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Anthem  Dec 2016
Ageism.../
Anthem Dec 2016
a momentary distraction
a brief respite from the pain
a decision to last a lifetime
and how it can never be the same

so drown the day in darkness
shut yourself inside the house
and when it comes to call on you
stay still, and quite as a mouse

because hope is a waking dream
and i'm too terrified to sleep
no matter how bright the old lights shine
they never give off any heat
abolitionism
absenteeism
absolutism
abstractionism
absurdism
acad­emicism
academism
achromatism
acrotism
actinism
activism
adoptian­ism
adoptionism
adventurism
aeroembolism
aestheticism
ageism
agis­m
agnosticism
agrarianism
alarmism
albinism
alcoholism
aldosteron­ism
algorism
alienism
allelism
allelomorphism
allomorphism
alpini­sm
altruism
amateurism
amoralism
anabaptism
anabolism
anachronism­
analphabetism
anarchism
anecdotalism
aneurism
anglicism
animalis­m
animism
anisotropism
antagonism
anthropocentrism
anthropomorphi­sm
anthropopathism
antialcoholism
antiauthoritarianism
antiblacki­sm
anticapitalism
anticlericalism
anticolonialism
anticommerciali­sm
anticommunism
antielitism
antievolutionism
antifascism
antifem­inism
antiferromagnetism
antihumanism
antiliberalism
antimaterial­ism
antimilitarism
antinepotism
antinomianism
antiquarianism
anti­racism
antiradicalism
antirationalism
antirealism
antireductionis­m
antiritualism
antiromanticism
antiterrorism
aphorism
apocalypti­cism
apocalyptism
archaism
asceticism
assimilationism
association­ism
asterism
astigmatism
asynchronism
atavism
atheism
athleticism­
atomism
atonalism
atropism
atticism
autecism
authoritarianism
au­tism
autoecism
autoeroticism
autoerotism
automatism
automorphism
­baalism
baptism
barbarianism
barbarism
behaviorism
biblicism
bibl­iophilism
bicameralism
biculturalism
bidialectalism
bilateralism
­bilingualism
bimetallism
biologism
bioregionalism
bipartisanism
b­ipedalism
biracialism
blackguardism
bogyism
bohemianism
bolshevis­m
boosterism
bossism
botulism
bourbonism
boyarism
bromism
brutism­
bruxism
bureaucratism
cabalism
caciquism
cambism
cannibalism
cap­italism
careerism
casteism
catabolism
catastrophism
catechism
cav­alierism
centralism
centrism
ceremonialism
charism
charlatanism
c­hauvinism
chemism
chemotropism
chimaerism
chimerism
chrism
chroma­ticism
cicisbeism
cinchonism
civicism
civism
classicism
classism
­clericalism
clonism
cockneyism
collaborationism
collectivism
coll­oquialism
colonialism
colorism
commensalism
commercialism
communa­lism
communism
communitarianism
conceptualism
concretism
confessi­onalism
conformism
congregationalism
connubialism
conservatism
co­nstitutionalism
constructivism
consumerism
controversialism
conve­ntionalism
corporatism
corporativism
cosmism
cosmopolitanism
cosm­opolitism
countercriticism
counterculturalism
counterterrorism
cr­eationism
credentialism
cretinism
criticism
cronyism
cryptorchidi­sm
cryptorchism
cubism
cultism
cynicism
czarism
dadaism
dandyism
­defeatism
deism
demonism
denominationalism
despotism
determinism
­deviationism
diabolism
diamagnetism
Isms are every where
Traveler  Nov 2017
AGEISM
Traveler Nov 2017
Can you really trust me
Within this old dead skin
Crow-eyed and wrinkled
Hair graying thin

Moving forward
Ever nearing
The wickedness
  Of that bitter end...

Is it casual or systematic
When age becomes a sin?
Traveler Tim
Ageism is an American thing?
Don Bouchard  Jul 2019
Ageism
Don Bouchard Jul 2019
Children, fresh as bib lettuce,
Green and tender,
Stand before me in my rocking chair,
Pearled new teeth,
Wisping hair, golden, brown,
Embarking up a stair way
That I am going down.

"Papa, can we go out to play?"
I look out the window
To see the kind of day
Before I say,
"Would you like to take a walk?"
ketjil  Oct 2019
ageism
ketjil Oct 2019
I am afraid
Afraid to grow old
To have my hair turn white
And my hands grow gnarled
I am afraid
Of time
Shaping me
Making me
A different person
Changing me
I am afraid
To forget
The time
Long gone
I am afraid
Of running
Out of time

-jt
Zoe Mae  Sep 2021
Ageism
Zoe Mae Sep 2021
He was not born old
He was not born obsolete
You're looking at you
Wandisa Zwane  Oct 2015
Help!
Wandisa Zwane Oct 2015
A farce melanin melancholic soul floating through a void of intertwined paragons.

