"anomie" poems
What luxury to get mad
about last night's basketball loss
and watch the full moon descending
at the speed the earth turns.
Things could get worse
personally and for the community.
Bombings, killings, anomie
boiling frogs and witches cursing.
The changing climate,
typhoons in the Philippines,
volcanoes and tsunamis, WWII which I missed,
Thanksgiving nor'easter, Easter twister.
What abundance to fast or feast,
your choice, stay inside by the stove
or go outside, climb the mountainside.
Live in a city or small town.
So I raged at the coaches
for their lazy zone defense
like an alien in the bleachers
unable to affect the outcome.
When my sons came home
I yelled at them too. What opulence
to be angry about nothing of consequence
neither stopped by the cops nor slipped on the ice.
Nov 7, 2017
Nov 7, 2017 at 6:13 AM UTC
Beautiful summer day. You know you're gonna die
that's why you know no joy
unless religion, tv, stories, sports matter.
For men like us dying's easy, it's living that's hard.
And since dying's much like living, that's hard too.
There's some contentment in letting community decide
your place in it. A good day to die, the Apaches say.
Can't stop the quince from blossoming
or my sons from smoking, speeding.
The best that can be done or said's a blessing.
Less tv, less guessing about the effects of your anger
unless you want to be an angry man forever.
Becoming knowledgeable is the best defense
against your insignificance. OK about being alone.
Alive, almost sure of it. Whether I'm a visitor
to my life or the actual owner.
Mature poets steal, most are masturbators.
There are a million poets, I'm poet #500K.
Plenty of mysteries, infinite philosophies,
prayers, laws and unwritten rules.
That's why we go to school, life's complicated.
All I do not know: ATP, probabilities,
the glorious revolution, meiosis and mitosis
and all I'll never see, the bottom of the ocean,
the palm at the end of the mind, a wolverine.
Forget-me-not, is that all I want?
To get lucky, you gotta be careful first.
To be great, you gotta be willing to sound BAD.
In last night’s movie, a young writer
and an older, married with children French woman
fall in love. They did not meet during a village massacre
and money is no object, Manhattan.
But after everything has happened
she cannot leave her children, not even for love,
because of love, the love that brooks no serendipity.
In the subsequent late night movie, a wealthy
altruistic doctor arranges for the ******
of his neurotic concubine. His guilt
provides us with an opportunity to consider
the concepts of faith and forgiveness,
that all will be well in the end
after a period of meaningless suffering.
Mar 6, 2017
Mar 6, 2017 at 5:21 AM UTC
the disease of despair
gambling
suicide
hate
sadism
symptoms, not causes
of the brown blood
drained from swines'
pockets
gather up your coat
and your hat
for the primetime
event
Dec 15, 2018
Dec 15, 2018 at 3:36 PM UTC
Barely Walks.
And does not sleep
day squinting
night in trance;
Moonblinked
& Anomie doesn’t speak
What she thinks
Until she drink
Apart; life projector spreads in sheets
Anomie not loveable
so off she goes
with dogs in sheets
that bark and bones
& in the padded womb
zaps milky-Light
synthetic-filtered-bright
A spotlight for the bees
Getting Drunk between her Knees
Confusion explodes confetti
disorientation takes the plow
*** the only how
An ****** or a fake hopeless meow
She lives in mental corners
watching window borders
They push in; she falls out
Brand new day
Teeth on pillows crack
Anomie's mind
has to react
She's fast to split-
Spit out a rebuttal
method witty-tactix kit
No one tells her time to go
But when Bee's belly full
She-goes - Self-loathes
Morning Glories still shriveled in their pods
They own the glory of her story and her song
Hiding in sarcastic retreat for clean feet
under ***** water bathes
wipes off the meat
Not your friend
She's trouble to love
The dirtiest dove
Anomie is naked and she's hated
Take away the curtain glove
eye slit under sunlit
She recovers
Don't judge
it's all her love
but you ****** Anomie anyways
just because
The Thrill
Feb 4, 2013
Feb 4, 2013 at 4:48 AM UTC
As long as there are teenagers extant,
Anomie and alienation of
an unripened generation
Shall spill upon this site in cliched cries,
Dabbling with threats of pills and lies,
The endless pain felt gives one fright.
