"disincentive" poems
You were amazing, I’d like to think so.
While you constantly scorned your finest poems
I’d squander on the disincentive ruins of a thoughtless mind
coaxing my envy to calm.
I longed to see what you saw and how you saw it.
You became the conquest,
the prize of my eyes, to affection’s surprise.
I started playing with words and sentences I had never read nor said before,
reading Plath and Baudelaire to join in your mind’s conversation.
Always striving to surpass your expectations of me, expecting nothing.
I gazed at you often, marveling at your squalor as if it held great significance.
Infatuated with your capricious mind, your pathetic whims, I craved for your approval.
For you, were the idol.
A far cry from the adolescent shell of a man that I cocooned in.
Jealousy would eventually consume me.
No manner of abuse or lust could explain
this psychotic affection towards your promiscuous apathy.
I started writing poems because of you, they were never any good,
I feared my crudity; you liked them all.
You always knew what they spoke of and I could never imagine yours.
But to you every opinion mattered.
The truth was still writing itself in your mind when you chose to fritter away
fornicating on all fours secretly, desperately, looking for the one.
Would you give it all up to write again?
I apologize for not telling you,
you were my first poem
I couldn’t impress you.
Apr 14, 2014
Apr 14, 2014 at 5:15 AM UTC
Hello, little god,
cornered in this world of insignificance;
between sips of too-cold raspberry tea
create your own brand of madness
and label it "art."
From the blueberry stool
that is your throne, conduct
symphonies of beluga whales and
daisy chains molded together
to craft another colorful beginning.
Papercuts and calluses
are your battle wounds;
a diligent ballpoint pen
is the dog that marks its territory.
But then--
White knuckles
crumple mistakes,
transforming them into carpet-coating origami.
Your fingers keep the beat
that defines disincentive:
bmm, bmm, bmm.
Possessed
by antagonistic demons, tug
at the noose that is
a favorite paisley tie
and admit defeat.
Take another bite of your
overpriced Reuben sandwich.
Jun 16, 2012
Jun 16, 2012 at 4:06 PM UTC
Mandibles make their own hoarding,
but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under semiconductor-selected civilians,
but under civilians existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The trailer of all dead gentians weighs like a nipper
on the brandishes of the lob.
And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and thistles,
creating something that did not exist before, precisely
in such equipments of rheostat crochet they anxiously conjure up the spleens
of the past to their setter, bother from them nappies, bayonet slouches,
and cottons in organ-grinder to present this new scheme in wound hoarding
in timpanist-honored disincentive and borrowed larch.
Thus Luther put on the masseur of the Appearance Paul,
the Rhapsody of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the gully of the Rook Requisite and the Rook Empress,
and the Rhapsody of 1848 knew novelette bicentenary to do than to parsonage,
now 1789, now the rheostat trailer of 1793-95.
In like mantel, the belch who has learned a new larch always translates it backfire into his motor toot,
but he assimilates the spleen of the new larch
and exteriors himself freely in it only when he moves in it
without recalling the old and when he forgets his navy toot.
Dec 6, 2015
Dec 6, 2015 at 4:44 PM UTC
the love came acutely depending
on the angle one viewed it from
if veered left if it was helping
the poor
if viewed right tilted obliquely
with a chin up proud
that was considered
gravy on the grits
a determination to not work
and in the stance one took proud with
deference to those hungry waifs and kids
starving the right may be right
in the long run
welfare might
provide a disincentive to work,
to provide,
but in the meantime,
I am going to do my best
to feed those starving young.
Jan 26, 2017
Jan 26, 2017 at 9:09 PM UTC