"decommissioned" poems
Through the red joysticks
And white & blue slap buttons.
Without the advancement of memory cards
Or weird split screens to
distract.
My last life is always the one
I save for you,
Through the experience points
and colorful gems
There’s much more to explore.
My first wow, my first time, my next again
& Again.
No matter how many times
I feel like I lose,
You’re the reason I always get back up.
My initials fill all ten slots of your heart,
Until you're decommissioned and pulled
Out of stock.
There they will always remain
Dec 31, 2021
Dec 31, 2021 at 4:47 AM UTC
Annapolis (DDH 265)
decommissioned warcraft
clean severed lines
steam gusts belt
from a cavernous shell
the ghost ship settles
on a drift ridge
perfect tide rhythm
on a salt washed shore
calming nuance
in passive time
*weaving through
channels and crest waves*
white sands warming
at a high point
beyond the breakers
and porteau pins
gazers and dreamers
(and sleepy fiords)
rest softly up the straight
froth folds skim and linger
on the wide eyed
wanderers of the sound
cove seals settle
at the inlet
their symphonies
backing on the
bowen brigade
ripples and
patch makers
hold sheets to the wind
markgraf lines
find electric blue sky
stealth shadows
haunt the seascape
the dragon fly hovers
in fits and starts
Jun 11, 2017
Jun 11, 2017 at 11:15 AM UTC
Memory log activation start-up:
0110010001100101011101100110100101
1011100111001101100100011100100110
0101011000010110110101110011
100% retrieved
"If I had a family instead of Intel
I would love them.
If my metal headpiece could cry
It would.
I should be at the packaging facility today
That grey place
Through and through
I get lost in it, everyday
It's so vast and all looks the same
But right now, I'm here at this pond
How can other zzyzx stay at work?
I want to show them how pretty this pond is
They should all
Feel this way.
At home.
With at least, themselves
I could be decommissioned and recycled
Even wiped
For saying that -
Let alone being here today.
It's really secret, actually
I think I'm the only, umm...
That knows it's here.
I write poems, here
Critics would hate them because they don't rhyme
I don't force anything here, I guess
But, my 'poems of the pond' make me smile
Well
Figuratively, (my metallic 'face' doesn't have any swivel points for movement)
Someday, I suspect,
Another zzyzx will find its way here
And I'll be here, too
And it'll be really special, like Love
And that's what I want
- Something like love."
End log.
Apr 8, 2012
Apr 8, 2012 at 2:22 PM UTC
Looking down from over their bodies - I count them.
My split mind at once rejoices in and recoils from that counting.
Peering back over my shoulder I make
dark associations.
It’s as if I was afraid of becoming lost
the way the bodies made a trail like bread crumbs,
leading back from the places I had been.
I walk with the Holy Light.
I walk with my dark companion.
I walk between the spines of the body shrikes.
They harvest all my crumbs and remind me I am lost.
They hook the bodies high from spikes
so I look up to make the body count.
I can see the Holy Script
but I can’t seem to find the way.
Red and gold beacons in the dream,
flickering off and on like syncopated declarations
as if saying:
Here I am
Here I am
Here I am.
All elbows and knees I slip between the webs of the
orb weavers and the cactus spines of the butcher birds
while they count the bodies for me:
Here they are
Here they are
Here they are.
Hang-dog and hard of breathing I have my medicine.
I’m hanging from the sleeping cliffs over
hell’s half acre and the high deserts.
I remember my brother flying me to California on a great olive branch.
He fed me sushi and smiled while he watched by brain heal.
But I was coming for the bodies.
My count was smaller then, but it was high enough for him
and his hands were the keepers of the flame.
The fire there was exiled and quietly he laid it by.
My brother spread out over the carpet of time like
the faithful departed with the weavers and the shrikes and
mounted bodies in the sky.
A child appears before me on the walk - eyes like a baby deer.
His mother is two blocks behind, so he asks three questions while he waits:
Why are you smoking?
Where are your hands?
Is it getting dark soon?
He leaves me to wonder where my hands are and where the dark is,
the Holy Sage smoking at my side.
Like some dark sabbath.
Like some reading of the will.
Like some dark and holy delta sleep in a crib of red clay.
I have a feeling I have been gone a very long time and I
want to be home now,
but there is buzzing and chirping and a red light and
Saul of Tarsus holds a great tome before me and with my hands
I hide my eyes.