To this old soul who wonders silently,
Will these thousands of pained children
Make it through to their next incarnation
So much angst, so much anger,
I wonder if God created poetry
To salve their wounds
Their unknown futures loom,
But all I read is hurt and doom.
You shall survive, children.
Awful poetry, some good,
you will write.
But write and write
till your heart be calmed
For even ancient kings felt the anguish of the soul,
And we profit even today by King David's psalms.
This wizened fool has his hands full,
Mouths to feed, bread to earn and bake,
As midnight is almost nigh,
He rests prone and adds a verse to this old poem
He long ago scribbled down, grimace-smiles now,
Realizing there is little difference tween him and the
Sad Eyed Teenagers of the Lowland.
For poetry salves his wounds still, even now,
Unashamedly, he thinks, quiet like, praying,
Hallelujah, spoken in the original,
The tongue of his ancestors
May 22, 2013
May 22, 2013 at 11:35 PM UTC
after Alexandra Leaving, a song by Leonard Cohen
<>
to go where?
to a city self-consuming in madness,
giving every excuse to stay, and yet,
it came to me just now when the poet
must be leaving his redoubt, with doubt,
and return to the concrete and anomie
of a different kind of splendid isolation
when the last leaf meanders slow down
to the battlefield, and the falling terminado,
and the tree branches are stick figures, each
finger pointing skyward in an j’accusing manner,
accussing & conceding defeat, begging for mercy,
their pleadings too much for me to bare and bury
when green has been wiped clean, and deleted
from the dictionary of colors, my moth eaten soul,
can no longer be granted a stay of execution by
merely looking at the landscape and seascape
to admire their friendly contrasting schemes,
their installation in me of the awe of a visual
quietude, that was an astonishing injection
not truly appreciated till now, too late and
still early, the awe colorations of nature’s vibrancy
The gods have come, my soul hoisted upon their
broad shoulders, the dead-appearing tree branches
can no longer keep their poet safe, hold him back from
meeting his fate; now, he too is a leaving but
floating upward, unlike like the fallen crowds that have
come to rest upon the soil that born them, now to be buried,
all saying: Goodbye Island Poet leaving,
Island Poet
has no poem, no good understanding, no vision,
had no plan, no foresight, only a hope against hope,
that safety was/is not seasonal, Van Morrison reminds,
“These are the days of endless summer,”are memories,
to be held onto tightly, until when if I pass muster, angels
will return to my island abode, where my natural friends
will greet me again, with a flowering and new births,
and The Island Poet can once again revel in ideas in words like
future, sanity, when boarding the ferry with a one way ticket smile.
Sep 2, 2024
Sep 2, 2024 at 2:23 AM UTC
To be alone
Is to be complete
They say
No man is an island,
But isn't everyone?
We're all stranded on islands of self-interest
Connected to others
Through flimsy bridges of temporary alliances
Mutual interests and gain
The more connected we are
The more isolated we become
Pictures and blog posts
Nothing more than facades
Anomie is the word of the decade
The individualistic
The self-sufficient
Is reviled
For refusing to play the game
To participate
In the masquerade
To jump through the hoops
Of social niceties
Somehow
To sit and squirm
Through ******* contests and gossip
To flap and flutter
In the howling gales of hysteria and contrived laughter
Is preferred over
Sitting alone
Revelations and epiphanies
Splayed out before oneself
Playing solitaire with one's reflections
In peace
Baby showers and mixers
Celebrated
The impenetrable silence
Of one's hermitage
Eschewed
The people-pleaser
Preferred
Over the lone wolf
The team player
Over the independent agent
I suppose
In an age of open doors
A locked one
Raises a few eyebrows
They'd knock and rattle
Then bang and kick and shout
Before leaving in a huff
Authenticity is now the rarest commodity
Valued over saffron and platinum
So people settle instead
For knockoffs
Alcohol-plied sincerity is better than nothing
A China-made Rolex still looks better --
Flashier, if nothing else --
Than a Timex
No man is an island,
They say,
Smirking
Frowning
Clucking with disapproval
Peering behind perfectly schooled masks
Nary a hair out of place
Looking at me
In all my artless imperfection
Paper, pen, and cigarettes for company
Well
Which of us here
Is truly alone?
