Seldom am I so direct,
Like Wayne, Parker, Kent,
I prefer my subterfuge.
But these words are penned
     (figuratively speaking)
by the penultimate,
              tumultuous,
and often callous wordjockey
yours truly.

As I've said, I'm seldom
more than the sum
of my company kept
[let slip,
reacquainted,
self-righteous reconciliation,
          regret, repeat]
And today, I find
myself
writing thrice,
twice toward pride,
once of consequence.
Que sera sera.

I'm lead like a horse
who had to drink -
or perhaps imbibe?
your softly streaming sentences,
words which kicked like a mule.
Remember, I was hoarse,
parched.

On that parchment, I find these words:

I am a cause...



Truth at last, truth at last,
Thank God almighty...

     ...you know the rest.


I stand on this principle -
that I cannot stand at all
sin ustedes
your words the salve,
my words the therapy.
"Progress."
Just Cause.

Now, waxing on
toward the triumphant,
anthemic Aye!
If you are the cause and the casualty,
then each daily account
of what might be made martyrdom
should be cannon.
Am I eliciting allusions and assumptions?
Inadvertently, but then precariously so.
So the pieces fall,
the causality, literary
the eventuality, progressive.

Aye, we are naught but what
we are made of by others.
So each concussive consonant chips and chisels
off the ol' block.

To a good Mister John Henry,
my gratitude.

there is a glacier
partially concealed
melting from a climactic
climate shift revealing a
reality congealed by revolt

rebels burdened with
a philosophy that
elevates humanity
insisting we will not grovel
before a vain messiah
espousing erroneous
iterations of ideology

will the human race permit
the iceberg to dissolve
as vapid reformist
rhetoric inundates our
political consciousness with
pragmatic progressivism

or will we rise in resistance
with the radicals
fists clenched in protest and
hands outstretched to one
another rather than
lifted high in praise to a savior as we
witness the glacier solidify once more

as CO2 perforates our atmosphere
with heady highs and noxious toxins
will we succumb like dumbfounded
addicts intoxicated by inoculation
consuming the opiated semantics
of charismatic personas or will we

challenge the corrupt
with our wits about us
facing the sobering corporate
corporeality with the pride
of lions facing a den of thieves

abandon the chosen champion
of the vanguard party
we stand hand-in-hand
7 billion
sisters and brothers
in an anthemic chorus of

solidarity that shakes the
bastions of the enthroned
with the resounding shouts of
perseverance in our
non-compliant defiance

our manifestos are written
in the blood sweat and tears
we've shed for this
dream deferred
and we will not be the
silent majority anymore

the masque of anarchy
is ours to share
will we wear its visage
or will hell freeze over
before we choose
freedom
over happiness

Pride fills your chest and you feel anthemic
Your thoughts are contagious
Pervasive, pandemic
Phrases like lasers
Searing gazes
At empty stages

But in the background
A playwright bleeds out on paper
Everyone told him fear is not real
But the lie burns acrid
Tastes like acid
What idiot would back this?
Grappling with ghosts
Only gets your *** kicked

Ignore it, and
It becomes a rope around your throat
Choking love
Choking hope
It’s a gag dipped in vinegar
Tightened over tongue
Wafting in your nostrils
Water in your lungs

Embrace it? It is sound and fury
And makes you question
That you have any questions left to ask
Or any words left to say
Any poems meant to write
Any battles worth the fight
Any gifts left to give
Any life left to live

Poet, Fear has a body
With a thousand different heads
This is what it looks like
This slimy source of all your dread
It's your mother when she told you to get a "real" job
It's your bills, it's your rejection slips
It's the "Sorry, not the right fit"s
It's the superstars
Without your scars
Whose work reads like ****

Fear is real
Don’t ever let them tell you differently
It’s real and it’s homicidal
it's maniacal and it's wild
it grips a butcher knife
and it comes to carve out your heart
cut away the playwright's smile

So, poet, posture cat-like
Beckon the foaming dog to bite
But bite you on your ground tonight
"I won’t pretend you aren’t there
so you can shadow my back
dagger between my ribs
**** my dreams in their crib"

