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jeffrey conyers Feb 2015
Like clothes given to you that you just add on to what you have?
Our love is about the same.
Like the purchase of new shoes.
When you already have plenty.
And need no more.

I find we having accumulation without elimination in our life.

And as find as this seem.
Just like friends surrounding us that means nothing positive.
Some we just have to avoid completely.

Somethings you must rid yourself of in life.
Except love which has power.
Which has a serious worth.
And in our life, we have accumulation of it.
Without elimination surrounding it.

I keep on accumulating.
In hopes, we never eliminating this love between us.
Devin Ortiz Nov 2016
Is to be told all the ways you don't matter
It is to be angry and afraid
It is to watch people walk on the opposite side of the street to avoid you
It is to be told to get over slavery
It is to be told that I'm not racist I have black friends
It is to be told the definition of racism like you don't already know
It is to be told hey what about reverse racism
It is to have a white terrorist group dedicated to your elimination
It is to be more worried about threats in your own country and those abroad
It is to wonder daily if your family will be safe, if they will get to come home
It is to called a **** for speaking out against the hate
It is to be called lazy when you work full time to provide for your family
It is to walk past folks and watch as the clench their purse or pockets
It is to be to have people fear you, when you feel more threatened then they ever could
It is to be told that privilege doesn't exist
It is to be told you are equal, except you know that in the courtroom, in the eyes of the law, the job market, the housing market, in the classroom, it is a ****** lie
It is to be live in a world where 1 in 3 black men are in prison
It is to know that they have sentences longer than white counterparts
It is to know they use prison labor to exploit them, slavery living on
It is to know that the police which are a relief for some, are a nightmare for you
It is to know that you can do everything right and be killed by someone sworn to protect you
It is to know that you will be blamed for your death inspite of this
It is to have the life choked out of you and a man telling you, **** your breathe
It is to hear what about black on black crime, even though every race commuts crime against their own kind the most
It is to remember white flight and the repercussions of it
It is to have family who have seen the bloodiness of the covil rights movement
It is to be taught in school how great this country is while ignoring the evil its done
It is to be taught in school how little you meant
It is to wake up every 2 weeks to another hashtag of some poor black fella to be forgot in a week
It is to want to simply be acknowledged that things arent right, and being ignored to this day
It is to be villianized in the media
It is to see that flag everyone holds dear and remember that pain it caused you
It is to fight and die for a country that still doesn't care about you
It is to be told to go back to Africa as if this wasnt stolen land
It is to be told I dont see you as black, you're just the same to me
It is to be told well you don't count as black, you don't act black
It is to have your culture stolen
It is to have value placed on your mysic and style and not your skin
It is to hear what would MLK think about these protest
It is to remember that people celebrated his assassination
It is to remember the slurs and the hate he recieved
It is to have people know they don't want to be treated the way you are
It is to want whats always been denied, the privilege of walking in your own skin without fear of persecution
It is to see family, friends and peers celebrate and share racist ideas and beleifs
It is being reassured they still value you
It is to know but not enough to matter

Being black in America is a lot of things, and I love the country all the same.

But I hope and pray for the day, that we can be treated the same.
jeffrey conyers Jul 2016
Who will be the last race standing?
Those under the impression that they are better.
Or those that suffered through several generation.

By process of elimination we might never ever know.
We place pigmentation  on ourselves.
We either of this group or that group.
But in total truth, we are mixed  through all combination.

Some just lives in denial.

Some lives according to getting through society.
Even if changing your race and living in deceit.
By truth and process of elimination only God knows ourself.

That lie we live to fool everyone else.
Repression is everywhere .  Repression is so common it is almost impossible to avoid .  Repression can be found in natural laws ; gravity is a repressive force .  I experience a desire for repression when I consider the possibility of extra-terrestrial life .  Propaganda is a form of repression when it eliminates unwanted truth ; militaristic logistics require repression of the extraneous.  Social hierarchy is only as good as it is expedient ; credibility is the key .  Psychological repression can be a functional personal tool .  Repression is a frictional force that can either eliminate unwanted forces or alter their courses .
Repression is most often thought of as a governmental tool .  There are many reasons a government might want to repress it’s subjects .  In a truly free government no one can practice repression on others of no consent unless they have infringed on their rights .  Fascist and socialist governments can force their people at will .  Their children are trained both  directly and subliminally in order that they may better fulfill their social positions .  In free countries laws repress repressors : people who might want to tamper with your rights .  Monopolies get repressed because they tamper with the people’s right to a free market competition
  system .  The individual reigns and the majority decides what is best for everyone .
The elimination of all unwanted repressions is the natural goal of all individuals yet repression is common the world over .  Social hierarchies necessitate repressions ; expedience in teamwork becomes more credible than individuality .  Many sociological forces create their own realms of repression ; the normalcy demanded by tyrannical governments and puritanical religions are obvious examples .  
Any retrospective examination of human history that is depthfully complete will probably bring to mind a vast quandary of opposing forces beyond social integration .    
           Personally  I find people to have a vast amount of basic similarities .  We become alienated from each other in the application of our abilities .  In fact each and every one of us live in a realm that is totally real only to ourselves .  I find this and similar states of social fragmentation to be one of the most pervasive observations one could make about the state of the human race .  
The tabula rasa state of man is an evolutional being ; a conscious realm that became out of dirt , water , sunlight , time ; an essence that has an innate quality , a cosmic continuum .  The historical development of world religions paints a vivid picture of man’s desire to relate to this tactile awareness .
There are many forces in the universe that we as humans need to repress .  Unwarranted or unwanted forces encounter natural resistance .  Humans learn to control their conscious state as they acquire maturity .  Natural repressions grow out of an understanding of the need for them .  But humans are not satiated with pragmatic self orientation .  They are easily misled by the perceived nature of their unconscious state .  The perfection orientation of Adolf ****** gives a stark example of an institutionalization of one of these warped images .
World religions also are often abortive of individual aspiration . Of course more often than not their impetus factors seem at least partially acceptable .
Practicality dictates that humans be self orientated in order to achieve their optimum state , but what is self orientation ?  Humans exist in both a conscious and unconscious state .  Individually we all perform many subconscious activities on an inadvertent level .  Although many of them are autonomic defenses we can exercise control and attempt psychic clarity .  
Actually repression is something that each and every individual must put down for themselves .  Although social expedience creates an environment that is conducive to itself , individuals have an innate need to repress certain of their psychic phenomena whether they are created by their environment or well from within .
onlylovepoetry Apr 2018
zelle ma belle