Aug 30, 2014
Aug 30, 2014 at 10:27 AM UTC
It’s only ever once
I’m inside the box
of your mind
that my tongue turns
misty blue
and in small whispers,
I pass away,
dying in some nonchalant way.
Oh how the days race on by
and how you pretend not to notice
that I’ve got my eagle eyes on you.
Easy shells,
we’ve made a mockery
of legitimate feelings
but I cannot deny such vraisemblance
You are a beach
in September,
or a summer in
rigor mortis.
I think we were both dead
when we met,
only just beginning to beg for rebirth
and I brought you maps of no-man’s land
so now here we are
Stuck in the mud
of a pneumonatic love.
I will always be the coughing Queen of Anomie
and you’ve still yet to unleash
your lungs.
Jan 15, 2014
Jan 15, 2014 at 4:02 PM UTC
In nature, as in civilised homes, there is evidence of conformity
That only significant study would make apparent,
but his studies were suspicious and neighbours would talk
The nose is bleeding and his pretty song is skipping
on the jukebox by the bathroom door
Anhedonia now is constant, the pathos inherent
As their mother went missing years ago
While they read Proust by the window,
and the day was drawing closed
Their father was sick with Absinthe shakes
whilst little duck starved in the pond behind the house
On disagreeable days,
profound introspection
becomes not more than
subversive psycho-babble
and the words he speaks
are dust on the tongue
a bother and little more
Purported to be perpetually depressed, his cool demeanor left an impression
on his sister, as she would gaze upwards at his face, displaying world-weariness
So Weltschmerz they called him and his cool was palpable
but only her smile could bring colour to his fa-*
Jan 21, 2014
Jan 21, 2014 at 12:32 PM UTC
Appointment to have ***** removed by robot-assisted surgeon.
Air-conditioned, no mosquitoes in the OR. When you arrive
You'll remove all your clothes. Naked before the ladies, nurses
Who have seen it all before. Mainly remember you're not unique.
Think about the government while they're mixing up the medicine.
There's always governance even if there's little or no government.
Back to counting backwards. Inside out, if I die, will I know it?
At 70, Jack's running the gauntlet with some skill!
Benny Golson wonders aloud what might have been
Had Clifford Brown not been killed in that auto accident.
Jack's girlfriend once said he was the reincarnation of Clifford
But he doesn't believe in ghosts, karma or an afterlife.
Benny's old girlfriend Betty inspired the tune Along Came Betty
And that's the most afterlife Benny or Betty's gonna get.
The Trojan bench being not as deep as the Greek
Once Sarpedon and Hector go down even the lucky shot
To Achilles' feet is not enough to save the town.
Aeneas is no match for wily Odysseus
Although unbeknownst to all he has the last laugh when Rome
Conquers Athens, the Myrmidons, what's left of Ilion
And the whole known world from India to Britain.
It's not bad to acknowledge death's primacy
Although after a while you stop remembering
To fear. That's when everything becomes clear
Purpose v. purposelessness matters less,
Anomie v. rule of law, that's a preference
Love v. loneliness, worth about 25 cents
Or a million bucks in the light of the holocaust.
Nothing but light, love and the majesty of death in the room.
