"capita" poems
I think I've procured myself again
The word 'filth' comes to mind
(For lack of a better word)
Yeah, I'm a *****
Unmetalled in the interface
It took yet another 'kind' word
Or should that be 'false' word
To realize what they think of me
To think
With their mangled good looks
Ubiquitous in psyche
Like they ever gave a chocolate-flavoured ****
Soon they'll all have had a go with me
And i'll become
How do you say? Sui generis?
Numb betwixt the thighs
I 'detest' myself
(For lack of a better word)
And I stare at the periwinkle
To find relief
And that's still no relief
Because I'm jealous of periwinkle
The capita thinks it's 'beautiful'
And of course 'I am no periwinkle'
(For lack of a better understatement)
For lack of a better me.
Feb 1, 2010
Feb 1, 2010 at 4:06 PM UTC
On rainy days
I look up poems set in Seattle,
then look back at the rain set against the window
I imagine the water was carried here
from the shores of their bay
across Pike Place, through Belltown,
in buckets they use
to carry Pacific salmon off fishing boats,
or in lidded Styrofoam bowls used
to take out clam chowder
I practice walking in this manner, sans umbrella, through the parking lot of a South Florida strip mall.
When I reach the 24-hour Dunkin Donuts, past the laundromat and the check cashing store, I channel my inner Seattleite: poised in wet socks,
unrushed as the sips they take from their mugs when its **** pouring outside
I renounce sugary accoutrements and have what they're having:
Black coffee with a splash of rain,
A balance perfected on their slanted hill streets
that breed more poets per capita
than anywhere else in the country
Vegas can have its mirages in the desert
San Francisco, its gold bridge
I think I should just have this coffee,
and this rainy day
as the poem it is.
Aug 24, 2017
Aug 24, 2017 at 10:58 AM UTC
~
as she poses
for the boys
her irony is
on display.
the naked truth
not easily deduced,
it’s not just they
that's being seduced.
her looks they’ve bought,
no heart nor touch,
a stage, a pole,
for them disrobed;
“just leave your
money please!”
mum says, *“ladies
don't act that way!”*
but mum ain't seen
hard times like these;
*“com’on mum,
let’s get along...
you gotta know,
its juxtaposition!”*
behind bars,
for driving cars;
stolen sweets
were such a treat;
*“com’on Judge,
rich guys got
more cars than sense,
what the difference?
if i take just one,
for just a spin,
the only joy
i'll ever ride...
and besides, he
left his keys inside
my valet shack.
those miles and dents,
that i put on, surely
ain't deserving this.
sweet fruit was
hanging far too low
for my resistance.
not my fault, you know;
it’s juxtaposition!”*
he sits high atop
a silver tower,
set beside the ocean fair;
existence storied for
he climbed every floor.
they call them shares,
it's what he sells,
but this brand of
sharing ain’t
what his mamma told.
it's a shell game by
a different name;
for it's more his soul
that he has sold.
you could say,
*“for a song his soul
sells short sales
down by the seashore.”*
or, you could say
just what he says,
“it's juxtaposition!”
~
*post script.
what prompted this? the city in which i live has the dubious and insidious distinction of having the greatest number of strip clubs per capita in these United States; not exactly something to be proud of. and yet i realize there are many ways to sell one's soul.
truth doesn't have many sides; if something does, then we can't call it truth; for truth, like gravity can be called many things, but under any name we still fall...
and come up short!
but then... that's just-my-position!*
Feb 11, 2017
Feb 11, 2017 at 1:45 PM UTC
Held in the highest esteem but inept in equality
Unprecedented equality she can never guarantee.
Yet she is dimmed perfect.
Imperfect is aiding the poor at the expense of the bourgeoisie
Yet vice versa of this infamy is dimmed rational.
Rationally speaking, we all can't be rich.
Thus why there would always be tiers.
With the upper tier benefiting at the expense of the proletariat
Yet the humanists are seen as rivals
And stigmatized via false credence.
These men, rooted in selflessness are considered dangerous.
With their movement colloquially synonymous with political abhorrence
As long as we all can't be rich.
Pursuit for Capita is as futile a venture as underwater basket weaving.
Jul 11, 2015
Jul 11, 2015 at 4:15 PM UTC
I doubt your mother’s ever told you.
The alternative to sanity is losing your mind.
When someone you love is gone they are replaced by an ocean of memories.
Your mind is a swimming pool and you’re just a bug, moving rhythmically, fending off the crushing weight,
and then one day you get so cold you stiffen like a corkscrew and sink like a stone,
driving your screaming body into the concrete.
And when they finally find the bodies of lost divers in the caves beneath our world, they are curled in fetal position, burrowed into the smallest crack they can find in the stalagmites of the cold walls,
hands and feet destroyed from ripping at the rock with blind death instincts,
grappling for a tiny passage back to the light.