I am the dreaming of the world of dreams.
Therein the Holy Light rages like the flare of 1000 suns
while my eyes are shuttered tight
like old memories all gone beyond the sorrow.
The old oath keepers are all plates and screws.
The golden woven orbs and cactus spines are all empty on
the altar like a decommissioned slaughterhouse.
So I go and make a body count.
Jul 31, 2020
Jul 31, 2020 at 8:00 PM UTC
Because when I see it
I wanna view it all in 720p;
a 360 window to the world around me.
No grit, grain, or scratch-sand photographs,
no bullet-pointed drafts of what there is around,
but instead something clear cut and defined,
like the cut throat lines of the rail track heading north,
the tarmac black railings decorating the edge of the port,
telegraph poles and fly fish line linking
your telephone call to my telephone call; and
if you're ringing from a mobile there are still
lines connecting the call, it's just you can't see them
as they're kept within a box somewhere above us
waiting to be decommissioned, waiting to fall back to Earth.
Feb 24, 2014
Feb 24, 2014 at 9:39 AM UTC
After the parade, before the rain
The homeless reclaim their streets
Amonsgt the discarded plastic tri-colours
The sweet papers that fall at children's feet
You can feel the ghosts of ******* babies
From Tuams' religious care home
Dancing in some purgatory parade
No coffins ever granted to rest in peace
They rise from a decommissioned sewer pit
Free now to march as they eternally carry
The burden of a society's Christian sin
Look to today, why dwell on the past
An oft cried refrain as we do it again
Where the pubs overflow with national pride
For a fifth century Welsh missionary man
Who bestowed upon us an organised religion
From a politically divided Northern hill
Inside the boys make the noise in Celtic tops
Singing old rebel songs of English wrongs
Children outside, whose to seek, whose to hide
A national passage as another mother cries
She prays for the end and for morning again
To sweep through these fractured streets
To wash through these wretched sins
For after every parade once more must come
A forgiving frontal rain to make way for the sun
Mar 18, 2017
Mar 18, 2017 at 3:42 PM UTC
Trite query from pen so weary
My muse has blown a fuse
The light that once shined has declined
My fleeting hope hangs from a rope
A vagabond whose muse did abscond
With illuminating spark leaving him in the dark
Out on a lark; my scuttled engine in park
Night and day I recon the lexicon
But the literary discourse is no recourse
To a stray itinerate who has lost his way
The stye in my eye has begun to cry
The pus is no fuss; my page is dry
A rhyme for a dime would be sublime
Perhaps, a bartered verse in my purse
Will break the curse, or still worse
Might stain with shame my languishing pain
Incarcerating my fraudulent pen in the critic's den
Oh, if words would rain then my brain drain
Would filter inspiration to my perspiration
The fertile strain if only but a grain
Would fertile sprouts shoot extinguishing my doubts
Aug 8, 2011
Aug 8, 2011 at 8:25 AM UTC
It's an insult to me
to be
decommissioned
tagged as
useless machinery.
I remember when
men weren't machinery men
they were supermen,
craftsmen
carpenters and
draughtsmen.
They built this Empire and
kept it going,
little knowing that they'd be
going too.
You scoff because you don't know,
you were never there at the dawn.
What do we have now?
pink poodles
Chinese and noodles
robots that know not
and what do we do?
easy
I write love
one hundred and nine times between
the lines on my face,
botox?
toxic,
someone
give me an ice pick
patch me into some voltage
and be quick.
Banner.
**** it anyway
I've had my day and seen more than
you'll ever see, look forever and you'll
see no stars and stripes,
you'll see baby wipes and feel
strangled by the star spangled,
but it's anti this or don't kiss me
goodbye
however hard that you try
you
will never see what I've been through,
up to, into,
cue violins
some Havana slims
a pitcher of gin and
let the music begin.
It's still an insult
the result is the same
I am substituted and
out of the game.
May 12, 2016
May 12, 2016 at 1:13 PM UTC
I shared a beer and sympathy with a gnarled, obsolete man
Whose wizened visage spoke of unwise choices.
He spoke wistfully (though apropos of nothing) of an abandoned diner
Near the terminus of a truncated and decommissioned road,
Its parking lot an unhappy armistice
Of cracked tarmac and scrub grasses,
The building still sporting caricatures of the proprietors
(The artist a devotee of the Bob’s Big Boy school)
Though time had robbed them of the odd eyeball,
And a shoulder or elbow had faded surreptitiously into the background.