Machines stand ready like marines, their beauty is in the motion
That overcomes inertia. The food supply is deeply compromised
So eat whatever you want. Mourning the dead is part of the business
Of healing and staying alive. When you get to the afterlife, walk with
eyes open,
Ocotillo and cactus may be in flower. The robot does the work,
imposes
Its own small order, like a girl on a bicycle with disorder in her hair.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 10:35 PM UTC
Gallimaufries Incondite in-risible pules from anomie.
Recondite jeremiadtions of every pessimal influence.
Yearning for the Quid-am Xanthochroi to sybaritic in the manner I long to LOVE,
Unrestrained The pennicle of BATHOS
observations of human
hopes and dubietys of mankind
An anodyne, the demersal soul
attempts at pawky insights often written whilst
inebriated and Katzenjammered!
Dec 31, 2009
Dec 31, 2009 at 7:51 PM UTC
Her eyes jaunted through my
Oppositional ghostliness,
Her hair screams “soft” in my
deaf but imaginative hands,
Her wineglass-visage stripped
My hollow strings of anomie,
Her uncorked skin spraying
On my lust-parched and sobered soul,
Her moonstruck glow poisoned
The rivers of my reveries,
Her poise dialectic
With wonders of the infinite,
Her breathe is shattering
The nihilistic love below,
Listless ears loosen by her
Magnetic harmony, “Hello”
Aug 2, 2010
Aug 2, 2010 at 9:19 AM UTC
I want to forget
Not have to worry about
What was just forgotten
From a mere 10 seconds ago
The time involved is an
Excruciatingly long prospect
Minutes being not finite
Measurements any longer
I'll refuse to leave this place
This room, much less
For at least two days
Nothing but hydration and cigarettes
Wonder aloud about anomie
And if I'm afflicted
A ridiculous thought
Of course I am
May 13, 2011
May 13, 2011 at 8:33 PM UTC
Descending kind of flight
Of thought
Associated free
Comprehending blind of sight
We sought
Delay of anomie
Pretending find the right
Forgot that
Which we can't agree
Defending lined the fight
That bought
Every hidden fee
Jan 20, 2015
Jan 20, 2015 at 12:38 AM UTC
Not long
after you pass out
exhausted from playing
the futile game of anomie
hoping to slumber with Eros
here comes Trickster
up out of the pillow
like mist
he just wants to talk
about a great stone hearth
the fireplace of the gods
at the paradoxical center
of a groundless void
and everyone there
is laughing and smiling
and you know they love you.
Apr 1, 2012
Apr 1, 2012 at 8:47 AM UTC
I don't know what to do from here.
It just seems as if the entire world is fixated on some infinite screen.
So all encompassing, yet images flicker in fantastic frivolity.
Such absolutely aimless anomie
erodes the mind, heart, and soul of everything.
To the point of true societal insanity.
Where we'd rather chemically synthesize the taste of an apple,
than to plant an apple tree.
Nations wage wars in the name of peace while
Corporations, not people, enjoy freedom of speech.
Is this what it means to be a human being?
Are we encoded with DNA or with binary?
What of your beating heart? if it still pumps.
Or have your cells of blood all become zeroes and ones?
Do you look out upon the shimmering sea to be humbled and awed?
Or do your eyes map out it's marketability, growth index, and overhead costs!?
Oh, what of a metaphor for societal insanity.
To depict society as an orchestral piece;
They are all strings vibrating in the very wrong key,
resonating on a global scale in such horrific harmonies.
Yet they'll incorporate,
they'll advertise,
they'll trade the stock publicly!
They'll call it a symphony.
Apr 19, 2012
Apr 19, 2012 at 11:25 PM UTC
He says he wants to be a city planner. Wants to build things. Things that don't go together. Things that don't make sense. Pyramids upside down, floating buildings, a strip joint next to a church. And I know he'll find himself a place to live. That place to build. In a truth of man, never a truth of mankind.
