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Here we are
Toy soldiers, Barbie dolls
Monopoly money flying off the shelves
As intentions remain disguised,
A rush hour to nowhere.
Suspicion hangs heavy in the air.
Fingerprints of greed upon the land,
Stain the walls and smear every surface,
Tearing our world apart
Entangling us in a labyrinth of lingering agony.
As financial empires crumble and fall,
We tumble towards a dismal crown.

Here we are
A shot heard around the world
Misdirection concocted with twists of propaganda
A sinister plot to keep us quiet
While economic doom looms large,
Forcing us to gasp for breath in its tort.
We are sliding into a sea of hell,
Crafted with a sinister dusk,
Leaving us trapped in uncertainty.
A bipartisan fakery,
A manufactured reprieve of endless war
Bacchanal Celebration of the uniparty,
To keep us all in the duality
Of a totalitarian doomsday cult of our own making,
With ties to the darkest corners,
Where shadows dance in the hue.
Why did George Orwell paint a future so dire
Of totalitarian control, a world on fire?
To blackmail us into believing
We are incapable of repelling it,
Pressuring us to fear, to tyranny.
Wall Street proclaimed, "Greed is good,"
A mantra repeated, understood,
Molding our minds, shaping our views,
Enforcing belief in capitalism's ruse.
Political speech, a vile roast of reality,
A nonsensical tale of deceit,
Yet, within its twisted words,
Makes us struggle to comprehend our reality.
Revelations of a conning government,
Manufactured divisions run deep,
As secrets too dark to keep.
In the chaos of our unraveling,
We grasp for a glimmer of light,
But find ourselves lost in the darkness
Of a world consumed by blight.
Do The Right Thing, a mirror held to our face,
Amid conflict beyond repair.
We consume the lies, a terrible plight,
Believing we're powerless, as they've said.
Free falling into despair
Believing we're powerless as the moments fly by.

Here we are
We've been conned and betrayed.
In the shadows of towering skyscrapers,
Where dreams were once fashioned from thin air,
A secret kleptocracy aims to divide and deceive,
Bleeding us dry, as we unquestioningly believe
In our American uniqueness
Until we start blaming each other
While everything gets worse,
A dysfunctional elite
Building lies around dysfunctions
Inducing us into believing
Our eroding circumstances are our own,
As they steal our lives, forsaking us to atone.
Fake news media informs us to be angry and tribalized,
Daytime television warns our morality is compromised,
Local news instills fear in our neighbors, near and far,
As we celebrate masked actors, forgetting who we are.
Reality Tell-a-Vision doesn't tell our reality,
Preferably, it shows life's hedonistic strife.
Zombie television tells us the public remains our enemy.
Social media floods with existential rife,
With nonsense conspiracy theories and memes abound,
Telling us we're hopeless in a world so unsound.
On a never-ending track,
An all-time high in the belief that we are helpless,
No matter the bubbles we encase,
Bombarded with existential crises in every space,
A surge in apocalyptic film, literature, and games,
Telling us there's no way out of society's flames,
As we buy cans of Liquid Death, in our despair,
And drink Death Coffee to fuel our inner plight,
In this rotten farce, we see no end in sight.
For our entire lives, we've been led astray,
In a world where our strength is fading away,
Divided against itself in a power play so grand,
As we believe we're powerless.
But in the end, we're left alone,
In a world where truth is overthrown.
As we've been brainwashed with silent screams,
We find ourselves constantly shaking down.
Things escalate wildly in a world gone awry
Where Dr. Strangelove teaches us to stop and comply.
In the collapsed towers, nobody stands,
Only masked actors with bloodied hands
As we hurtle towards an inevitable brawl.

Here we are
Investigating the mountain of lies,
We uncover the truth, rotten to the core,
As vicious beasts roam in our streets.
Smoke and mirrors promise miraculous destinies,
But abandoning us stranded, battered, and frail.
In this desperate state of dying slowly,
Words ring true, screaming at us to wake up.
Yet suspicion clouds every intention,
As we ponder the reasons why.
The fabric of society frays at the seams,
As revelations tear through the veil,
Exposing the rot within our midst.
Our lives are a tangled web of deceit.
O say, can you see?
We are drowning in the sea.
On this moon of deception and decay,
We grasp for a semblance of truth,
But find ourselves drowning in the sea.
O say, can you see?
Did we go to the moon?
Why are we drowning in the sea?
Our Statue of Liberty is sinking fast and deep.
O say, can you see?
I'm begging you; can you see?
In the wreckage of shattered dreams,
We find ourselves lost in the debris,
Victims of a grand illusion,
Where reality is uncomfortable to see.
Terrified, yes, but unafraid to tell,
The tale of our time, the ringing knell
Of corruption and deceit,
We rise, we rise; we must rise above
In the name of truth, justice, and love.
O say, can you see?
              Can you see?
              Can you see?
nick armbrister Sep 2023
**** Hat