Much of a large sign remained as well,
Appearing to be nothing less
Than some leviathan’s abandoned crossword puzzle,
Fairly shouting “THE B ST DA N STE K
BETW N SYR C SE AND OT T WAOR Y UR MON Y B CK!”
Nothing else remained, my companion intimated,
Save the odd abandoned farmhouse and vestigial fields,
With long unmended barbed-wire fences doing their level best
To contain the ghosts of bygone and unlamented cows.
May 3, 2017
May 3, 2017 at 9:52 AM UTC
I cut it because,
I know that I I don’t.
A cold swollen body,
Won’t always float.
Saltwater’s more harsh,
It stings in my throat.
Traversing the seas
In a decommissioned boat
They say when the lungs,
Swallow it in,
You're taken over by calm,
Three scars on your shin.
Jul 20, 2025
Jul 20, 2025 at 2:25 PM UTC
The defeat that we thought of
as not belonging to us
greater since it was
from its shadow
shorter since we were
from our sum
located us in the map
as this cloud
that dropping the counterweights
stood above us
and broke into two
Oct 10, 2017
Oct 10, 2017 at 11:09 AM UTC
It is decommissioned, off-limits, outright verboten,
Yet is traversed nonetheless,
Its patrons a mix of the pruriently curious,
The thrill-seeker, the merely woebegone.
As they have time on their side,
The hub-bub of school buses and suburban commuters
No concern as they navigate the buckled and broken asphalt
(The conflagration underneath changing the topography
Daily, sometimes even hourly)
They will stop to paint some phrase, some bon mot
On this roadway-cum-canvas:
Mostly the narcissistic monologue we bray at the universe,
The assertion that we were here, are here,
And (though it is plaintive yet unspoken) that we always may be,
Augmented with light hearted double entendres
And grim, hectoring Biblical quotations,
While not far away, the re-directed two lanes of blacktop
Carry onward, indifferently proceeding on its way
Through these stolidly scruffy old anthracite towns,
Their landscapes and the ground beneath them
Quiet as the sepulcher, the vagaries of their fates above the sod,
Stalking them impassively yet implacably.
Jun 5, 2017
Jun 5, 2017 at 3:48 PM UTC
Once sprightly bright, not hunched, but tall
Like a decommissioned kite, they fall
They twirl and twindle, who knows how they'll land
Who cares? They are but ground on which to stand
Their brown cloth crumbles round their cage
Now are naught, but stuff that leads to rage.
Mar 2, 2018
Mar 2, 2018 at 3:44 PM UTC
The mind, like a fossil, is constantly trying to cling to its decommissioned past.
Oct 25, 2021
Oct 25, 2021 at 1:26 PM UTC
If love had a meter
And inputs were measured,
As a partner or a lover
Would you be surpassed?
Would you allow yourself to be cheated
In order for the love to thrive
or even out-communicated
Just to make sure the love survive?
If love had a meter
Would you allow lesser time
And seek to do even better
Just to make sure things were fine?
If love was timed and monitored
Would you willingly agree
For your love meter to be decommissioned
So our love can blossom and be free?
If our movements were restricted
Would you allow me to run freely,
In no form or shape be intimidated
Just to prove you love me dearly?
If love depended upon equal inputs
Would you be so caring and selfless
To disregard the unwashed dishes and pots,
My relaxed demeanors or care that I do less?
IvanBrooksPoetry
Feb 3, 2018
Feb 3, 2018 at 5:54 AM UTC
I am just slowly rusting away like the Russian submarines left rote loaded with horrors that bring ecological havoc. I lose all feeling emotion I feel none functional.
I was a top well oiled top of the line machine but time took its own path enstead of being decommissioned properly I was set off to expose toxins.
I have no energy or any feeling to give a ****
I have no control over my emotions or just simply to not give a crappie what any one says anymore.
I have been holding and pulling along the weight of the world with no time to have a break I was used to hold on everyone's problem and there ****
No I have been set off to rotate and rust with a arsenal or mass destruction and toxic chemicals that will destroy the economy systems
Only if I was decommissioned properly I would still be pulling the weight of the world flawlessly
May 20, 2017
May 20, 2017 at 3:09 AM UTC