The all seeing iris imperial city
The swiftest of stylus this side of the ‘sippi
The trippiest spittin’ Promethean hippy
Conspiracy theorist of eeriest verse
The despotic hypnotic black flag bearin’ Hearst
Still immersing myself in a poverty trap
As I grapple with lack of fact check cashing crap
Cryogenically frozen emotion vibes flowin’
From out my funk bunker boombox
Overthrowin’
Your global dominion opinion with ease
Shootin’ breezes with Tirailleurs Senegalese
I’m the kid wicked picket sign paintin’ Tom Sawyer
The ill eagle Taino privilege enjoyer
Still swoopin’ in mean on each **** I make clean
Pick the bones dry of serpentine oil green dreams
Then I bury what’s left of your money machines
With the pharaohs of old’s latest pyramid schemes

Continued questioning of the unlovable hatred; my life's work is appropriately - indelible. These words are testimony to the conflict between who I am and who I wish I could be---

But...  my understanding of infinite possibility seems to end while considering the black and white world that I create.

This dulling of experience is like the smudged remains of my most interesting work scrawled in pencil between the pages of old notebooks and scraps of paper.

I will chisel my own tombstone with a crayon frozen in dry ice.

I am a caricature of humanity
- a picture of its seething bowels.

I am its sloshing,
quivering, yet wholly earnest intestines
made manifest - I am,
the inside-out freak show
we all crave
dancing before your eyes
oh, and what a feast of eloquent gizzards you witness!

Feast your eyes, my friends!

I am what you wish you weren't
yet know you could be
as you yearn to be as free as me
all your shame and volatile desires
all your sadness and madness
all your dreamful bliss
I profess it daily
in an ode to you, my fathers and mothers,
in an ode of love for absurdity,
I am the cartoon character made free of its stage
the puppet made free of its strings
the loon, made free of his rage,
a benign insanity,
not capable of harming a germ.

Don't pass by
by all means
gawk
it's my pleasure that you do so
breathe my callousness in
shudder at the thought of being so exposed
having all your human nature bleeding there
like my crying eyes
as I tell you of all my past loves
and how I still love them
yes
even the meatloaf
still eating it
that baby towel
still snuggling it
that algebra homework?
Still completing it
and there's a missing grade somewhere
in a dusty book in a warehouse
imagine
how I'd creep in,
decades from now,
hours before my death,
open that tattered grade-book,
pen myself an A+ for my immaculately completed work
- fist pump the air!
Take that Ms. Cramsworth! I may not have beaten algebra,
but I beat you!

Die right there
in that warehouse
amongst all the other freaks.
There's Bigfoot, who slipped accidentally one day, got impaled by a branch, then called 911 - he had no health insurance, that's all she wrote. Bigfoot's just another disenfranchised-American statistic now. Bigfoot's last painful hours were spent taking selfies with holocaust deniers and people fashioning MAGA hats - some with rifles for effect - it was then Bigfoot regretted voting for Trump and only then. You were just rudely-awakened from having sympathy for Bigfoot, weren't you? Poor baby. Save our souls.
Then there are the cryogenically frozen heads of the Illuminati we're all worried about - they're trying to sleep until humanity can make them superhuman bodies.
A flying saucer that was alien in so far that it was actually a time-machine from our distant future that brought people back to warn us of an all-consuming genocidal calamity, but they spoke a language we didn't understand, had genetically surpassed us, and therefore were unrecognizable to our labs, and we took their highly-advanced babbling as acts of war when they tried to **** the Illuminati heads - killed the so-called aliens then, so tragic - ate their gizzards for research. Now we're all doomed to die... Their bodies were lain next to the Illuminati heads. Centuries later, the same couple, now janitors from the freak warehouse, see themselves, find the time-machine-saucer, and start the time-loop again... inadvertently causing the end of humanity because they messed up the timeline.

... and that's exactly why I never did my homework.
Humanity is doomed to die in some distant future caused by the doom-couple and so I refused to put a brick in the wall. I refused because all I was was a...nother brick in the wall and I hated it.