Trying to be a single entity and not being subdued by the stereotype that is ageism which is ingrained and embedded in the plethora of knowledge which is - the brain

Trying to destroy this boundary in her psyche which has covertly limited her growth and expansion

But this thought is slowly manifesting to those around her

This retrospect thought will only spread through an act of malicious behavior which is inevitable and scornful
I can't finish my writings
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
there's always that trailing off i get when i write,
oh god, whiskey is a ******...
    it drags you like a mermaid to the depths,
i start to feel an anchor in my mind
even though my heart is steady-numb...
   and i evidently become slightly dyslexic...
  but hey! what can you do:
     either drink and be miserable,
  or drink and unfold with terrible spelling at
the end of a session... and feel shame the next
day, having seen the outpouring
from the previous night...
      better still... i could recommend tending to
a small vine-patch...
and like me: taking a break from whiskey once
a year and drinking your own produce...
    unless of course you have a local turkish shop
nearby that sells out-dated beer
  at half the price... let me tell you:
that's ****** marvelous... nothing like
out-dated beer... it's right up there with the rollercoaster
and the kick! my my! it's so sudden...
      but it hits the spot,
all the disorientative effects of mushrooms:
without excess Dali lodged in your eyes...
so yeah, out-dated beer... double the trip...
but today is different, i have about 30 litres of
home-made wine just ready to be drunk,
   i've downed one bottle and i'm running
errands with the next... but i'm not miserable
in that i'm washing away my sorrows...
the funny thing about making your own wine
is that once you drink it: you celebrate...
you start to think about all the effort you put
into making it... how you picked the grapes from
the vine, how you squashed the grapes,
how you stood bedazzled by melting sugar
        in a little bit of water over the stove
(and how it started looking very much like
heavy water, or mercury, but see-through) -
and how you sniffed the stench of yeast,
and then waited for a month or so for the ****** thing
to take up strength...
   and now you're drinking it...
                    oh yes... wine in essex is very much
agreeable... and my my: i am really celebrating this
endeavour... it's not as fake as going to the shop
and buying a bottle of wine... i am drinking
my own work... i am celebrating, there's no god
or omen in the world that can tell me otherwise...
    i waited a year for this, well: two...
i don't know what happened last year, i mistimed...
the grapes froze, there was a sudden surge of frost
and i was really upset because of it, 2 years ago
i was drunk like a skunk for several days
and wrote some poems in between,
      and put my own wine on the christmas table,
but since i was ****** for so long, i could only
showcase one bottle...
      well they do say there are spirits out there,
and i must say: wine, esp. your own really is
the veritas, as the saying goes: in vino veritas...
    bring it back to whiskey, or Ms. Amber as i like
to call her... she's not sour, and she's pulverising,
so she's no friend of the tongue... in case you're wondering
i'd like to call herr goebbels right now...
         but can you feel a shame of having misspelled a word
drunk, because your hands started to feel
   a bit like a daddy longlegs with one or two legs missing?
in terms of the keyboard...
what are the prime digits?
right hand: ******* - ****! now my hands feel conscious
of me talking about them...
middle and thumb (for the spacebar) -
   index finger for the opening bracket (  
pinky finger for the enter button -
                 to make room for the next line -
which makes me wonder about my left hand,
it would appear that i'm left handed when before
the keyboard -
   the main provocators are the index
middle and... surprise surprise! the ring finger!
the left hand thumb sometimes does
                       use the space bar also...
the the right hand ring finger is hardly used...
i remember watching my doctor type at a keyboard once...
a bit like a crow pecking... it went like this:
index (right) index (left)
    index (right) index (left)
               index (right) index (left) - it was agony...
it was a bit like standing at a supermarket cashier with
an old lady in front of you, buying butter and milk
and talking for an hour while counting her change...
   ageism? no! just your typical life-bound comedy of
how the stats stack... we spend this many years in traffic...
and my, the hand thing...
       yep, next thing you'll - aha! there is the ring-finger
utility in the right hand after all - it comes with words
that come shortened, i.e. you'll... the ' mark,
and also the backspace button...
                  i was going to say: (the shift button?
pinky owns it) - as the great kabbalists have this fetish
of looking at your hands, it's worthwhile to note down
this geography of the keyboard...
   they'd just point at the indententions of the hand
and spew words out like: girdle of venus...
     malkhut (silent h) -
                 which brings to mind:
   we already know the name is silent,
  since you might be served an indian dish called
dhal... and in fact you would be served such a dish,
but you'd only say you ate daal... or dāl...
then again that's also true with the pedant puritan
who'd note it as: dhāl... which is funny that this isn't
merely coincidental... a language that doesn't
use diacritical marks, and has a third arm sticking out
of it in terms of what letters remain silent (but are
inserted into words nonetheless), and a concentration
of the same rubik's "cube" akin to y and w...
      y and i are so close! you can almost feel them pushing
together, or giving birth to something!
  why?! why?!
                         (insert snigger)... drunk humour:
it gets the better of me sometimes...
   so yes, that thing about kabbalists and the hand thing,
other words could be included, like: keter,
               bina(h),             gevura(h),  
strangely enough Hod...   tiferet (what a beautiful word),
    yesod....     chok(h)ma(h)...   chesed...
netzach! hey! surfing u.s.a., i think i'll bring my banjo
to sniff out whether i'm part of the scene:
dangle dangle plop plop... ah poo...
                   p pi po'h...           and last weekend
we had snow... it scared the bejesus out of people
for a while, but things returned to normal nonetheless...