So he blew up of his rock on a rocket ship, left Anomie, now heading towards Anarchy. That's where he's meant to be. Where they should have raised him. Anarchy's no building rules. Even more so – no truths. He's of that same structure. Blowin' up from his family and friends. Blowin' up from his girl, his entire world. Seeking out his true passion. The one deep set inside him. The one that never left.
That one was born after his birth. As a child, visiting New York City, there were no rules. None to their gravity or structure. He was raised to sell insurance, but understood their architecture too well. Always had. Traveled the city often.
And they'll say he's a genius. Limitless ability for building things. Things in the present, so he doesn't build for the future he moves. He's followin' no guidelines, there's none that he should. None of their rules could lead him like his own.
He says it's about the strategy, less about the tactic. Not about how tall or long of what he wants. All about the resources and where they're placed. The way he needs them used and when. How well he will when he's penniless. A mental checklist.
So now he's flying to Space City.
Aug 16, 2010
Aug 16, 2010 at 6:14 AM UTC
here, i've built up
a collection of kilometers;
a fever, written out in stains,
coffee against fingertips; an
indomitable anomie. this
room gets messier by the day,
it won't be clean come
winter. spring. the day you
decide to break down and
call. there are twigs between
these disheveled sheets.
i'm
stagnating. i'm fluorescing,
only for you. only, you can't
see it. just yet, at least.
increments grasp in quiet
moments. sometimes this
clay in my eyes takes your
shape. sometimes i wonder.
sometimes i wish you'd come
over. all times i fall a little
further down.
i've been here before.
but not like this. drowning
on open land. quietness
by any other name.
propinquity, or inertia.
or simple lonesome.
predictably, i lose dreams.
you lean in close,
eyes alight.
Apr 15, 2014
Apr 15, 2014 at 7:58 PM UTC
Obdurate and profligate from years of anomie,
I have become hallow due to this sessile pons asinorum
Incurring solely affliction, I know only discontentment;
My existence is damnation, and damnation is my existence...
Enmity and sorrow are the sole tenants of my heart
No matter my anguish, these demons nevermore will depart
Presiding within my occult and dingy soul;
Anon my antipathy will irrecusably attain control
For hope is naught but an opaque postiche-
A whim that dissipates, even when you beseech
-The Bagatelle
Mar 20, 2014
Mar 20, 2014 at 5:42 PM UTC
*Originally posted to this site on May 23, 2014
a backwards trek, to learn where to step next...*
Sad Eyed Teenagers of the Lowland
As long as there are teenagers extant,
Anomie and alienation of an unripened generation
Shall spill upon this site in cliched cries,
Dabbling with threats of pills and lies,
The endless pain felt gives one fright.
To this old soul who wonders silently,
Will these thousands of pained children
Make it through to their next incarnation
So much angst, so much anger,
I wonder if God created poetry
To salve their wounds.
Their unknown futures loom,
But all I read is hurt and doom.
You shall survive, children.
Awful poetry, some good, you will write.
But write and write till your heart be calmed,
For even ancient kings felt the anguish of the soul,
For we profit even today by King David's psalms.
This wizened fool has his hands full,
Mouths to feed, bread to earn and bake,
As midnight is almost nigh,
He rests prone and adds a verse to this old poem
He long ago scribbled down, grimace-smiles now,
Realizing there is little difference tween him and the
Sad Eyed Teenagers of the Lowland.
For poetry salves his wounds still, even now,
Unashamedly, he thinks, hallelujah!
May 23, 2014
May 23, 2014 at 8:13 AM UTC
I long, like you long for a place to rest my head
You long, like I long for a warm silky bed
I long, like you long for the lights to finally dim
And you know, like I know I do not want to float
I would rather swim
And I know, like you know
I long, like you long
I am tired, like you are tired of the anomie
And I am scared, like you're scared
Of disenfranchise and insanity
I drown, like you drown in a hidden river in the woods
And I frown, like you frown
At how our methods have failed us
I wait, like you wait
And I hate, like you hate
And I regret, like you regret
Like a wildfire in dry hills
Like an animal scratching its cage
Like an exploding light bulb
I run, like you run.