(zelle is an interbank system for sending cash in an instant to someone else’s bank account)

sent her an unexpected $250,
at 4:00am, of course,
a check-plus for her life,
because she revel reviews her day at school,
as special person day, teaches them well, and
anointed, appointed unsolicited confirmation by them
“as part of our family”
how they crave her body, her touch, at scary movie parts,
her kitchens diner size menu,
her refusal to ever disappoint,
her candy drawer supreme,
her crayon color visions which they execute,
her zen sense of their moods,
and for me,
for calling them without hesitation
my grandchildren

indeed more here hers than mine
she asks me why the $$ and poet doesn’t lie
but thinks quick at 7:30 am while bed prone,
“you won Nana of the Day award”
the only (grandparent) on the floor with two kids in her lap,
for the magic show,
all the rest,
benched, chattingly adultry things


she thinks on it and says
“ok, I accept!”

p.s. also,  I have yet to inform her of the (my) elimination of a
crystal champagne flute while doing my manly cleanup  from Friday night lights dinner pink champagne celebrating  
le weekend’s arrival


olp
Escence May 2015
I was struck
on the day of extinction
I was confused
on the day of elimination
the seashells rung
in it's glorious tune
but it seems our opponent
is not immune
So we win the battle
because of the seashells
joyous rattle
It's getting hard in the RSA
even those who don't get paid have to pay
the insane tolls
the cops on petrol
just to get on there way
you under stand what I say
the difrance between we and they we have hi-def blue ray they have it hard desray it means destiny I don't have a plan to get a fan or a groupie I know you probably thinking this ****** mind is doodie but its my duty to make things know especially the things that aren't shown on tv like corruption or so called special selection and the detention of those who don't deserve it because you deserve it

I'm on buzz cause of this love I'm getting from my team it feels like a dream I'll rise to the top like cream but with skin like milk chocolate my imagination flows like water out of a facet, tap I've got talent in the rap and my connection to my soul  is uncapped
I'm just warming up like a kettle I'm like a precise metal in fact I'm talent in its purest form I should be on cable or at least the periodic table but registered as unstable because I'm on a hair trigger jack rabbit with my bad habits like talking about things I don't know then asking   About things I don't know you know making the unknown known remember my curiosity  been burning like an ember

I truly fear for our women ashamed of the cards they have been given or delt and the blows that have been felt on their surface and in their core these stories I hear just leave my heart sore I need to flyaway on the broken wings of my generation with the help of some recreation  to stop the exploitation of those who don't know better not because they could have Learnt better but been taught better you can call It third world problems I call it mankind problems because it affects us all and we're all one after all ilitaration is a mews helps send across my point of view so light bulbs flash ding an idea that's was a great example of onomatapia  it's a process of elimination in a  copulative form these thoughts and ties are more messy  then the perfect storm but I plan to help heal our nation not by confrontation but cooperation

I hope these notions stay in your mind like the blank slate sticks with the blind and the peace with the deaf order In the hands of the ref or better yet Organised chaos,
Because that's realistic But we didnt request it, It's like a pay off  see there I changed the rhyme scheme From aabb.Too abba It's redundant to say But it helps me see,
my potential so I know my credentials and knowing you is essential to keep your heart full your flaws on tour don't think it  trifle but gargantuan like Rabelais' book but most wouldn't know his literature or calling any man sir  but they know facebook I hope these notions stay in your mind like the blank slate sticks with the blind and the peace with the deaf by now I'd  think you'd like to be deaf tired of my voice but I have no choice but to make a statement about what my emotional state is I hope these notions stay in your mind like the blank slate sticks with the blind and the peace with the deaf the name of this poem is emotional theft
This is a slam spoken word poem also, it was my first attempt at one 2011 February 7
I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                              But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
                        Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                          Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

    The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.
Elizabeth Ann Apr 2013
10 Years of Discretion
9 Months of Persecution
8 Semesters of Imitation
7 Weeks of Affliction
6 Days of Temptation
5 Hours of drug Consumption
4 Minutes of thought Malfunction
3 Moments of Desperation
2 Seconds until Eradication
1 Life of Lacrimation
jeffrey conyers Nov 2012
To hear a woman speaks.
All men wants the same thing.
Which might be true.
Which might not be true.
It just depends on the woman's view.

No two men acts the same in trying to wi you.
Their game of chase is a little different.

But don't give them the clues of ways to do it.
Then they re-arrange the schemes to get there.

Listen to when a woman speaks.
They wants a one woman man.
Even the best player can be award winning actor.

They wants a faithful man.
Well, we know that can be temporary too.

Just keeping give clues on ways to get to you.
Then use the process of elimination rule.
A tool that can benefit you.
When you gotten rid of the fools.

Now, you have a few woman.
That loves to be used.
They fall for some hard and quick.
Then pretend they gotten taken advantage of.

When they didn't realize men plans on using the scheme
see a fool use a fool.
You: have the wounds everyone wants to kiss and love
You: recognize you're only important if you're pretty, dead, and or just so happen to " beautifully "  borderline either at any given time.
you :let people satiate their misplaced guilt and empathy.
let them coin you a case of charity,
a stigmata *******,
Is it building or belittling to be someones muse?...
If your only inspirational because you're looked upon as broken or used?
For those among us who lived by the rules,
Lived frugal lives of *****-scratching desperation;
For those who sustained a zombie-like state for 30 or 40 years,
For these few, our lucky few—
We bequeath an interactive Life-Alert emergency dog tag,
Or better still a dog, a colossal pet beast,
A humongous Harlequin Dane to feed,
For that matter, why not buy a few new cars before you die?
Your home mortgage is, after all, dead and buried.
We gave you senior-citizen rates for water, gas & electricity—
“The Big 3,” as they are known in certain Gasoline Alley-retro
Neighborhoods among us,
Our parishes and boroughs.
All this and more, had you lived small,
Had you played by the rules for Smurfs & Serfs.

We leave you the chance to treat your grandkids
Like Santa’s A-List clientele,
“Good ‘ol Grampa,” they’ll recollect fondly,
“Sweet Grammy Strunzo, they will sigh.
What more could you want in retirement?

You’ve enabled another generation of deadbeat grandparents,
And now you’re next in line for the ice floe,
To be taken away while still alive,
Still hunched over and wheezing,
On a midnight sleigh ride,
Your son, pulling the proverbial Eskimo sled,
Down to some random Arctic shore,
Placing you gently on the ice floe.
Your son; your boy--
A true chip off the igloo, so to speak.
He leaves you on the ice floe,
Remembering not to leave the sled,
The proverbial Sled of Abbandono,
The one never left behind,
As it would be needed again,
Why not a home in storage while we wait?
The family will surely need it sometime down the line.