Come get me, Fear
I smell you
I feel you
I’m ready for you

His eyes sang the symphony of love
With purest passionate words of life
She was lost in his moving music
That drowned her dreadful silence
They were an anthemic rhythm
Together forever in echos of time

did you know
if you earn $34k a year or more
you're in the top 1% of all the world

if that's the joke then
where's the punch-line
did i miss it somewhere
in the attempt to justify
political suicide

how could that appease
those of us groveling on our knees
living hand-to-mouth
from paycheck to paycheck
as the world's 80 richest billionaires
who control 50% of the world's wealth
do whatever they **** well please

by all means
fact check me if you don't trust my
ridiculously overpriced master's degree
in literary cultural and textual studies
because let's face it
we've all heard the jokes
an English diploma means jack-****
in this morally bankrupt economy
where literacy is literally repressed as a
way of keeping the downtrodden oppressed

a healthy discussion where we ask
critical questions is the natural synthesis
of any democratic debate and
challenging each other is a stellar
way to cultivate the intellectually irate but
let's not divide and instigate after all
unnecessary altercations over
trivial factoids only distract
us from the realists' explanation

we are ******
the world is burning all around us
200 species perish every single day
as we exorcise fossil fuels
and melt the polar ice caps
pumping oil into gas-guzzling SUVs
and CO2 into the air we share as

we poison the wellsprings of hope
with idiosyncratic politicians
who force idiotic semantics
down our throats until
we choke and splutter and mutter
beneath our breath about
how things used to be and how
we'd be happier if we just followed
passively like gentle sheep adhering to
the edicts and decrees of the
corporocratic oligarchy

see
i'm not standing here defaming
or complaining on the contrary
i'm stalwart in proclaiming that
if we don't pause to consider
the way we're fanning
the flames razing this
planet we will no longer
have a globe to call our home

with all due respect
there's no chance in hell
that i'll just sit back and laugh
while the Empire grows and
consumes life liberty and happiness

gorging itself on the apathy of
the well-adjusted privileged white kids
who don't blink twice at the
homeless transgender teenager
hiding out on the stoop of a
fair-trade coffee house to avoid
the Florida rain or the corpse
of a drowned emaciated Syrian toddler
buried face-down in the sand
or the arrest of Sandra Bland for
failing to use a
turn signal or put
out her cigarette
tell me how such
a mundane gesture of
defiance could warrant
the admonishment that
tied a noose around her neck

the 1% is not a people group
it is an idea nurtured at the behest
of capitalist demagogues
that inundate our culture with
fantasies of American exceptionalism
let's face it the only thing exceptional
about this lackluster nation
is the fact that we have the world's
largest prison population per capita
due in no small part
to vindictive laws that target
the poor and clap them in chains

it isn't Us vs. Them
that is the nefarious toxin that
brainwashes and destroys
community and philanthropy
if we would truly call ourselves
lovers of humanity than we must
muster the humility to admit that
we all have certain degrees
of light and dark
each of us on a spectrum
oscillating in stark contrast

it is We the People vs. the State
that three-tiered hydra that
guards the estates of the elite
and leaves others starving out
in the streets
a system predicated on
setting the classes against themselves
a self-perpetuating leviathan
looming god-like overhead
nurtured by the treatises of
outdated 18th century philosophers

the social contract is a lie
i didn't sign my life away
on some dotted line
so that my freedom and
independence could be usurped
by the stupendous guise of
capitalism masquerading as
the harbinger of harmony

we're not demanding economic
equality but fiscal equity
a concept that each man
and woman and child can
live and love in
comfort and in health and
worry not for the future
generations because a system
of slavery no longer exists
to inundate their lives
with shallow labor
'till they perish

if we sit idly and watch our
culture continue to chortle and
spiral into the idolatry of political celebrity
we may forget that the people
have the capacity to
reclaim our stolen dignity
hoarded by the specter of power

