Shadowboxing with a dead man as a massacre stills  

Fingerdancing to smoke & mirror the masses

Whistling frantic in the gathering dark to steady the ranks

Faith trumps facts

A strong man acts

Greasepaint thick

Growing cracks

A flailing will can kick up sparks

Keep squeezing shills

Catch easy marks

Throw enough show & something will stick

That's shitbusiness!

Wake up and smell the coffee, focus as the pan flips,
Time for the rat race and its monotonal semantics,
Suss out agendas - get ahead of the mind tricks,
Brush over simple truths with pointless lies and politics.

Another year gone - stale memories as the frost licks,
Dignity diminished, allegiance pledged to bosses,
Anticipating failure as you organise your post-its,
Institutionalising life, leaving no room for chances.

Clutching at a purpose yet defeated as the clock ticks,
Finding closeness in distance and solace as the storm hits.

As with everything else in American life, the national government is just another commodity packaged for mass consumption. We're all being spoon fed a spectacular narrative which by its very nature is designed to evoke the passions.

Every day, someone gets on TV and says or does something which provokes outrage, drawing the viewer in like the iridescent lure of an angler fish, and keeping them hooked just long enough for the hypnotic messages of the corporate sponsors to burrow their way into the collective consciousness between "newscasts."

It is precisely for this reason that these frivolous displays SELL like hotcakes. There's no government going on here. There hasn't been for who knows how long? All that is left is BUSINESS. Raw and unfettered. The United States of America is now nothing more than a 'reality' show, and boy, I tells ya, the revenue stream is OH, SO LUCRATIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To know truth is disown a loss of life, slowly simmering to a boil, to be free, when we’re all pawns to the marriage that freedom has with reality. To know truth, to be in real freedom and that loss could be morals, values, memories we hold dear to our heart, it could be a loss a friends and family. Things we had worked for, like a career. Sober and seldom, no longer to be enslaved to one’s own dreams and desires, breaking away from earthly suffering. To be a muse is the same to be a sinner, may as well be better, wrapping one’s soul around this world and drop poems veiled over dogma. To live in narrative of society, is be worse than laymen, scorned forever in flaws. Hypocrisy, those who dream the most, often live less and never to know truth, freedom and be mastered by reality. Be weary of false prophets in culture. There is nothing sacred about an individual moral codes. Otherwise, society would have no need for revolutions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtS0z4J0UWE

Palestinian
children
and women
attempt to
protest apartheid,
fighting against
those borders and walls,
walking towards boundaries
where snipers sit
settled in
to shoot the innocent,
and continue
freedom's infringement.

Soldiers fire to take
the lives of those
they dehumanize.
Two thousand
are wounded
and fifty plus
dead.

My government is complicit
in these illicit
acts of violence.
We support and supply
the horrible ordinance
used to brutalize
and end those unfortunate lives.
Our politicians
spin blood red threads
into golden ***** lies
and celebrate the bad guys
who have no intention
of compromising,
the ones who
go on occupying
and terrorizing the Palestinian people.

Meanwhile,
state supported
media guys,
are televised
to tell us lies,
go on air
to share a side
that shames
and blames
the victims of
new atrocities,
by their favorite
allies,
repeating
reports of agitation
incited by
Hamas,
but no one on
the Israeli side
was wounded
or died.

As a writer and poet who absorbs the world and then bleeds out truth, I'm finding it harder and harder to break through the political propaganda that television, radio, and web media has conjured to dominate and control so many minds. I can work around the programming by introducing abstract moral truths, but the moment I reference modern cultural, my work goes ignored.

I feel myself losing touch with a society that I’ve taken for granted my entire writing life. In a gluttonous feast of sensational media
that has proven nearly impossible to extricate ourselves,
we allow the power of profiteers and con-artists
to stream content into our minds that programs us
to accept unprecedented levels of violence.
We celebrate military-style police powers
to remove our freedoms of expression,
the rights to own property at reasonable expense,
and our most basic rights to life under a banner of liberty.
In an **** of hatred and greed, a large swath of society
has proven comfortable with exterminating
or imprisoning human beings for the color of their skin
or the origin of their birth in private-for-profit prisons.
Yes, I definitely feel we are lost in a spiral of human descent,
where there is no end, only torment and death.

-Ron Gavalik

In a world of wage servants
we are drugged, propagandized.
That's how the keep us
docile, in line.
Sometimes a servant refuses
to take his meds.
His spoken truth burns down
the facade, for a brief moment,
until he is silenced.

Padding padded pockets is a leaf of golden steal
Leaving lovely leaflets that I read, and have to feel
Falling from the fountain that shot hope up in the sky
My most favorite leaflet is the one that makes me try