A dignified death?
Who can afford one these days?
The question answers itself:
You are John Goodman in “The Big Lebowski.”
You opt for an empty 2-lb can of Folgers.
You know: "The best part of waking up, is Folger's in your cup!"
That useless mnemonic taught us by “Mad Men.”
Slogans and theme songs imbibe us.

Zombie accouterments,
Provided by America’s Ruling Class.
Thank you Lewis H. Lapham for giving it to us straight.
Why not go with the aluminum Folgers can?
Rather than spend the $300.00 that mook funeral director
Tries to shame you into coughing up,
For the economy-class “Legacy Urn.”
An old seduction:  Madison Avenue’s Gift of Shame.
Does your **** smell?” asks a sultry voice,
Igniting a carpet bomb across the 20-45 female cohort,
2 billion pathetically insecure women,
Spending collectively $10 billion each year—
Still a lot of money, unless it’s a 2013
Variation on an early 1930s Germany theme;
The future we’ve created;
The future we deserve.

Now a wheelbarrow load of paper currency,
Scarcely buy a loaf of bread.
Even if you’re lucky enough to make it,
Back to your cave alive,
After shopping to survive.
Women spend $10 billion a year for worry-free *****.
I don’t read The Wall Street Journal either,
But I’m pretty **** sure,
That “The Feminine Hygiene Division”
Continues to hold a corner office, at
Fear of Shame Corporate Headquarters.
Eventually, FDS will go the way of the weekly ******.
Meanwhile, in God & vaginal deodorant we trust,
Something you buy just to make sure,
Just in case the *** Gods send you a gift.
Some 30-year old **** buddy,
Some linguistically gifted man or woman,
Some he or she who actually enjoys eating your junk:
“Oh Woman, thy name is frailty.”
“Oh Man, thou art a Woman.”
“Oh Art is for Carney in “Harry & Tonto,”
Popping the question: “Dignity in Old Age?”
Will it too, go the way of the weekly ******?
It is pointless to speculate.
Mouthwash--Roll-on antiperspirants--Depends.
Things our primitive ancestors did without,
Playing it safe on the dry savannah,
Where the last 3 drops evaporate in an instant,
Rather than go down your pants,
No matter how much you wiggle & dance.
Think about it!

Think cemeteries, my Geezer friends.
Of course, your first thought is
How nice it would be, laid to rest
In the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.
Born a ******. Died a ******. Laid in the grave?
Or Père Lachaise,
Within a stone’s throw of Jim Morrison--
Lying impudently,
Embraced, held close by loving soil,
Caressed, held close by a Jack Daniels-laced mud pie.
Or, with Ulysses S. Grant, giving new life to the quandary:
Who else is buried in the freaking tomb?
Bury my heart with Abraham in Springfield.
Enshrine my body in the Taj Mahal,
Build for me a pyramid, says Busta Cheops.

Something simple, perhaps, like yourself.
Or, like our old partner in crime:
Lee Harvey, in death, achieving the soul of brevity,
Like Cher and Madonna a one-name celebrity,
A simple yet obscure grave stone carving:  OSWALD.
Perhaps a burial at sea? All the old salts like to go there.
Your corpse wrapped in white duct/duck tape,
Still frozen after months of West Pac naval maneuvers,
The CO complying with the Department of the Navy Operations Manual,
Offering this service on « An operations-permitting basis, »
About as much latitude given any would-be Ahab,
Shortlisted for Command-at-sea.
So your body is literally frozen stiff,
Frozen solid for six months packed,
Spooned between 50-lb sacks of green beans & carrots.
Deep down in the deep freeze,
Within the Deep Freeze :
The ship’s storekeeper has a cryogenic *******
Deep down in his private sanctuary,
Privacy in the bowels of the ship.
While up on deck you slide smoothly down the pine plank,
Old Glory billowing in the sea breeze,
Emptying you out into the great abyss of
Some random forlorn ocean.

Perhaps you are a ******* lunatic?
Maybe you likee—Shut the **** up, Queequeg !
Perhaps you want a variation on the burial-at-sea option ?
Here’s mine, as presently set down in print,
Lawyer-prepared, notarized and filed at the Court of the Grand Vizier,
Copies of same in safe deposit boxes,
One of many benefits Chase offers free to disabled Vets,
Demonstrating, again, my zombie-like allegiance to the rules.
But I digress.
« The true measure of one’s life »
Said most often by those we leave behind,
Is the wealth—if any—we leave behind.
The fact that we cling to bank accounts,
Bank safe deposit boxes,
Legal aide & real estate,
Insurance, and/or cash . . .
Just emphasizes the foregone conclusion,
For those who followed the rules.
Those of us living frugally,
Sustaining the zombie trance all these years.
You can jazz it up—go ahead, call it your « Work Ethic. »
But you might want to hesitate before you celebrate
Your unimpeachable character & patriotism.

What is the root of Max Weber’s WORK ETHIC concept?
‘Tis one’s grossly misplaced, misguided, & misspent neurosis.
Unmasked, shown vulnerably pink & naked, at last.
Truth is: The harder we work, the more we lay bare
The Third World Hunger in our souls.
But again, I digress.  Variation on a Theme :
At death my body is quick-frozen.
Then dismembered, then ground down
To the consistency of water-injected hamburger,
Meat further frozen and Fedex-ed to San Diego,
Home of our beloved Pacific Fleet.
Stowed in a floating Deep Freeze where glazed storekeepers
Sate the lecherous Commissary Officer,
Aboard some soon-to-be underway—
Underway: The Only Way
Echo the Old Salts, a moribund Greek Chorus
Goofing still on the burial-at-sea concept.

Underway to that sacred specific spot,
Let's call it The Golden Shellback,
Where the Equator intersects,
Crosses perpendicular,
The International Dateline,
Where my defrosted corpse nuggets,
Are now sprinkled over the sea,
While Ray Charles sings his snarky
Child Support & Alimony
His voice blasting out the 1MC,
She’s eating steak.  I’m eating baloney.
Ray is the voice of disgruntlement,
Palpable and snide in the trade winds,
Perhaps the lost chord everyone has been looking for:
Laughing till we cry at ourselves,
Our small corpse kernels, chum for sharks.

In a nutshell—being the crazy *******’ve come to love-
Chop me up and feed me to the Orcas,
Just do it ! NIKE!
That’s right, a $commercial right in the middle of a ******* poem!
Do it where the Equator crosses the Dateline :
A sailors’ sacred vortex: isn’t it ?
Wouldn’t you say, Shipmates, one and all?
I’m talking Conrad’s Marlow, here, man!
Call me Ishmael or Queequeg.
Thor Heyerdahl or Tristan Jones,
Bogart’s Queeq & Ensign Pulver,
Wayward sailors, one and all.
And me, of course, aboard the one ride I could not miss,
Even if it means my Amusement Park pass expires.
Ceremony at sea ?
Absolutely vital, I suppose,
Given the monotony and routine,
Of the ship’s relentlessly vacant seascape.
« There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea,
And I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates. «
So said James Russell Lowell,
One of the so-called Fireside Poets,
With Longfellow and Bryant,
Whittier, the Quaker and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,
19th Century American hipsters, one and all.

