This is the Last Straw –
and Something About Sacred Buckets of Holistic Ice Water

****** predators, human smugglers
Starvation in the Sudan, civil war
in Syria, mass executions in China
Journalists murdered almost everywhere
Fashionable infanticide, homelessness
Unemployment, urban terrorism
Mass ******, school shootings, wildfires, racism
An unstable national government
Anti-Semitism, border desperation
Riots, arson, ecclesiastical corruption
****, alcoholism, historical cleansing
Skinheads, abuse, Khardassianistas
Volcanos, the death penalty, free verse
Affluenza, Jerry Springer, The View
Herbal tea, antifa, anti-antifa
And the soul-******* existential despair
Of inspirational singer-songwriters:

Nah, not a bit worried about plastic straws

But I must go now; The Voices are telling me
To pour a bucket of ice water over my head
(As long as it’s not a plastic bucket)

We spend our lives in pursuit of what we lack
So much time wasted when we look back
On the years we paved roads
And paid what we owe
And what have we gained but old age?

We waved our troubles away
And ignored how our bodies decayed
Until caught in the ragged net of time
Unable to finish the climb
For the mountain of satisfaction can never be conquered.

Unaware of what wasn't to come
Like dogs, we now beg for a scrap, or a crumb
Of the happiness we sought in all the wrong places
Until we are rescued by God's saving graces
And fall from one void into the next.

While I pretty much opined for this impeachment
my fellow Americans voted for this guy and they could be right
I’ve been wrong before, stuck as we are with a system
that generates some perplexful leaders, democracy being the worst form
      of government—
except for all the others.
Anyone can be president, that’s been proven time and time again.
Wars can start for no discernible reason other than
radical purity, avarice, cupidity, gluttony, rapacity, even affluenza—
meanwhile life goes on outside all around you
perhaps you identify as Jewish, Latino, Muslim, Indian or Filipino
asexual, cybersexual, somasexual, hypersexual, homosexual, pentasexual
it doesn’t really matter, nothing **** matter matters, matter
content of life (serious, love it) hate death for the hell of it
to see what it’s like inside the heart of darkness.

Not that I accept their god, their void, I accepted humanity as a natural
      part of nature
demisexual, downsexual, ecosexual, Eurosexual, eversexual, exsexual,
extrasexual, femtosexual, Francosexual, geosexual, gigasexual,
Grecosexual, Indosexual, intersexual, kilosexual, macrosexual,
malsexual, megasexual, metasexual, microsexual, missexual,
medisexual, mocksexual, monosexual, muchsexual, multisexual,
mustsexual, nearsexual, neosexual, nonsexual, oftsexual,
omnisexual, oversexual, pansexual, parasexual, partsexual,
photosexual, polysexual, postsexual, presexual, pseudosexual,
psychosexual, quasisexual, rentasexual, selfsexual, semisexual,
Sinosexual, subsexual, supersexual, telesexual, terrasexual,
ubersexual, ursexual, ultrasexual, undersexual, vicesexual,
weresexual, wikisexual, zoosexual.
When I did that I had to pay the rent and get a job, too.

I remember the first time I discovered poetry,
bolts of electric affluenza coursing through soft fingertips
and into the skinny blue lines of fascination
meaning nothing at first, yet transforming into the spillage
of emotion, the invention of color,
the budding metamorphosis of the artist’s apprehension.


I remember telling everyone about the honey-tainted metaphors
that exhaled yellow pigment through our film noir madness
of ravaged years cementing over irises
and I remember the revelation, saucer eyes and trembling hands
after discovering the faultlessness of magic
that tore at heartstrings and furrowed brows,
the mumbled prayer of stitching entire blankets of words together
to keep our souls warm even as the frigid ice of Time
burned in desperation to freeze our heartbeats.


You are a poet
but to the world, you are wasted opportunity
you only know of words that slip through tied tongues like silk
and mending excuses to make up for heartbreak
You are a poet
but they never stop reminding you to keep your feet glued
To hollow ground, shaking
To find something that tastes of reality, the human flesh
sweat of long lost longing
You have to stop living in your head
In the spaces where you breathe life into promises
You are a poet
But that has never been enough.


The poet is used to this--
the knowledge of failure always shoved under the doormat
numbers that collect under crumpled paper,
the rotten look of misunderstanding as they wonder
where the science of living went missing
When did art decide to invade your insides,
Leaving no room to calculate meaning with mathematics?


Oh, but only the poets understand
That there is no formula to meaning
No theorem to calculate suffering,
Only words that get stuck and disintegrate into whispers
only all-consuming madness, write me a storm
That rages through afflictions
Write me an ending where
We are older, in the house we dreamed of, buried
Under blankets in the forgotten fog of Decembers
Write me an ending where my voice is steady
Instead of constantly wavering past the silence of goodbyes
hellos
heartaches


Love me
And I will love you
Lose me
And I will turn you into poetry
stretch your bones into feelings,
follow the lines in your palms into futures
Where we end up together
I will hold up your eyelids
so they will never feel heavy at the sight of destruction
I will shelter your heart to keep it beating
As we watch  as the words I could never say
flutter at your fingertips like moths
with broken wings


The world does not understand love


nor the poets that create it.