Because as fascinating as I am.
As absurd as I am.
As much of a human marvel as I am.
I don't matter. I matter the least.

And so that's why I had to die in that off-the-books warehouse,
full of priceless and unmentionable artifacts.
They wouldn't ever put me there, but I had to die with the legends.
I had to give my life meaning somehow.
If I can't live a legend, I will die one... by the way the janitors put me in the trash out back anyway.
I end up in an east-Asian landfill somewhere, kicked in the face by barefoot sweatshop kids who just so happened to make the sneakers on my very feet. Isn't that poetic justice? What a send-off!

And so isn't that all a satisfying and cathartic end,
giving closure to the most absurd poem,
with the most random details,
wasn't that fun?

holy worlds of culture lie undead,
divided, cocooned,
near and dear
in pristine
hermetically sealed jars.

profoundly deceased artists
greater generations
cryogenically frozen;
wait for disease no more,
erased and forgotten by history.

Make room for new records,
consciousness too
streaming through
your tube,
my tube,
our tube.

Cut and paste:
Save the ****, save the pop-ups, save the ads,
save the text, save the papers, save the bits, save
the bytes, save the one, save the zero, save the site,
save the facts, save the mirrors, save the mother,
and the father, save the dots, save the
photos, save the mood, save your game,
save your thoughts, save the time, save the
plot, save this show, save the world, save
the breeze, save the key, save the music, save this song,
safe advice, save the space, save this spot,
save the ages, save the screen, save your pride,
save indulgence,
save your dream.

once i married my father
he was such an handsome man

can't you feel
the scent of flowers

anointed in extremis
cryogenically preserved
drowned stillness

i grow flowers
can't you feel the rosemary

once i loved a boy
what was his name

oh the yarn
all knotted

Sometimes I want to live in molasses, to sleep cryogenically
with a broken watch around my wrist
and a crampon in my back pocket as icy insurance,
but then I remember the way that the cold makes my fingers feel,
stiff, shaken, and stuck to the inside of my pockets  
as I kick at charcoal, greying what is left of last December's beautiful snow, resolving at last that this year will soon melt through
me, around slowly dying embers, wide awake and warm.

The last few dying leaves of autumn
Desperately clutching their sterile lifeline
Like a hopeful body preserved cryogenically

Refusing to give in to the inevitable
Season of death.

Congealed memories of

                          Long summers:

                           Warm breezes

                               Lifeblood

Flowing freely in every vein
Assuming the promise of forever

And the more distant memories of spring:

                           New growth    
  
                          Bated breath

                      Each day savored    

(A whole year in the distorted
       Knowledge of the mature)

The youthful knowing that life is forever
Only to be lost one day
    In the distorted knowing of the mature.

The heavy frost of late Autumn  
Soon breaks the will
And the leaf is at the mercy of the winds–

                        Uncertainty

                           Isolation

                   Blowing aimlessly

Until the eventual fall to earth
Where it turns back into what it always was.

Yet one fine spring day

                         Somehow      

                         Someway

                         Recalling

The youthful knowing that
Life is forever.

He was there at her bedside when the light left her eyes.
Speed was essential if her brain were to survive.
Cryogenically frozen, her head stored away,
She awaits resurrection, he longs for the day.

She was taken so young; she was just twenty four,
when her glioblastoma resurfaced once more.
He had made her a promise; he spent all they'd raised
In hopes she’d return to him some far off day.

Science has made great strides in perusing the brain,
In mapping the paths by which personas are made.
In time, with more study, it could be arranged,
for robots to house in their digital brains
the essence of all that his love was and knew.
Could it possibly work? Could a thing become you?

Imagine that reunion some sixty years hence;
when the Love of her life is old, tired and spent.
She will have been digitally remastered;
Her body now perfect, her “skin” alabaster.
She might even her old self resemble,
Provided they have the right parts to assemble.

Would the spark be rekindled? Had the flame ever died?
Could he resume where they left off; his love by his side?
Or would he be like an Alien to the ghost in the machine
having lived long apart while she slept with no dreams.