Then there’s CREMATION,
A low-cost option unavailable to practicing Jews.
« Ashes to ashes »  remains its simplest definition.
LOW-COST remains its operant phrase & universal appeal.
No Deed to a 2by6by6 foot plot of real estate,
Paid for in advance for perpetuity—
Although I suggest reading the fine print—
Our grass--once maintained by Japanese gardeners--
Now a lost art in Southern California,
Now that little Tokyo's finest no longer
Cut, edge & manicure, transform our lawns
Into a Bonsai ornamental wonderland.
Today illegal/legal Mexicans employing
More of a subtropical slash & burn technique.

Cremation : no chunk of marble,
No sandstone, wood or cardboard marker,
Plus the cost of engraving and site installation.
Quoth the children: "****, you’re talking $30K to
Put the old ****** in the ground? Cheap **** never
Gave me $30K for college, let alone a house down payment.
What’s my low-cost, legitimate disposal going to run me?"

CREMATION : they burn your corpse in Auschwitz ovens.
You are reduced to a few pounds of cigar ash.
Now the funeral industry catches you with your **** out.
You must (1) pay to have your ashes stored,
Or (2) take them away in a gilded crate that,
Again, you must pay for.
So you slide into Walter Sobjak,
The Dude’s principal amigo,
And bowling partner in the
Brothers Coen masterpiece: The Big Lebowski.
You head to the nearest Safeway for a 2-lb can of Folgers.
And while we’re on the subject of cremation & the Jews,
Think for a moment on the horror of The Holocaust:
Dispossessed & utterly destroyed, one last indignity:
Corpses disposed of by cremation,
For Jews, an utterly unacceptable burial rite.
Now before we leave Mr. Sobjak,
Who is, as you know, a deeply disturbed Vietnam vet,
Who settles bowling alley protocol disputations,
By brandishing, by threatening the weak-minded,
With a loaded piece, the same piece John Turturro—
Stealing the movie as usual, this time as Jesus Quintana—
Bragging how he will stick it up Walter’s culo,
Pulling the trigger until it goes: Click-Click-Click!
Terrestrial burial or cremation?
For me:  Burial at Sea:
Slice me, dice me into shark food.

Or maybe something a la Werner von Braun:
Your dead meat shot out into space;
A personal space probe & voyager,
A trajectory of one’s own choosing?

Oh hell, why not skip right down to the nitty gritty bottom line?
Current technology: to wit, your entire life record,
Your body and history digitized & downloaded
To a Zip Drive the size of the average *******,
A data disc then Fedex-ed anywhere in the galaxy,
Including exotic burial alternatives,
Like some Martian Kilimanjaro,
Where the tiger stalks above the clouds,
Nary a one with a freaking clue that can explain
Just what the cat was doing up so high in the first place.
Or, better still, inside a Sherpa’s ***** pack,
A pocket imbued with the same Yak dung,
Tenzing Norgay massages daily into his *******,
Defending the Free World against Communism & crotch rot.
(Forgive me: I am a child of the Cold War.)
Why not? Your life & death moments
Zapped into a Zip Drive, bytes and bits,
Submicroscopic and sublime.
So easy to delete, should your genetic subgroup
Be targeted for elimination.
About now you begin to realize that
A two-pound aluminum Folgers can
Is not such a bad idea.
No matter; the future is unpersons,
The Ministry of Information will in charge.
The People of Fort Meade--those wacky surveillance folks--
Cloistered in the rolling hills of Anne Arundel County.
That’s who will be calling the shots,
Picking the spots from now on.
Welcome to Cyber Command.
Say hello to Big Brother.
Say “GOOD-BYE PRIVACY.”

Meanwhile, you’re spending most of your time
Fretting ‘bout your last rites--if any—
Burial plots on land and sea, & other options,
Such as whether or not to go with the
Concrete outer casket,
Whether or not you prefer a Joe Cocker,
Leon Russell or Ray Charles 3-D hologram
Singing at your memorial service.
While I am fish food for the Golden Shellbacks,
I am a fine young son of Neptune,
We are Old Salts, one and all,
Buried or burned or shot into space odysseys,
Or digitized on a data disc the size of
An average human *******.
Snap outta it, Einstein!
Like everyone else,
You’ve been fooled again.
Robert Jackson Feb 2010
Please forgive my hesitation
at instigation of flirtation.
Did I ensure my elimination?
My romantic assassination?
I'll gladly partake in any placation,
for any chance of indoctrination
to the centralization of your concentration.
An operation of admiration.
A correlation of inflammation.
Your gravitation brings animation,
exclamation and elongation.
My specialization is duration.
Not to hint at a connotation,
but I feel a certain *******
by an obligation to a certain destination
where your presentation gives me restoration.
Petrification?
Total mind evacuation?
Would clarification bring fascination?
Stimulation!
Salivation!
Gratification!
Insinuation of fornication?
A simple salutation to syncopation.
Would a single bright carnation
be enough of a motivation,
for a two way relocation?
Would poetic recitation
be sufficient lubrication
for collaboration?
A consolidation?
Or an exacerbation of isolation?
Please hold no reservation,
I've only got one aspiration.
To achieve a higher elevation;
by means of inhalation,
or a certain recreation
involving a bit of perspiration
along with physical communication.
Does this seem such a bad situation?
Or are you ready for pure elation?
“I may be grown up but I’m only seventeen.”
The faded blue chairs were in rows, as could be expected. The building was old and the air was littered with dust; just like you would expect. The light shimmied through the draperies and tapestries and slithered across the floor in tiny slits that cut the room into pieces. The dark worn floors boasted years of scuffs and scratches. They were no longer mahogany for they were nearly black with age and dirt. The whole place was frozen in time. Even the air was reminiscent of years gone by. When you walked in you could expect to find memories nestled in corners or peeping out from one of the many books strewn around. The place breathed nostalgic fumes. Some might have called it “stale,” but many others would prefer to call it “alluring” or “curious.”