- interlude -

the tyranny of being conscious...
long recognised by eastern philosophy and the practice
of meditation...
  to be away from me...
        and they do so, splendid,
and then all toward vanity, given you're forced
into dreaming... so even when you're not even
conscious... i.e. unconscious...
   you're being fed a dream...
  and however disroted that you in the dream
is... there's still you...
oddly enough: if i make thinking = dreaming
   i can honestly say: i wish i dreamed more
than i thought... me not a mighty oratory gob
after all...
            evidently doing hallucinogenics
   was to excavate the dream into the waking hour...
and that's how i'll leave this interlude,
   i just imagine andy warhol testifying about fame
at the opera...
   or that's me bound to watching:
   alain de botton... or what does need diacritical
marks: alain dé bóttą...
                        dé bóttą... the art of travel,
                    on the QE2...    
      dé bóttą! oh the marvel, French of all languages
is nasal and glottal! when speaking Polish you
might as well be talking in razors...
                  Greek and lisp, English and Cockney rhyme...
and the lost trill of the R... R hollowed out...
                and once again to modern times:
the imperial march (darth vader's theme) vs.
     beethoven's 9th symphony...
                                                             tra la la -
both as universally acknowledged as the sound of
a ****... and perhaps a pigeon's coo-woo
                                                                                       -

...the interlude actually contains what ignited me to
write... drinking aside, but drinking too...
   in all too a great happiness that somehow i live
a life that asks for narrative minimalism,
               i can say: and in between i did **** all,
i thought profanity was necessary,
            and how i'd wish i'd have written a epic
like don quixote... but then i thought: keep it real,
keep it real... av a laugh...
                           i'll probably taste the sour from the wine
sometime soon, once the narrative becomes a Gobi
and i get worked about the eventual loss of
   a carpe diem quickie...
                           but it's still there, for the moment...
        and having realised that: it's gone.
               and i did say:
    by the personnae principle, in line with not writing out
a Tolstoy, i have to admit that i never know
who i encounter in my exploits...
            and there is a personnae principle at work here,
it's not Shakespeare, that much i know,
   it's the practice of personnae incorporation that
does away with: and Titus said:
                                      veni! vidi! vendredi!
(oi oi, enough of the French static, ya ponce!)
          so that's that, poetry has come to resemble
   modern art... given the personnae principle
we have done away with all the intricacies of
        writing a Shakespearean play...
Titus - lo!
   Anthony - a plum tree!
                          as a person competent with narratives
i ask for all people to leave the building...
   a pit of tongues i might also add...
      populo in singuli!       ah freckles and ash...
it has to be: pertaining to the vulgate...
   nothing better than speaking illiterate latin ol' boy...
  a bit like richard brautigan
writing the pill versus the springhill mine disaster -
there the buds of the concept personnae (without clear
indication that we are dealing with a crowd,
so no memorable quote or character, the narrator
is trying to keep his **** together, pardons for the laziness
and lack of indicative marks that there are actually
more people in the room than could be expected...
me and drunk me make up a thousand crude-essentials
as to what is intended to imply: having a good time) -
    sometimes poetry is just that: a quickened code for
acting, albeit without any character-study,
        or diet, or paparazzi...  and it's so quick... you've
watched a movie like a mosquito lived its life and you're
writing the credits...
       like richard brautigan wrote that poem -
      when you take your pill
           it's like a mine disaster.
       i think of all the people
      lost inside of you.