Everybody wants to be a model
So her outsides fit how she’s dying on the inside
Everybody wants to be roadkill
Pegged up for examination but mostly for display
I guess it doesn’t matter how the victim felt
It doesn’t matter how wet leaves slipping from under feet feels
It doesn’t matter how cold it is
It doesn’t matter how another cigarette tastes
It doesn’t matter how his eyes looked when he walked past
It doesn’t matter how a cold gun feels
You can’t feel a gun, technically
Is anyone out there? Can you help?
Does your brain
Hesitate too long almost all the time?
Do you need to breathe through your mouth just to keep going when your nose can’t work? Do you feel dizzy? These are deep places with no air, in the future. You need to be able to breath with utmost control
And take up the least amount per capita in your lungs possible
By prepping your lungs for the atmosphere
Of the mask world you are not dying,
They hum in every bright viscous corner
Of Hollywood Blvd and time square
You are not dying
You are winning
And you angle down just to show everyone you can make the illusion of beauty appear sick
I focus on the version of me I see in my mind every time I forget to feel better. You want to be me, I am sick. I want to be better, I forget you. I want to breathe with my lungs again
Dec 30, 2016
Dec 30, 2016 at 2:10 PM UTC
It flashed on the television screen
The death toll rising
It was just another stat for me
Just an inanimate number
General Knowledge
Before that day
Before that day
It was just a boring news piece
Repeated all the time
Shouting matches on television
No on cared bout the dead
Just numbers to them
To me
Some days less some days more
A minister said deaths per capita were less
Tell that to the widow
Percentages and line graphs and histograms
And vultures and hyenas for trps
So dry no emotion
Before that day
Anchors and politicians
Calculating and comparing
Different countries and classes
By deaths and cases
Like stock market
Humans in flesh and blood
Like shares and indices
These lives these smiles
What destiny held for them
Who knows
Gone away in the icu
To just become another statistic
Another pawn for politicians to fight about
Thousands and thousands of people
Becoming numbers
Meant to be forgotten in days
The magnitude made me numb
I didn't care
It wasn't me
Wasn't my family
It didn't affect me
To me it was a
Just a never ending vacation
Rates of poverty and unemployment
Didn't matter to me as a child
Misery and anguish of people
Millions and millions of people
Just a figure to be momentarily saddened by
While I cursed at the zoom meeting screen
Someone's mother and father passed away gasping for oxygen
Leaving a newborn orphan
And while I ate the same bland food
Someone died walking miles towards his home
Before that day
It didn't matter
It wasn't me
Wasn't my family
Till it was
It's painful
A person becoming a statistic
May 13, 2021
May 13, 2021 at 11:37 AM UTC
I
When the world freezes over,
The soft glow of the computer screens will leak against a sky-black universe
When everything goes on without us,
Stop-lights and streetlamps will light the way
For all the people who don’t look there
The beast in the pit
When the stores will always be empty,
Vegas will ****** no one with her lights,
A blinding light
II
Green-glow and blue-shine will cry out
From their boxes in vain, to
The glowing black-blue swirl of
Cosmic magnificence!
Humanity’s ancient projections will whimper and beg
The interstellar paradise ingentis so unexplored
For desperate affection and faces,
drooling.
III
When the bottom falls off…
When the bell tolls for thee…
When the plug comes out from the wall….
You will not look,
You will stare.
Eyelids - hanging like abandoned bridges
Skin - blue with the afterglow still clinging to what it caught.
Sweating through your bottom
Until you expire, and – then, we will cower away from the great
For thine…
IV
et misurent pulverem super capita sua et clamaverant flentes et lugantes dicentes vae vae civitas magna in qua divites facti sunt omnes qui habent naves in mari de pretiis eius quoniam una hora desolata est
User error… user error… user error… user error… user error…
Feb 25, 2014
Feb 25, 2014 at 11:40 AM UTC
The U.S. has more
Billionaires per capita
Than anywhere else
Plus more millionaires as well
And I ask, at what a cost?
Mar 22, 2015
Mar 22, 2015 at 11:43 AM UTC
Really tried to run the hardest, like some kind of poor mans Sean Carter,
Until I took a look
Out of body, like a shadow
Stood beside it
Was unwise
That thinking is less savage and all the time more similar to garbage
It's all lies
Some grow but never harvest, humble is best saved or put aside for the modest
More likely, the world will turn you out
I will throw shade like a forest too deep for the garden
Grass fed conundrums fed with a water spout
Like the world was placed below the stars because it's easier to take it
And I am flush with fresh thought, but I am not worth the capita
Haven't lived long enough to make it
I've survived the epic tales of shear wonder, how's a man born of below average beginnings gonna enjoy peaceful slumber?
Sleep belies dying
Or least lays under cover when dreams are the closest relative of success you've ever heard of
You partake to doze numb
Like three fingers and an ambien, that's mine
What's you're sleep number?
Dec 27, 2016
Dec 27, 2016 at 6:56 PM UTC