This was not her case. The door ****** the life out of the place as it slammed shut. The reverberations could be felt throughout the entire structure. Her anger fueled her along at a violent pace, sending chills up the drapes and swirling the dust into tornadoes of chaos. The floorboards rumbled and squealed in sheer terror under her feet. If you were here you would likely have tread softly and listened carefully just because you hoped the place was talking to you. But since this is her story and not yours, that is not the case.
She threw her body into the nearest chair and the force almost sent her backwards. The girl and the chair hung in time for a single moment, teetering on the edge of balance, but nothing happened. She kicked her feet up on to the chair in front of her out of utter disrespect.

Each breath that she blew carried venomous thought. Every air molecule expelled from her nose was laced with despise until it fell to the floor, devoid of life. You could feel the place shuddering with every breath. Or maybe she was shuddering. But it wasn’t important.
The girl let one lonesome anguished tear roll off her face, but since she was too strong for crying, she ****** her body out of the chair with every ounce of hatred she had inside. In one swift motion she swathed her face with her shirt to obscure and erase the tear. She stood there, filtering the air through her shirt, refusing to acknowledge everything the place had to offer. She dropped the weight of her head into her palms and bit her lip against the pain. She pulled her face back only to check the shirt. She knew it would be stained. She knew because every other time before it had been stained. She listened for a moment before she glided across the floor toward the nearest window.
When she finally came to a moment of rest, the place sighed in relief. The dust rested and the floorboards managed to quiet themselves. The drapes relaxed and everything paused again, settling back into a time of long ago. The place embraced her like the wind embraces a leaf. It helped her along gently as she was carried away.

Not wanting to be discovered, and not wanting to overstay her welcome, the girl carefully hid her soul behind the heaviest drape and emptily marched towards the door. She traced her finger along the scorch marks that marred the wood. The scars ran deep, evidencing a strong fire that had ravaged the place years before. The door oozed sympathy as the young girl shared her pain. Her heartbeat pounded out her sadness and resounded through the door and back to her. She clutched the **** in her hand and pushed it open. She slid through to the outside. She did not look over her shoulder. She did not carry a glimpse of hope within her. The flame in her heart was extinguished with the closing click of the door. She was outside. She watched as the place got smaller as she walked away.

His name was Devlin. “Dev” for short. It could’ve been “Devil.” It should have been “Devil.” He was the one who called the shots. This was his game; his rules. She was just a player who could be benched at any minute; suspended from the league in the blink of an eye. He knew the world. He had been learning it for years. As if the world was something that could be learned; that could be acquired. He missed the most important lesson for he never learned how to love. He had mastered affection and words spilled off his lips like honey. But love was not yet something he had come to possess.

Regardless of his material possessions, Dev knew he was missing something. He didn’t know what it was or how it could be acquired, or if it could be acquired. He only knew that the gaping black hole inside him was consuming him. There was no fulfilling this insatiable hunger. There seemed to be no solution. Only temporary fixes could easy the longing but with every dose the hole grew deeper.

           She too, knew that beneath his smile there was blackness. Not emptiness. Just blackness. There was no value, no gradation. No. There was nothing to hold on to, nothing to hope for. She would have enough black to cover the entire world if she had wanted to paint. But she was honestly looking to survive.


                Time had gone by, but only by the measure of light. Time had not elapsed to heal her wounds. She had covered miles on the feet of one thought. She had traversed only into one idea during her journey and yet she had already reached her destination. It was easy to fall to your subconscious when your body was tattered. When she stepped through the threshold she almost imagined the place. But she stopped herself because she didn’t want to take the chance of contaminating it.

                Her eyes were closing and the soft carpet looking appealing in all its graying and deterioration. The couch and bed looked inviting but that was suicide. She was fighting the urge. She had too. She had tried to purge her mind but one insignificant monstrous thought plagued her. “Don’t go to sleep until I get back.” Her eyes lingered closed for a moment. How beautiful and welcoming this blackness was. It was gentle and comforting. Her eyes jumped open. How long had they been closed? Surely no more than a few minutes. Fate laughed in her face once again. “I told you: Don’t get to sleep until I get back.”
                The first one was the most painful. Even though her eyes were blurred from pain she could still see the look in his eyes. She had to look. The simple thought of closing her eyes would earn her several more. She clutched the threadbare carpet with all the dignity she could muster and stood like a soldier before a firing squad. Every wince squeezed the tears in her eyes closer and closer to escape, but she held on through the miserable pain. It wasn’t even his hands that hurt anymore. No, it was the iron, or the bat, or even the brick that hurt. When it was his hands, he sympathized with the contortions of her body. He felt her pain. When it was some other object, there was distance between them. Six, five, four, three, two… She could time the blows. When he wasn’t so angry they came faster, just to put the girl in her place. When he was enraged, they came slower. Each hit was followed by an explanation or justification. “You have to learn the hard way.” or “How dare you get blood on your clothes?” The indignation in his voice made her sick. “Don’t look at me like that!” “I love you.” Over time she had learned to smile over time. To lessen the pain.

                …Her face was burning. Every fiber in her body wrenched with pain. Every breath brought tears to her eyes. The shaking was uncontrollable. She never should
have fallen asleep…

                You see on the inside he was just a child who never knew love. But that was her job. To love him. He was one of those “monsters,” or rather a vortex, something to be awed and feared. A display of powerful destruction. But that was the point. He was ******* up everything good while furthering his own self-destruction. He would eventually collapse in on himself. It was inevitable. It was not a matter of time. It was not some probability that fate would determine. It was not plausible to think, no matter what length of time you were thinking for, that time could, and would, heal all wounds. This was not something that would fade into the background and blend into a dull gray. This was not something that could be fixed by a miracle of God. There was no twelve step program with guaranteed results. The only thing that could happen was the elimination of time. If this happened, then there could be change.  


                She had figured it out some time ago. A long while back before she knew the place. The only answer was destruction. You might even call it ******. But since it involved no bloodshed or munitions or hatred, it seemed to be a good idea. Even the victim was ultimately willing to go through with it. The only factor stopping the girl was love. Her love for him. She did love him. She truly and justly loved him. She loved everything about him. She loved him for chaos and instability. The only solution was to destroy time. Without time, there is no way to measure. There is no structure. There are no rules. The only structure is what you make in your mind. That was the easiest way to escape, the easiest way to ignore the pain, to ignore the love.        


                  However much she thought about it, she never thought about it enough. The hours she spent on the floor in utter stillness were useless. When her breath was shallow enough, she nearly died. Her shirt was stained with blood. It was severed from her hip to her elbow. Her face was swollen purple and blue. Four of her ribs were shattered. Her left ankle was swollen. Her eyes were sealed shut by dried tears. Her lips were pale and chapped. She could not breathe out of her nose. It was filled with blood. Her pants were a rolled in a crumpled ****** mess several feet away from her. Her legs were patched with bruises. Her fingernails had blood under them.