richard brautigan! richard brautigan!
this is the mine disaster company, over!
         yes, we number 34 souls in total.
       and there's your thesis! it must be hard to
write "poetry" and never, not once: experience
the Styx in your travels, the pit of tongues,
         or the personnae principle...
              always bound to rigid narrative constructs,
alway having an aliby with a 'he said it!'
          it must get horrid sometimes,
   living that life of a puppeteer / narrator -
     never really drunk with pesky humour -
       never once enjoing a wicked thought -
        a meddle on the omnius frivolity of life...
but personally? i find it almost bewildering that
of all the ancient Greek gods... Hades was homeless...
that's before Hades was a noun designating a place,
a realm... i just find it hard
to believe that of all the gods, Hades didn't have a temple...
    the only god from ancient greece that didn't
have a temple... sure, they had a statue of him,
  but there was no temple to see to benediction...
now i really think i've over-stepped it...
                     the wine is imploring me to end this
polyphonic nonsense, and think of a monophonic
sound of a woodpecker... relax... think of the sound
when wood is chopped...
      relax... forget this circus of what could be
described as a theoretical exploration of a schizophrenic
symptom... think of a monty python sketch...
        calm



                                                                                 .
Eshwara Prasad  Oct 2020
Ageism
Eshwara Prasad Oct 2020
The youth work faster
But the elders know how
to avoid pitfalls.
Mateuš Conrad Nov 2015
poetry, only poetry is immune to the whole
mozart gig,
it's immune to the wizard kids,
only poetry is immune to the age old ageism
of being given a status genius so early
on in life - i mean - what sort
of feelings could little mozart have
other than demonic mischief so early on in life?
where was the emotional catastrophe?
given a. he was a son of a musical composer,
an b. he probably had a tiger mommy too
- monkeys also learn to climb trees with
as much prodigious ambition as an elder
flute player giving instructions to his son* -
less idealistic poets bite the shingles...
if poetic genius is anything like that of musical
genealogies...
it's idealistic... but after keats, shelley or hart crane...
it's still the same old cold grit regime of realism.

*you have to attack the big boys...
  it's synonymous with attacking snobbery
  and the historical claustrophobia
  of: only a few ******* were apparent, the rest
  of us were statistics.
Mateuš Conrad Mar 2017
there's just too much coming in,
you can own about 100 books and
never keep up;
a bit like alan harper's frustration,
or quiet simply meltdown in
the bookstore... "i just want to
read melville!"
    too bad, i want a nobel prize for
something or other... but i did manage
to fetch a memory of the summer
i spent reading bertrand russell's
history of western philosophy,
lying down on the balcony in my
grandparent's flat... in a building,
that if translated into western standards
of housing (or apparently none
these days) would be deemed a housing
project, or an estate...
     but then this is post-communism,
and it gave rise to an exponential reply
to the losses incurred in the second world war.
i hate to call my methods "natural selection"
but there goes the tool of metaphor...
  gone, done, gone gone... gone.
        do i need this tool, as in (doubled-up
ambiguity): the way i might need
the distinction between verb and noun?
                 enter the nerd, with a baggage
of tricks and quirps...
                    no... but i just stopped reading
books by my contemporaries...
      might be that there is some sort of
ageism roaming the planet...
                      being younger i could relate
to older people... now i can't seem to find
   a position to take with them...
                     or maybe i do...
then again once you read enough books and
say to yourself: enough! you get to
read book reviews, so a bit like an orawellian
double-think concept:
        there's a c.c.t.v. camera over there...
should i be bothered, or shouldn't i be bothered?
        and then the cascade of happenings
enter and you lead into sitting on a park
bench, where there's the alternative to c.c.t.v.:
a crow perched on a branch...
      then again, i always thought that crows
are bowing (boeing)... bow-wow...
     out of all the birds i've seen, crows actually
look humble, as if bowing, hunched...
try spotting a crow at night...
           an insomniac crow is very hard to spot...
i know that crows are capable
    of attacking storks... seen that happen with
my naked eye...
                and sure enough: a kestrel once
visited me, perched on my garden fence...
if it sat any closer i'd go all underwater cross-eyed.
          i have literally lost the capacity to *******
people... it's too consuming in terms of time
and it really ***** up your memory...
   trying to remember all the lies... beginning
with the first one? takes about 10 years off your life.
  so as book reviews go, you enter a world
of double-think... and as this book review clearly
proves, a doubling of standards to understand something...
christopher knight, the north pond hermit...
            27 years, living alone...
                                cites his favourite book that's
1,200 pages long (william shirer's the rise and fall
of the third *****)...
                         and then he cites freud:
"there is no such thing as a joke... it's only veiled
hostility."
                 rings true... but you really have to
spend 27 years alone to read a book, that, if thrown
could **** someone (in hardback edition)?
                i guess you do.
           we can't read them all...
but we'd love to just write all of them.

— The End —