The American was an **** hat

A real ***** ball idiot

Who didn’t care what people thought

She did this and that what she wanted

A new tattoo left ****** coloured dark green

Right ear extended elf like

Having *** with 70 year old men

Just for the Hell of it

Not to get their cash

A real **** hat gal

She was a local character

One whom people detested

Crossed the road to avoid

Yet she was smart could argue

On vague stupid topics

Her real name was Dawn

In reality they called her slang

Names unprintable here

She’s the **** hat gal

Full of crap a real lunkhead

Imagine if you were her

So full of **** hat ****!
Ken Pepiton Mar 2023
This has a photo of a California Black Lizard
official name, sunning on a rock, but that's
in the modern novel medium, blog form.
mmmmaybe, baby, we do
grow old, past sixty-four and even more,
unbridled tongues, held silent, lo' monks,

listen, quiet, now, then, to now, then to when
listen to the Osprey fly over our valley to Yuma,

to the Chocolate Mountains, beyond the river,
the only river, running down the great crevice,
due to erosion from John Bunyan's Pauline ax,

a rift right across the heart of the land,
opened up the first Bright Angel Trail,
for there was no other way across the canyon.

And we had people, before, on that other side,

that happened, all around the globe, that hap,
the earth was struck, and struck another,
time and lost all its religion,
it was announct, we all sang along,
and some force pushed the edge of the sun,
in a single most malignant EMP burst relig-i-used
to beat al bound synenergy rationally, as knowledge
and life, root and branch, time and chance missed call
first shall be last, roll on, roll on down time orchard

lessons learned in lines of trees, you can imagine,
while alone, just be used to being in the sense we yoosta
call peace, or bliss, blah good blah, being right inside.
- breathing easy, not sleepy, no place to be.
When outside is just too hot or too cold.

Chaos reigns for days, and weeks and years, and
we can imagine, my kind, human kind, earth stock one.

We the deme, the interbreeding productive kind,
we who beat the dis-easing raging fever from eating
foul putrid rotting corpses, as would dogs, any dogs,
naturally,
we have such knowledge, said to be wild boys,
raised by wolves or Comanches… Grandma,
she did not know her people,
but she knew her place,
and made it perfect,
just right, she and her little dog, and relics
from a life that matched Saul Bellow's on earth,
though she was never widely read, she did leave
a greater legacy in terms of proper child minding.

Yep, minding is mighty
otherwise than rearin' n'raisin' hardgeenevahnegated
she said it, and she served such chicken at the
same table where we all ate, we was sorta colored
because my grandaddy fixed cars for folks mr leon
the jew who owned the Loma Vista in the Green Book,
befriended on collect calls, and sent Pop Boyett, said he
t' tow ya in, he'll send his boy Jim,
'be there drectly, jest don't fret none.
sit tight. Sundowns a ways yet.

yeah, I am white proud that my grand daddy was friends,
with ******* and injuns and jews, his customer's
including Charlie Lum, Mary's daddy, who used grandpa's

knack with stunted fruit trees, to bring peace and calm
into the environment, with a quarter acre lot back yard.

Living earth is in me, I ate my first mud pie, and liked
the laugh it got from whoever washed my mouth out.

I watched an uncle get his washed with soap, thus
learning how loudly to utter curses when being proven
beguiled by a will so sharp and thorny, nothing sweet
shall ever stick,
honey chile, tar baby, chocolate kisses, all a mud pie
made me remember, at a whim, in my dementing whiling
away

nothing needed doing more than not dragging grease
from the shop, past Grandma's back porch,
where the squeezed water tub always was soapy
enough to expose a little boy to sudden stripping
and brush scrubbing,

while she laughed,
and made them all laugh, as long as that junk yard
was apayin' the electric/


-- Coming in from a tinctured cuppaKuerig
Settled mind alligning old stitches in a tapestry,
not much sense can be made of Bayeux resolution

stitched in time to serve in tutorial classes
open to the masses, for your undivided attention

in silence, for the space of about a half an hour there.

