The lack of the eternal
  Within my own eternity
    Has never bothered me
      Before this
        Before today
          I cannot am
            I cannot want
              I will not be

sometimes the sticky-sweet of baltimore air
is a little too much

and screws pop loose like
bullets out of guns

back before the ghetto,
there was a white man who came here

married his cousin, went crazy
nevermore, nevermore

but now the park were he used
to play as a child is a public housing project

where the only poetry is that of puff-puff-pass,
chalk outlines peeling and melting in the midday sun

and a child who speaks to his murdered brother underneath his breath
as he pulls the trigger on his very first gun

Eye can taste
The musky dusky dark
Of a raven on a windowsill

Eye can smell the Witches
Brew, be it stirred or
Be it still

Eye can feel the pain
And sorrow of man
Trapped in shadowy cave

Eye can hear the cries
Of Homer's sirens on
Rocky shore and mystic wave

What you see is what you get
Never has there been
A cliche so obvious
And yet a truth so paperthin

Oh sweet Edgar Allen Poe.
So many wondrous poems you created.

So many echo gratitude
as they read
to grasp your well penned verse.

But worry not the master writer EA Poe lives,
Yes lives, moving in the shadows of the after life.
He drifts in spirit form behind poets worldwide.
Standing as guide to tweak a scribes words.
He exists still using his souls talents
to anoint the world with his stories.

And for that I the poet laureate is grateful.

I've confined the greatest hits of Marx
to a playlist
and periodically map over them with dull,
grasping eyes, when desperate for talking points
or anti-capitalism ideation

The works of Bukowski, Poe, Emerson,
tethered to my fingertips where I can stave
them off enough to hold concept
but unearth no meaning

I can pull and manipulate quotes
like nobody's business

I googled Sigmund Freud once
because I forgot how to spell his name

If photos could become life
and give justice to experience and wealth,
I would be Frank Lloyd Wright

If John Muir had an iPhone,
he would be as distracted and rooted
Somehow he died surrounded by angels
at the advent of advertising and public relations;

Emily Dickinson would have been
an Instagram model and romanticized
mental illness

I gasp in admiration and nostalgia
at Rockwell, but that world never existed
beyond his oil, canvas and scope

If the people that wrote the history books
had to read them, they would be
as insatiable as me.

All we are is illusions of aesthetics
to one another
Trapped in the vaguely perfect candor
of rehearsed moments

Tripped up and mired in perspective
because we aren't as lost as they
Only lost to ourselves

The library of my mind relies
on binary communication,
programmed in arbitration

And inside, there's a small child
whose heart still desires to play
But he's overwhelmed and crying for help

In the corner, a yearning spirit
is steadfast and pacified
Forming a benchmark of baseline bullet points
Wrought with cynicism

I am not smart
I am not profound
I am not layered
I am not organic
I am not the next great American anything