This was love.


Eventually. Not relative to time. Not relative to the beating, but relative to her. She crawled over to her pants and began to restore her dignity until a foot crashed down upon her hand, jarring her body into a fetal position on the floor. She forced her eyes to stare at her hand turning from pink to white to purple. She hung her head in shame and hoped for mercy or forgiveness. The crushing weight of the foot began to ease the slightest bit. “You didn’t learn. You never do.” She stood perfectly still, waiting. The foot lifted. He pulled her to her feet and bestowed a kiss upon her forehead. “That’s why I am here: To teach you.” He took the crumpled pants from the floor and removed her bloodied shirt. Then with **** of his head he motioned to the floor. “You will learn the meaning of humble today.” She lay back down and tried to glean warmth from the carpet. She was cold. Desperately cold.
Nigel Morgan Aug 2013
It’s nearly two in the morning and the place is finally quiet. I can’t do early mornings like I reckon he does. Even a half-past nine start is difficult for me. So it has be this way round. I called Mum tonight and she was her wonderful, always supportive self, but I hear through the ‘you’ve done so well to get on this course’ stuff and imagine her at her desk working late with a pile of papers waiting to be considered for Chemistry Now, the journal she edits. I love her study and one day I shall have one myself, but with a piano and scores and recordings on floor to ceiling shelves . . . and poetry and art books. I have to have these he said when, as my tutorial came to a close, he apologised for not being able to lend me a book of poems he’d thought of. He had so many books and scores piled on the floor, his bed and on his table. He must have filled his car with them. And we talked about the necessity of reading and how words can form music. Pilar, she’s from Tel Haviv, was with me and I could tell she questioned this poetry business – he won’t meet with any of us on our own, all this fall out from the Michel Brewer business I suppose.

This idea that music is a poetic art seems exactly right to me. Nobody had ever pointed this out before. He said, ask yourself what books and scores would be on the shelves of a composer you love. Go on, choose a composer and imagine. Another fruitless exercise, whispered Pilar, who has been my shadow all week. I thought of Messiaen whose music has finally got to me – it was hearing that piece La Columbe. He asked Joanna MacGregor to play it for us. I was knocked sideways by this music, and what’s more it’s been there in my head ever since. I just wanted to get my hands on it. Those final two chords . . . So, thinking of Messiaen’s library I thought of the titles of his music that I’d come across. Field Guides to birds of course, lots of theology, Shakespeare (his father translated the Bard), the poetry and plays of the symbolists (I learnt this week that he’d been given the score of Debussy’s Pelleas and Melisande for his twelfth birthday) . . . Yes, that library thing was a good exercise, a mind-expanding exercise. When I think of my books and the scores I own I’m ashamed . . . the last book I read? I tried to read something edifying on my Kindle on the train down, but gave up and read Will Self instead. I don’t know when I last read a score other than my own.

I discovered he was a poet. There’s an eBook collection mentioned on his website. Words for Music. Rather sweet to have a relative (wife / sister?)  as a collaborator. I downloaded it from Amazon and thought her poems were very straight and to the point. No mystery or abstraction, just plain words that sounded well together. His poetry mind you was a little different. Softer, gentler like he is.  In class he doesn’t say much, but if you question him on his own you inevitably get more than the answer you expect.  

There was this poem he’d set for chamber choir. It reads like captions for a series of photographs. It’s about a landscape, a walk in a winter landscape, a kind of secular stations of the cross, and it seems so very intimate, specially the last stanza.

Having climbed over
The plantation wall
Your freckled face
Pale with the touch
Of cold fingers
In the damp silence
Listening to each other breathe
The mist returns


He’s living in one of the estate houses, the last one in a row of six. It’s empty but for one bedroom which he’s turned into a study. I suppose he uses the kitchen and there’s probably a bedroom where he keeps his cases and clothes. In his study there is just a bed, a large table with a portable drawing board, a chair, a radio/CD, his guitar and there’s a notice board. He got out a couple of folding chairs for Pilar and I and pulled them up to the table.

Pilar said later his table and notice board were like a map of himself. It contained all these things that speak about who he is, this composer who is not in the textbooks and you can’t buy on CD. He didn’t give us the 4-page CV we got from our previous tutor. There was his blue, spiral-bound notebook, with its daily chord, a bunch of letters, books of course, pens and pencils, sheets of graph and manuscript paper filled with writing and drawings and music in different inks. There was a CD of the Hindemith Viola Sonatas and a box set of George Benjamin’s latest opera and some miniature scores – mostly Bach. A small vase of flowers was perilously placed at a corner . . . and pinned to his notice board, a blue origami bird.

But it was the photographs that fascinated me, some in small frames, others on his notice board, the board resting on the table and against the wall. There were black and white photos of small children, a mix of boys and girls, colour shots of seascapes and landscapes, a curious group of what appeared to be marks in the sand. There was a tiny white-washed cottage, and several of the same young woman. She is quite compelling to look at. She wears glasses, has very curly hair and a nice figure. She looks quiet and gentle too. In one photo she’s standing on a pebbly beach in a dress and black footless tights – I have a feeling it’s Aldeburgh. There’s a portrait too, a very close-up. She’s wearing a blue scarf round her hair. She has freckles, so then I knew she was probably the person in the poem . . .

I’ve thought of Joel a little this week, usually when I finally get to bed.  I shut my eyes and think of him kissing me after we’d been out to lunch before he left for Canada. We’d experimented a little, being intimate that is, but for me I’m not ready for all that just now; nice to be close to someone though, someone who struggles with being in a group as I do. I prefer the company of one, and for here Pilar will do, although she’s keen on the Norwegian, Jesper.

Today it was all about Pitch. To our surprise the session started with a really tough analysis of a duo by Elliott Carter, who taught here in the 1960s. He had brought all these sketches, from the Paul Sacher Archive, pages of them, all these rows and abstracts and workings out, then different attempts to write to the same section. You know, I’d never seen a composer’s workings out before. My teacher at uni had no time for what she called the value of process (what he calls poiesis). It was the finished piece that mattered, how you got there was irrelevant and entirely your business and no one else’s. So I had plenty of criticism but no help with process. It seems like this pre-composition, the preparing to compose is just so necessary, so important. Music is not, he said, radio in the head. You can’t just turn it on at will. You have to go out and find it, detect it, piece it together. It’s there, and you’ll know it when you find it.

So it’s really difficult now sitting here with the beginnings of a composition in front of me not to think about what was revealed today, and want to try it myself. And here was a composer who was willing to share what he did, what he knew others did, and was able to show us how it mattered. Those sheets on his desk – I realise now they were his pre-composition, part of the process, this building up of knowledge about the music you were going to write, only you had to find it first.