Foucault once wrote that dominance
cultivates resistance and i am the
expression of that latter people's movement
one aspect of an anthemic chorus
singing in unilateral unison as
the glass castles of the State come crashing down

equal to each and every sister
brother to seven billion
rebel with a cause
now
tell me
will you join
your voice with ours
'cause trust me we need
all the help that we can get

We must prove,
Innocence beyond subsistence,
Amass the cultish mantle,
And forge beyond resistance

All of your ambitions,
Languish here in black and white,
Mental scars on fleeting stars,
To rest upon the night

Sepia tones,
Dispel the anthemic,
Bitter shades,
Scatter the lyrics bare

Notes wrap around the bend,
Rapping with might,
As they mend,
Faith contends with sin,
And rends its neck,
Until the steeple sends,
For mercy

He was the great regret!
The unfinished melody
going slightly sour in its final notes.
Once meant to be anthemic
now little more than a dirge.
The brokenhearted one that got away;
No tear shed or throat vice gripped
in the absence of you,
but changed none the less.
And make no mistake,
He hurt you and you hurt him.
Sometimes badly.
Sometimes very badly.
Because nothing shatters as completely as a heart,
"My God" say the old men of hearts,
"And not a one the same."
He's sorry.
He never meant to hurt you,
and he knows you didn't either, love.
Don't worry.
We hurt each other, we hack away.
We expose the pulsating and raw innards of each other.
We chip away at each other
Until what is left is the perfect shape.
You made him into her matching set,
And he fixed you for whomever came next.
And seriously, he hopes for the best
because he didn't love you the way you needed but he did love you.
Maybe you loved him, too.
Even if you don't miss one another.
You were broken notes.
It wasn't the right song.
You are the great regret!
The brokenhearted ones that got away.
Or rather, grew up,
up, up and away.

Like a wildebeest
The commotion within me,
Unsettled,
The anthemic rhythm is unruly
My carcass accommodates an anarchy
Transfixed by an enticing temptation
I am gullible liquid
Falling into your shape,
Absorbing into your creases, willingly
Do with me as you please
I’ll monopolize your monologue
Engage in every lie
Like it’s made of gold
I am your ever-lasting prize
As long as we don’t volatilize
I’m yours to mold

Quite mild winter weather bourne this way
within environs of Perkiomen Valley
since latter months of 2021,
but also since me
January 13th, 2022 birthday,
I predict minimal snowfall
for remainder of 2022 winter,
what with just couple weeks
until Spring Equinox.

Within lil more'n a fortnight,
as tempestuous slam
dunk March madness closes curtain call
“in like a lion, out like a lamb,”
twill hove tested survivability,
asper flora, thru harsh winter, and

those most see ring robust will pass exam
unbridled love bursting asunder
cavorting, frolicing, instigating
wham bam thank you ma'am
lollygagging, orchestrating, romancing

while birds and bees pollinate jam
ming, humming, fostering sensational slam
dance, where flora lifts, wafts, and yawps
invoke warble, gurgle,
burble from baby in pram.

Meanwhile latent Mother Earth
quite pregnant with
multifarious potent new life
vermilion, violet ready to burst

asunder from Gaia's girth
dramatically altering landscape
with expectant birth
of animal and plant species distilled

within crucible, sans terra firma hearth
quite a contrast, when
polar vortex wrought dearth
whence Spring begets plenti
kindling, snapchatting, and twittering mirth.

Also uniquely designed hue man
denizens of every stripe nurse
tender affection expressing
amorous poetry and verse
rejoicing, the dead of winter,

and attendant frostbite curse
frozen folks felled, thence carried
away in horse drawn hearse,
where heavy grief ameliorated
as natural holistic

narcotic brings pacific
balm, calm, and psalm snapping,
crackling, and popping
wide web with electric
ambient ancient, yet contemporary music

punctuating the air with lulling lyric
since time immemorial
recognized as greatest soporific
equally savored, whether
devout or atheistic
nonpareil eclectic dreamy

harmonic melange cathartic
aural, diurnal, integral
quintessentially converging harmonic,
democratic, and anthemic
congregation replete with fantastic
incorporation, viz diversity galactic!