Columbian, it says on the plastic waste,
mea culpa, mea maxima,
we suffer such silly easy living made much too easy,
I light the bowl with a focused rim jet quartering,
too easy to use the flower, to ask smoke a favor,

as to result
in a bounce back,
as the elanvital of my mountain pushes west winds
back into themselves
to form the ribs
of huge cloud forms that reform so
true to pattern proof, exhalent
of this wind
reflection off the ridges we live on,
vitalized by a DNA centric view
of stress or pressure, squeezing bests
from times as worst as worsts were then,

Vital tipping point that lets a spirit slip into the story.

Structure and content cata and ana, as we leave
that which our fruits produce, a cache of all we be

come and see, I said, okeh.
Proof by Synthesis/ Venter link, blink
-Craig Venter… GI imagine, we all can Google It,
in another window,
and find it not mystical in terms of who imagined this.
You realize whoever it was, it is yet done
dramatically as next years
stories, lightsped mind gluons
from last years tragedy we all can find,
sympathy puddles, lost allusions
to chances being once this line
was written
for no single pair of eyes, not mine, ours,
de-cartooned Madiera wine revival fly,
wise minding times retwining U to I,
leading down old fissures where
suddenlies occurred and we all recall, as if
some things in life after television are with us
-to this instant and
until we die, and leave our mystery religion lying ever after.
Twinkling a little,
winking
done did done, artificial art intuited involuntarily

Accidents, where by we live, U rhea re minding us,
there is something wishing to use us, as yousta be,
- so fine
thank you for your service, Turing and Von Neuman
The general and logical theory of automata…

"much less well understood" loop the tape,
loop it once,
and again, become the digital life Wolfram made,
flat land as real as Wildersmith ever projected it

Up against the wall, we pass through it all
and so on and so forth,
fighting phrases to fit the codescript initial intention,

in the immature tabernacle state,
a thousand atoms should be plenty,

make life from that, and all the scattered dust
of heavy metal stars that burned too fast
to eat up all the lithium.
- this is the bottom
A funda-lowest level, fundamental, puts us sensing
tips of our own tail, verily modeling
Ouroboros
in the womb as drawn to our imaginations with
Look Whose Talking Now! WOW
Haeckel and Jeckle, and L. Ron-ron didoo ronrun
Dianetics really gave Travolta therapist recollections
needed to over come the scorn
spewn on Urban Cowboy,
outside Texas and New York City.

We can tame the bucking machine, with no pistil.
No bull, boys and girls, we made sugar in Trinidad,
using the pistil of a bull to instill the will to learn
to live,
and let it be known, life abhors evil, it fails to hate,
that which has no use and piles as potential piles
of all we knew we needed to encode to become
XML, then the shifting database schema, Dinesh
D'Sousa, the metadata scraper with an MIT MBA.
Not the pundit.
He fed me this character trait, mind in order,
meets older orderly mind in mortal chaos, coping.

Feel his way past the message messenger collision,
caused in no insignificant way by poetry, and poets,
enthralled with taming textual dragons, lizard brain,

quick wits
to wot not with, per haps, haps as chance are us,
being lucky because we feel lucky,

monstors speak often one with another,
see the bull lizards crawl all over each other.

Smell that, mofa, smellmemo nofa fame fa fa fa me
lizard pheremone, so subtle after while.

Layin' out on the terrace, up above some granite
splashes from the wave that left the coastal range,

rising up from here, see it there, on googled earth,
take away the clouds and spin that globe,
like you are one of those named winds,
names you heard they called the wind; Mariah, and
Santa'na; Chinook and Roclydon and twisters
too many to name. Bringing dust to the Amazon,
to feed the hungry jungle, woken at the touch of waste
being made to feed once needless services, after,
the great lizard brains lost their minds in one fell swoop,
so they say,
they who strike the suckers, just below the root,
fine staffs are made from suckers broken off before blossom.

