I'm not an obvious kind of pretty
I don't have natural blonde hair
Or bright blue eyes
No perky little *****
No gap between my thighs
I don't look like anyone else
I bleach my own hair
Use drug store eyeshadow
And **** shopping in Topshop

I have lumps and bumps
Cellulite and pudge
Blackheads and bacne
And prodigious pours
A recipe for nothing special at all!
Just someone average
Who has a bright twinkle
In her fog grey eyes
And curvy hips and ****
That sway in the sun

You have to look close
To see all my beauty
I'm not a runway model
Or a ******* bunny
Just someone on the sidelines
Watching the runway models and bunnies
While they get the attention
And I get brushed by
It's not obvious that I'm beautiful
Until you look into my eyes
Until you see my semi-white smile
Then you notice the little moles
The red and silver scars
The way my body curves
In a voluptuous ans peachy way
And then you see
Just how ******* perfect I am

We share a bond,
and poems and songs in the spaces between.
We love ice cream,
and the conversations that come with it.
We dance,
and pour our hearts out into the lyrics.
We share hugs,
and giggle through those bedtime stories.
For us, friendship is more than Snapchat streaks.

The gorgon's masonry casting châteaus
for the rich
turning hearts to pompous narcissist

once of legends and myths
has arisen once again
blue light and endless scroll

the gorgon's masonry casting shadows
for the everyman
turning hearts to pompous narcissist

The downward momentum is clear to me now.
The engine has built up a full head of steam.
I’d try to stop it, if I knew how.

The fires of industry must burn on somehow;
they tend to burn brightest when fuel is extreme.
The downward momentum is clear to me now.

When currents are surging, we shouldn’t allow
the jingoist fringe to swim in the mainstream.
I’d try to stop them, if I knew how.

Civility means more than I can avow,
but poems can only allude to a theme:
The downward momentum is clear to me now.

Each click of a mouse that shouts holier than thou
is a cog in a treacherous clockmaker’s scheme.
I’d try to stop him, if I knew how.

We worshipped the circuit and forsook the plow
in search of a false technological dream.
Our downward momentum is clear to me now.
I’d try to stop us, if I knew how.

The howling maelstrom of wireless
Haunts the air unseen
Blue toothed demonic
It whips up white caps of restlessness
And drives sleep onto the rocks

Blowing through keyboard tickers
And screen flickers
There’s a digital mosquito hum in the rigging
And the sheets fill with an endless cacophony
Of Arabica bean buzz

Your physiognomy is a book
Rolled up like a chart in a tube
The cabin cricket in its cage
Twittering nonsense
And lusts of cute and food
And anti anti anti

Both bullies and victims at the masthead
Squeal and rage and defecate
Raw sewage dribbling down the bow
In a million billion ones and zeros

Sailors lost in foreign climes
With no purpose on land
The motley crew self-gratify
Thinking
Come the dawn we’ll all be back at sea

Not realising
That with the globe at your fingertips
Both night and day are constants
Lash yourself to the mast
Else be washed overboard

All the stars you used to sail by
Have become little more
Than dead pixels on a screen

© 2018 Steve Kelly aka kellyocs

Just one more message,
One more,
And the night disappears.

In ones and twos the messages appear,
Replies within the minute.
One more message,
Then I’ll go to sleep, one more.

Just one more message,
And the night slips away,
Out of reach.

So the nature
the dirt of the past
is crushed under
the wave of the future
old relics of freedom
stuck in the sands of time
and an army rises
from the ashes of coffee
and newspaper stories
heroes and nightmares
metallic eyes
arms tied to strings
pulled by those
forever gluttons
in power since
the beginning
however silent
they pull
on their little
dancers
and we forget
our saviors
in this ocean
this new sea
of indifference.

Crash unbridled gates. Grind organs
through the rosy calm of tolerance.
See misfits shuck the beasts
in bed with bliss. Type up and tack
to this new daily mess the bounds
of what went by 'neath private barroom
skies; no looming spy will fix you
flint to burn the friendly waters,
flicker honor out to disarrange
and scold some rhyme too bold
for comfort-answers, dumb-fit, fumble-
grounded in some sliver too uncouth.
Tape pageless trees for truth;
blog-sift the spheres, watch darkness' evil
ears upend and train the tuner on
the lips extolling groundwork kisses
(sparkful dominance upstaged
by passion turned to stone:
reserves gone sour, hour unknown.)
Mist-choked misnomers
acting onerous and blinking out of phase:
de-stage the structure. Anchor down who stays,
who pulls the latest polls. While blind-spots
clutch white lace like arguments,
make space to process what flies past
as ****** rats stay the course,
a maze in grace.

I watched you die
Wasn't there next to you
Nowhere in your site
Just on my cell phone
Watching you die
While the next meme follows in the timeline
I saw your family cry
I've never met them
Don't even know anyone who knows them
Saw them on a YouTube
While going through recommended videos
I tuned in to your hashtag
Followed for a few minutes
Liked a few tweets
But didn't retweet
Hit the arrow on the top left
And went back to my timeline
After I watched you take your last breath
You lay lifeless
Not fortunate enough to die in the energy of love
Immortalized in the death of many
But many isn't enough for change
Ever a hashtag
Sustained by newsreels and half­hearted court cases, likes and retweets
Until I watch the next you die in my timeline
Worse yet, I'll read of their demise in a headline
Just last week a man lost his testicles, teeth, and life after a routine stop on the highway, the story
didn't trend or make it into my timeline