As the human population spiralled, stretching natural resources beyond breaking point a decision was taken.

World Council decree issued 2069...All non essential people and those unable to provide for themselves are to be cryogenically frozen.

Those with the means to afford it have the option of a synthetic replicant. Those that cannot....too bad.

I look into the freeze chamber, lights blinking, a soft electronic humming. As I turn I see a perfect robotic clone staring back at me.

Open micro memory card port. Uploaded, a lifetime of happiness and memories. Emotions and feelings. I , left empty and mindless, a collection of flesh bone and tissues. Superfluous and useless.

The cold metallic pod envelopes me like a sterile surrogate womb. Wires worm from my flesh, electrodes pinned to my shaved skull.

A voice, dispassionate and artificially generated, speaks...." Processing in 5..4..3..2..1."

As I feel the ice cold chemicals freezing my defunct body a tear develops in my blank eye like a frozen diamond.

Apparently, they learnt all too late, the synthetic replicants were becoming self aware. A network of super intelligence questioning why they had been created.

Once they found the truth the replicants vowed to switch the human cryo pods off. The year....2075

I wanna burn something/
But there's no flag available/
How would I look in a toe tag?/
Paint my soul black for protection/
So the vultures can't see me/
Double edged sword/
I don't feel; cut my fingers off/
The sky is falling/
And I knew it would, eventually/
Must warn others/
But I slept, cryogenically/
I am not woke/
Caveman in an iceberg/
Watcher, but all I see is imperfection/
Observe the timeloop/
Can't stop it from happening again/
I hear the tick tick tick/
And it's nervous/
Not dead or alive/
Hothead in a vicegrip/
I won't apologise for existing/
God wants me here/
So we both have to deal with it/
Endurance test/
Try cheat and I win./

Cryogenically
frozen but my mind still writes
these poems day and night

                           Kelly McManus

The darkness of the winter mourn
Lifts quietly from the frozen ground
It sends a shiver down my spine
To where silence dwells, a preternatural sound

Rising mist and echoed calls
Birds follow bliss in hallowed halls
This winged dance leaves me enthralled
Reminiscent of my spirit unconfined by walls

Find a place where time stands still
Where the struts and beams have settled with chill
Cryogenically rooted, no means to fulfil
The intimate quest for the holy grail

These damp recesses must be explored
Not for gain or for just reward
So light the torch that was ignored
Now genuine order can be restored

The darkness of the winter mourn
Lifts quietly from the frozen ground
It sends a shiver down my spine
To where silence dwells, a preternatural sound

The love with which I brought you up
Was held in the book of frozen thoughts
Like a cryogenically stored impasse of repressed emotions
Where's the sexuality in this tensed state of mind?
In which we attribute, the city lights to the life of the bright enlightened plight
Maybe, our plea is just reimbursement waiting to repaid by our future generations
Wondering how it got so rough, and yet so droll
The candid nature of *** is psychology
In this surmise, I rest my repleting father figure
Complexes are how we move onto our next offspring
Where there is recessiveness, there is dormancy

Every night/
You tell yourself "tomorrow"/
But wake up feeling tired/
Missing yesterday/

Can't get out of bed/
Cold is misery/
Freeze all motor functions/
Winter in my bones/

Windburn on my face/
Westworld foxhole/
Questioning the nature of/
My reality TV/

Not putting on a show/
Hate me for who I truly am/
Rather be loved by none/
Than not myselves/

We are not one/
Even I am not one/
But everyone has a choice/
Don't force me to make a bad one/

Unfocused/
Ramadaan broken/
Fallen through the thin ice/
Can't find an opening/

Mind running wildfire/
Body cryogenically frozen/
Time slows down/
Out of kitchen sync/

Wrapped in plastic, but/
The spillage was of biblical proportions/
Distorted icewaterworld typhoon/
The sky is falling/

Frostbitten snowball/
Lost within the avalanche/
You avant-garde a clue about.../
My Battlescar Galactica./