Orchard watches, as a young man, planless, saved, for sure,
but no assignment save this so-called fight of faith, for sure,

some people can be fed the kind of meat that forms soldiers,
from any man worth his salt, which, if it were ever a sin to gather
salt, say from the sides of the roads, where there's a plenty this spring,
why then I would think the concept of sin had passed its use by.
why,
I'd get the old pickup runnin' and take a flat blade shovel,
or, what was I thinkin'
not a type scooper, but a flat, scale-scraper shovel, there you go,
use a phrase arranger allowing such metaphors that morph to any tool.

Fluidbots in The Abyss, look it sees you seeing it, so what, was that new
when Nietzsche notict, tskt,
I trow not. But if it was then, it is not now, and that leaves me room
to say Freud imagined he knew things and his followers do as well.

Sometimes a cigar is a prop.
A stiff staff to lean on in a manifested dream interpreting schema
for ancient meta data shuffling,
the whole of all we know so far right now,
this being in which words act as though we know, we
at machine level code, being the internet, being a node, a nerve,
in the ever of ever since every thing, the whole truth thought impossible
but, to not imagine, thinking it at once,

it must be possible to tell, or why, in hell, aha, instant answer,

this is not hell, because if it was, I could not tell you the truth,
as Paul bore witness All Cretans are liars, I tell you the truth.

I bet my life, against any one of many, each experience as fable forms from,

those hang as moss in swampy tidal deltas, where rivers do not branch,
but open wide, another spring time in the Rockies, reaches all the way
to Burro Creek, down through all the Diablo Canyons in bad lands,
at the edges of the last great tsumamis that our satellitia see through centuries
and eons to when there was no thing made by man that could show him,
the Nazca Lines and our Blythe Intaglios.

In the world of artists at work, function descriptive sign making symbol
we agree, we be
come and see, sit beside our tiny fire, see, we have no words to say,
so we some times whistle and sound so much like a bird, a jay,
some one out there laughs he is my brother so he whistles better,

then every body laughs and shout PA PA PA papapapapapapa yah, way
cool, pa looks at his old walkabout friend,
he nods,
we grin, and go, well, when why was just a guest at our station,
in the core script lost,
left in the back of a black volkswagon,
who gave this boy a ride, from Santa Barbara, that strip,
I never paid enough mind to what they call it,
but it was lined with hitchhikers, they gave them rides,
and he was one of those who took PCH up and down,
a few times, spring of 1970, eventually, I imagine,
I would have been invited
to learn
at Esalen, what I could imagine doing about it.
The big? mark of the beast, the very knowledge forvidding one.

Cognosis infections sets in, but you know Jesus never sneezed,
and hees heest atuitionally
assumet' be wiping your excretions from your beard.

In the spirit, no offence, only words, no gestures, ups or downs,
rounds and rounds, teetering palms, tilting eyes, furled brow,
world class rime crimes tearing whole realities' religited ties, bows gnosis
knot release,
tricky three pole knot…

Magic, once, a few who knew, easily seemed so, read Twain,
and imagine your own, in dementia, joining other intentionally scattered
brains
informing conformist patterns that make our laughing echo
as medicine from men listening to grand fathers and uncles whistling
and laughing and little sister joining in, so grandma's sister does so, too,

woo hoo pretty soon its allusfools fullfilled dancing in the dark
where we can still feel the fire.

As a s aside, for science sake, I have reached a stage,
an effect in on or to or any of the hundred and fifty
or so pre
positions things can be, and become, formative,
logos, logical sense of saying something seems so,
if you have been at this stage, and wondered

what is it worth to say it is no secret and never was,
I use cannabis, and I read and write and function

as any writer in the days of Post and Colliers, n'such
had to believe was possible,

to create the creatures we see on television,
those were dime a dozen underground reds,
feeding fertlizer to minds subknowingly with science,
hidden persuaders, falsely called so, they were inyaface!

Fool, he follow the old weigh where heavy mean good,
real good, get down, to the ground feel the weight o'
oh momma did you know,
oh momma when did you start to show,

could you have let me be nothing but a bad draw, you
nevahnevahnevah gonna know now, but momma,

mam, where all good mommas gone, go on, you done,
you brought a heel into the world,
yes, ma'am.
a real snake stomping, preacher, kinda man, selling
salve, to soothe the transition, come the kingdom

due any day. What price you pay, what task you prefer
performance mandatory, in any sucha story
as this very one intends to be,
at a rate, cuneiform forming lets, say that,
this way
in an other time, one symbol to the thumbprint,
one per inch,
10 wpm during upload to ever from now.
Used just yoosta be we were tools.
"a used key is ever bright."
Images holding minimum 1000 words abound at Kenpepiton.com
Destiny C May 2022
My heart shatters on the floor,
like the bullets of a school corridor.