The analysis he put together of Carter’s Fantasy Duo was like nothing I’d experienced before because it was not sitting back and taking it, it was doing it. It became ours, and if you weren’t on your toes you’d look such a fool. Everything was done at breakneck speed. We had to sing all the material as it appeared on the board. He got us to pre-empt Carter’s own workings, speculate on how a passage might be formed. I realised that a piece could just go so many different ways, and Carter would, almost by a process of elimination choose one, stick to it, and then, as the process moved on, reject it! Then, the guys from the Composers Ensemble played it, and because we’d been so involved for nearly an hour in all this pre-composition, the experience of listening was like eating newly-baked bread.  There was a taste to it.

After the break we had to make our own duos for flute and clarinet with a four note series derived from the divisions of a tritone. It wasn’t so much a theme but a series of pitch objects and we relentlessly brainstormed its possibilities. We did all the usual things, but it was when we started to look beyond inversion and transposition. There is all this stuff from mathematical and symbolic formulas that I could see at last how compelling such working out, such investigation could be . . . and we’re only dealing with pitch! I loved the story he told about Alexander Goehr and his landlady’s piano, all this insistence on the internalizing of things, on the power of patterns (and unpatterns), and the benefit and value of musical memory, which he reckoned so many of us had already denied by only using computer systems to compose.

Keep the pen moving on the page, he said; don’t let your thoughts come to a standstill. If there isn’t a note there may be a word or even an object, a sketch, but do something. The time for dreaming or contemplation is when you are walking, washing up, cleaning the house, gardening. Walk the garden, go look at the river, and let the mind play. But at your desk you should work, and work means writing even though what you do may end in the bin. You will have something to show for all that thought and invention, that intense listening and imagining.
sheloveswords Dec 2013
You feel you're invincible
being that your sanity is uncontrollable
strolling around with your shoulders past the birds
past the planes
your ignorance succeeds in innumerable ways
your sight is weak
your mind is enable to capture
it's buried under life's adversities and Earth's pleasure
you don't know when to stop so you flood yourself
until you're lame at your ankles
and paralyzed in your emotions

you wend through life this way
well you try
stuck in misery
with no lane to merge
frustration is your best friend
a human is impossible and
incapable of the acceptance
your belittlement draws mankind away
no one wants to attend a pity party
unless their accompanied to your VIP
and to reserve
you are the one to RSVP

Enlighten heads will stray away
pessimism is a curse
rapidly spread by the weak
you have distress and frustration
suppressed
strangled screams
holds your eyelids open at night
deliberations controls your emotions
controls your feet
throughout the day
you are terrified of tangibility
so you indulge yourself excessively
burying your true identity
becoming irritable when bearing your sober mind

if only you knew how divine you are
you would grow to love yourself
in ways incompetent of how you could love so hard
look yourself in your eyes
find who you are
even if you have to savagely search
you'll see the soul people has grown to
love so much
you'll notice your beauty
that covers endless realms
or your strength that could hurl a boulder
No one can help you discover
your destiny
it's your journey you'll have to make alone
but during the expedition and constant footsteps
the process of elimination could be your guide

find your inner child
it can help your prevail that's
where you once had happiness
your joy was established there
because if you continue the silencing
of your heart's cries and
your soul's screams
you'll live a life analogous to hell
and that is

a nightmare's worst dream



                Copy Right 2014
                     ©Patty Ann
The room is full of you!—As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!—

Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed
Each other room’s dear personality.
The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,—
The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death—
Has strangled that habitual breath of home
Whose expiration leaves all houses dead;
And wheresoe’er I look is hideous change.
Save here.  Here ’twas as if a ****-choked gate
Had opened at my touch, and I had stepped
Into some long-forgot, enchanted, strange,
Sweet garden of a thousand years ago
And suddenly thought, “I have been here before!”

You are not here.  I know that you are gone,
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;
If I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes
Would kiss me from the door.—So short a time
To teach my life its transposition to
This difficult and unaccustomed key!—
The room is as you left it; your last touch—
A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself
As saintly—hallows now each simple thing;
Hallows and glorifies, and glows between
The dust’s grey fingers like a shielded light.

There is your book, just as you laid it down,
Face to the table,—I cannot believe
That you are gone!—Just then it seemed to me
You must be here.  I almost laughed to think
How like reality the dream had been;
Yet knew before I laughed, and so was still.
That book, outspread, just as you laid it down!
Perhaps you thought, “I wonder what comes next,
And whether this or this will be the end”;
So rose, and left it, thinking to return.

Perhaps that chair, when you arose and passed
Out of the room, rocked silently a while
Ere it again was still. When you were gone
Forever from the room, perhaps that chair,
Stirred by your movement, rocked a little while,
Silently, to and fro. . .

And here are the last words your fingers wrote,
Scrawled in broad characters across a page
In this brown book I gave you. Here your hand,
Guiding your rapid pen, moved up and down.
Here with a looping knot you crossed a “t”,
And here another like it, just beyond
These two eccentric “e’s”.  You were so small,
And wrote so brave a hand!
                         How strange it seems
That of all words these are the words you chose!
And yet a simple choice; you did not know
You would not write again.  If you had known—
But then, it does not matter,—and indeed
If you had known there was so little time
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
And this page would be empty, and some phrase
Other than this would hold my wonder now.
Yet, since you could not know, and it befell
That these are the last words your fingers wrote,
There is a dignity some might not see
In this, “I picked the first sweet-pea to-day.”
To-day!  Was there an opening bud beside it
You left until to-morrow?—O my love,
The things that withered,—and you came not back!
That day you filled this circle of my arms
That now is empty.  (O my empty life!)
That day—that day you picked the first sweet-pea,—
And brought it in to show me!  I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see
And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.
(You were the fairest thing God ever made,
I think.)  And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew.  (Beloved hands!
Somehow I cannot seem to see them still.
Somehow I cannot seem to see the dust
In your bright hair.)  What is the need of Heaven
When earth can be so sweet?—If only God
Had let us love,—and show the world the way!
Strange cancellings must ink th’ eternal books
When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right!
That first sweet-pea!  I wonder where it is.
It seems to me I laid it down somewhere,
And yet,—I am not sure. I am not sure,
Even, if it was white or pink; for then
’Twas much like any other flower to me,
Save that it was the first.  I did not know,
Then, that it was the last.  If I had known—
But then, it does not matter.  Strange how few,
After all’s said and done, the things that are
Of moment.
     Few indeed!  When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
“I had you and I have you now no more.”
There, there it dangles,—where’s the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down!  I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!