Feb 9, 2014
Feb 9, 2014 at 7:15 PM UTC
Betrayal and heartache are the resultant of the most sorrowful of circumstances
It comes from losing yourself in the one you love the most
And losing them as a result of being a complete fool
This duo has a way of eating at the soul
It sneaks up in the most beautiful of disguises
It uses you for your love and your generosity
Planting itself in the thing that attracts you most
It makes you need it to survive
Takes all advantage of you and ***** you dry
Leaving you for dead without a way to sleep, breathe, or function
You've become a soulless body
And a heartless being
A dark feeling of anomie
Depressed and meaningless
Jul 21, 2014
Jul 21, 2014 at 12:26 AM UTC
So this is what they call anomie?
A grayness,
A blank,
All things devoid of beauty?
When the eternal arms,
Have left me to my own devices,
To toil in deaden land
To paint futile pictures?
I’m wading through waves, through fires
Surely to send a man to delirium,
And as though it never came to pass
I sip unsweetened tea.
What rips men apart,
What fetters pull him in twain,
Simply move me with sway
And don’t move me at all.
Tears rush like the flume
Admonishments thrown
And I can only sigh in frustration
At all this petty emotion.
For man fills his stage with characters,
And bleeds ink all within his works
Aspiring to his own audience, the god he is,
I simply abuse this alchemy
To bide my time till death.
Call meaning what you will,
Fill your life with love,
Fill your life with gold,
with God,
with spite,
with studies,
with yourself.
I cannot,
I do not,
I know not these simple pleasures
Perpetually I am not full,
For there exists where faith should be
A deep impartial hole
If I could be normal,
If I could be normal,
If I could love,
If I could believe,
I’d turn away from it,
And choose to stare uselessly into my faithless hole,
All things beat on, as they be,
And this conviction, be it ever so keen,
That existence and living are useless things,
I’d still see what believers still see
That being the world as beauty,
I’d only see it with a more grayish hue
(Without the pretension to know what is true!)
And see the sense it lacks to see
And commit myself to this anomie.
Sep 11, 2013
Sep 11, 2013 at 3:37 PM UTC
pathetic fallacy
doused in endless anomie
but I am dripping with vibrant mentality
and here I am, circling your reality
combining mine and yours, yours and mine
together, submerged in a different galaxy
floating through clouds on an out-of-space railway
chasing tracks of sun kissed flowers and scattered hay
delving deep into meandering mountains of sunken grey
oceans teasing the shore, the bay
I hold your hand, I kiss your thumb
your scent sweet like my bubblegum;
and there are hues of silver attacking your skin
as we travel further and further within
the realms, the depths, the shivering tide
of interlocking hearts and my quivering pulse is magnified
no gravitational field to bring back the vomited butterflies
convulsed from my stomach and paralysed, hypnotised by your patient eyes
wandering through an infinite odyssey of colourless skies
but the darkness only enhances your shine
as we whirlwind back and forth and in and out through time
my hand-in-hand companion, my holy grail, my wind chime
forever entranced by the meticulously sublime
a love that flourishes in the pool of my mind
a parallel universe wrapped in tinfoil, thrown into mankind
we bounce back and forth, and in, and out
leaving traces of our lives speckled throughout
sandy supernovas and grains of stars,
anything is possible when combined with another’s heart
Sep 14, 2016
Sep 14, 2016 at 10:19 PM UTC
in the stranger’s vacated car, he counted seven dogs.
the town was a.m., a grocer’s dream, a fisherman’s desperate tooth.
tragedy, his raincloud, what else
it wept. wept the window down.
Jul 26, 2012
Jul 26, 2012 at 2:41 PM UTC