Revving up the engine
of the gleaming funky machine
before zooming around, gave her
such an Adrenalin high, nonperil.
The constant ****** no guy ever could
promise, this act gives her.
She is pleased for that moment,
gets ready for the ****** rigmarole,
the very next second.

She gets jealous of her
own story, ever heard of that?
On the race course and the spread bed
alike her ebullience creates
tsunami waves,broke long standing records.

When you run fast enough
there comes a moment,when
there is no record left to break!
and the beds, you guessed right,
all are broken, made redundant.

And then the inevitable happens,
she smells leaking gas, panics,
freezes on the track, shuddering,
switches off quickly the engine
of her dream machine,her heartbeat,
makes the final escape,spontaneously,
without delay, decides to renounce
worldly pleasures altogether,
up to the Himalayas goes by foot, seeking
that thing which in life she missed all along,
Finds silver light's play on ice caps, and realize this:
she was walking through a dark, dark  tunnel ,
of self-deception,"Affluenza" was indeed her affliction.

The Himalayan snow cap, loomed large as an attraction,
in her dreams once, now seemed less formidable, at arm's length,
"What a Guru,who looked timelessly ancient,
jokingly predicted  once, comes true here"she muses.
Her trek upwards resumes with a vengeance.

I have yet to know a self I can call my own,
wandering through these bodies
the way one would try on clothes
but far deeper
than this analogy could ever dig,
I live with these identities.

I fall for them
the way lovers do in autumn,
keen that the coming winter
will leave me yearning
for the comfort of another,
but no sooner do the bells of spring
begin to ring in summer air
does the necessity of this comfort fade.
The temptation of sweeter fruit
hangs above me in the orchard shade
and an affluenza of potential
almost coerces me to stay.

Though no self have ever felt my own
I know within my heart, within my blood
and in my bones, more than anything
I am compelled to grow
towards entropy and complexity,
ascending, never settling at any plateau
a silverback drumming his barrel chest
and roaring into the void of the valley below
“What is next for me!”

and the answer is silence
(I should have known)

Donald Trump
will never make America great again.
The American dream is dead.
You are the one who killed it.
Dead with Lennie and the rabbits.
George is probably gone now too.
Depression. Couldn't live with himself.
Curley's wife never made it to Hollywood.
Still stuck in the bedroom,
with red ostrich feathers and ***** husband's
vaseline-filled glove.
His breath still reeks of rotten eggs;
only a matter of time before he gets sick - affluenza. Incurable.
Crooks isn't a man. Been diminished to nothing
but a shell. Hollow, and he believes it.
Candy and Slim, worked to death for minimum wage.
The American dream is dead.
******* by deluded denial.
Time to wake up and smell the rotting corpse of reality.

Pleasure to finally meet you ladies and gentlemen
How about we make a couple million? 6, 7, maybe even 10!
You people make me laugh with your fancy cars and shallow smiles- a gluttony embellished with diamonds
Thank goodness I’m here to stop all this *******…Tonight your rule ends
1-percenters be ******; they constrain our wills and throw the innocents to roast
Go on, show me the chalice of greed, raise your cup
Speak a final taunt, an exiting boast
My gun drawn, shooting from the waist up

She was barely sixteen,
out late partying,
and intoxicated
when he came
and violated
her sacred
center.

At first, she resisted
but with his fists
he insisted.
So, stunned numb
she submitted,
laying still as a stone
that sunk
to the bottom
of a lake,
as she was forced
to endure
that horrible ****.

Disgusted and ashamed,
she almost took a shower,
but unfortunately knew
if she wanted to
press charges
she’d have to keep
his ******* fluids.

So, she let them
swab and start collecting
all the samples
they would need
to prosecute.

But at her
court appointed
appearance
it soon became
apparent
that only her parents
cared about justice,

cause the judge was
quite transparent.
Even though,
he made a production
of compassion for
her suffering,
he still let
that rich man's son
off with only a
slap on the wrist,

cause the lawyer told him
he’s just a boy and
he can’t do time in
the prison system,

cause it would ruin him
and it’s not his fault because of
affluenza.

What good would it do
but ruin the lives of two,
after all they had
both been through?

Several weeks
and more than three
pregnancy tests later,
she still felt
the violation
as a remnant of him
began gestating
like and alien
inside of her.

But her church wouldn’t
let her abort the fetus
so, despite the trauma
she had to adapt
to the fact
that she was trapped.

Four weeks later
she went from
at least this life
will need her,
to cold chills,
cramps, and a fever;

From ten to
twenty-two  
pounds gained
then to back down
and even lighter
then when
her pregnancy
began.

She went from
finally accepting
and preparing
to start sharing
her life
with a newborn,
to a ****** expulsion,
nausea, repulsion,
and hiding
said heartbreaking
pain in shame.