The sound ricochets in my mind,
like the screams of a parents not able to pick their kid up in time.

We are at war with the reaper.

The one who hugs the bullet while it pierces through the air.

The same one who casts its scythe away,
because the gun was more American.
Sharon Talbot Apr 2022
Admiration is the cousin of envy,
as I learned long ago in Austria.
I knew a girl from a village in the Tirol.
I don’t remember her face,
Except for the placid smile
on her berry red lips.
She was not beautiful, but pretty
in a Mägdlein sort of way,
"smelling of crushed daisies and sweat".
But her long, butter-yellow hair,
seemed to have fallen from the sun.
She wore a black, Dirndl vest
that hugged her torso, a white blouse,
and a long. striped, pink skirt.
Even her legs were beautiful,
With tiny, blonde hairs that glistened.
I wished I could be like her:
Simple-seeming, unaware, unquestioning.
I watched her stand on a rocky ledge,
On a little mound like a pedestal
That overlooked an green-blue alpine valley.
She was a poem or an imagined girl
From a fairy tale or an ad for Priumula.
She was  a goddess escaped
from the the netherworld
of dairy barns and milking cows.
I thought that she might never return
there from her lofty peak at the world..
But another girl stood beside her.
A spartan sort with round glasses
And a face like a Pug dog.
She seemed to stand guard,
In a sexless, violent way,
Threatening those who might approach.
I fantasized about pushing her off the cliff,
Just to rid us of her presence.
The altitude was spinning my thoughts,
Wondering what would happen
To this Hummel Fräulein someday.
Would she follow the other youth to Vienna,
Smoke and drink espresso in a café,
Or come back to her alpine home
And milk goats while her children played?
The next day, as if still drugged,
I strolled across the bridge to Germany
And the river path to Freilassing.
There I bought a new, blue blouse
With a heart shaped neck
And brown, corduroy slacks.
It was the best I could do then
And Dirndls were not cheap.
So I spent the summer
As an ersatz Austrian,
No longer an American with jeans.
My freedom was almost euphoric,
Including dodging classes
About Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill,
Die Dreigroschenoper,
Those overrated poseurs!
(Except for Mack the Knife.)
I even attended Mass at various cathedrals,
just to hear Mozart or Schubert dance
up in the arches with cherubs,
or in front of ancient, colored glass
in the gloom of medieval stone.
I accepted that The Tyrolean Girl
And her antique, sunlit style
Were as inaccessible as
Gentian and columbine, mist-shrouded
on high peaks wrapped in clouds.
I once ran to see some up close
And nearly passed out.
But knowing that, I felt their charm
Had descended from the heights
To entice us in the valleys,
With pink striped cloth, gold hair
And amethyst flowers.
They flee past us like time,
Swift as the rivers in Spring.
nick armbrister Mar 2022
20 Cents
The guy gave the war concern 20 cents
This was enough to buy ten bullets
Which would **** ten enemy soldiers
If fired accurately by a good soldier
He'd give more if he could afford it
But he was jobless and skint
20 cents was all he could afford
Bread and coffee cost money
Even if cheaper thru the VA
His benefits were little not enough
So he just gave 20 cents
To the war collection team
When they knocked on his door
It brought back memories
Vietnam and Central America
Plus other deniable places
Still alive in his head
He didn't like Russians
So 20 cents was fine
The cost of ten bullets
For a competent soldier
He prayed they wouldn't miss
Once he was a soldier
With many good kills
All of them Russians...
A M Ryder Dec 2021
The first step is
Radical honesty
With ourselves

We don't intervene
We invade

That's not
"Collateral damage"
Those are
The corpses
Of children
And their parents

Ours is not defense
Ours is war
Frenchie Sep 2021
Is it really that black and white?
To choose a side,
is it red or blue?
Whats true for me,
or whats "best" for you?

Where have all the flowers gone?
Burned to dust in California.
Drowned to death in Lousiana.
Blown away in the Central states.

We are left with heartbreak,
                    and rage....

We reap what we sow,
isnt that what they say?
Is this why Violets lie in my wake?

So where have all the flowers gone?
Raise your eyes and see,
count our stars.

Love is free.
Violets are a symbol of peace.
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