“I had you and I have you now no more.”

O little words, how can you run so straight
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified?—Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on!  Would God—O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery!  O, let me sleep a while!
Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back
In that sweet summer afternoon with you.
Summer?  ’Tis summer still by the calendar!
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!

We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart.  I had not thought
That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre.  And to-day
The shining strip is rent; the exquisite
Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart
Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled
In the damp earth with you.  I have been torn
In two, and suffer for the rest of me.
What is my life to me?  And what am I
To life,—a ship whose star has guttered out?
A Fear that in the deep night starts awake
Perpetually, to find its senses strained
Against the taut strings of the quivering air,
Awaiting the return of some dread chord?

Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast,—save that contrast’s wall
Is down, and all opposed things flow together
Into a vast monotony, where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms.  What now—what now to me
Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers
That clutter up the world?  You were my song!
Now, let discord scream!  You were my flower!
Now let the world grow weeds!  For I shall not
Plant things above your grave—(the common balm
Of the conventional woe for its own wound!)
Amid sensations rendered negative
By your elimination stands to-day,
Certain, unmixed, the element of grief;
I sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth
With travesties of suffering, nor seek
To effigy its incorporeal bulk
In little wry-faced images of woe.

I cannot call you back; and I desire
No utterance of my immaterial voice.
I cannot even turn my face this way
Or that, and say, “My face is turned to you”;
I know not where you are, I do not know
If Heaven hold you or if earth transmute,
Body and soul, you into earth again;
But this I know:—not for one second’s space
Shall I insult my sight with visionings
Such as the credulous crowd so eager-eyed
Beholds, self-conjured, in the empty air.
Let the world wail!  Let drip its easy tears!
My sorrow shall be dumb!

—What do I say?
God! God!—God pity me!  Am I gone mad
That I should spit upon a rosary?
Am I become so shrunken?  Would to God
I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch
Makes temporal the most enduring grief;
Though it must walk a while, as is its wont,
With wild lamenting!  Would I too might weep
Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths
For its new dead!  Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive.  If all at once
Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!

O God, I see it now, and my sick brain
Staggers and swoons!  How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant—looking over—and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight—

                     *

Ah, I am worn out—I am wearied out—
It is too much—I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep.  Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.
John F McCullagh Jul 2013
If you want to make a profit
(and the morality is grey)
Dehumanize the victim
and you'll be well on your way.
In a country that's divided,
and declining by the hour.
Your sins will be forgiven
by the Autocrats in power.

As, once upon a time,
in our then divided land
Slavery was acceptable
because a black was not a man.
Then black people were possessions
and very few were free.
They knew the lash, they knew the rod,
They knew not dignity.

Now fetuses are parasites-
not considered human beings
Abortion is big business
the cash cow of their dreams
Fifty million have been murdered
with no end on the horizon.
(******, it appears, is acceptable
as long as it's not you dying.)

Someday you'll be old and gray-
and have an awful cough
Please don't be surprised or shocked
if they opt to write you off.

The weak and the disabled,
those feeble minded or not spry
can blame our liberality
when it comes their turn to die.

Eighty years its been since
Adolf ****** rose to power
Little children sang his praises too-
and darkness had it's hour.

Note:**** eugenics were **** Germany's racially based social policies that placed the improvement of the Aryan race through eugenics at the center of Nazis ideology. Those humans were targeted who were identified as "life unworthy of life" (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), including but not limited to the criminal, degenerate, dissident, feeble-minded, homosexual, idle, insane, and the weak, for elimination from the chain of heredity. More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their will, while 70,000 were killed under Action T4, a "euthanasia" program.[1][2]
(They will call it choice until the choice is there's alone)

Funny but many will call me a reactionary racist for my position against abortion but there have been millions of black Americans aborted, just as planned parenthood's founder intended.I would not make all abortions illegal as I believe that I shouldn't legislate morality. I think they should be rare, legal and safe.
I almost don’t want to voice my opinion
because I like staying in the back of the mix
but it’s hard to do.
Straight from the mind, the mouth,
of a transgendered person,
this is honesty.
I know that there are a lot of people going on about the bathroom laws right now.
It’s ridiculous we even have to get to laws for bathrooms.
They’re for
elimination,
but it generally doesn’t stay at that.
Gossip, vomiting, crying, ****, ******, etc. Things you’ll most likely, in this century, find in the walls of bathrooms.
People are posting the meme, about the ******. Trying to mix it in with these laws.
A ******,
who is a man,
and someone who is transgender, don’t fall into the same category, and even if it’s made to better the judgement of hate and redirect the criticism of keeping transgender people in a specific bathroom,
don’t compare.
Because he is a male, he is a ******.
We are not the same.
Now, recently, people are posting about the mass shooting and connecting the two.
Saying how the last thing they want to hear about is how dangerous a transgender person is in bathroom now.
And they’re correct, because it’s always the last thing on my mind. I hate myself, so you don’t have to.
I have enough hate in me for myself so everyone can leave me be, knowing its strong enough.
I don’t want to be me, I don’t want to be like I am and I live with that everyday. I haven’t been able to make peace with myself and love myself, yet.
But I hope I can eventually.
I just wanted to put this out there, so people can see this side of things. From someone who is transgender.
The last thing on my mind in the bathroom is: you.
I do not want contact with anyone in there.
I fear you. I am scared to be there.
I feel threatened. I feel in danger, not you.
You should be ashamed to feel such resentment towards someone you don’t even know, because I am in the one in danger, not you.
I feel ashamed I am afraid of you and that is embarrassing to say,
but I am.
So don’t dare make it about your safety, because you are the last thing on my mind,
I promise you that.
Being misgendered, being *****, being beaten, being murdered, slandered, assaulted, accused, uncertain, hated, dehumanised, alone.
Fear.
These are what I am thinking about when all I have to do is ***, but all I wanted to have to do was get groceries.
Or get McDonald’s, get cat food, my car fixed, an outfit, take my husband lunch, take my daughter to the park, etc.
I have a family I love, very much.
So yeah, you are the last thing on my mind when I just have to use the bathroom, and don’t even want to need to use one in public because I am so afraid for my safety and wondering if this time, is going to be the last time I walk in one and don’t get to go home to my family because of who I am.
I am sure people have reasons to fear what they won’t know or understand,
but understand this.
I know you have your own fears and your own needs and expectations, but so do I.
Don’t fear me, in the bathroom, because my fear is actually greater than yours,
I promise you that.
And honestly, that is the last on my mind, anyway.
**I just have to ***.
Jeremy Betts May 2022
(too long version)

Life indeed pushed me to the edge of the cliffs end but the jump was my decision, no one there could ever be bothered to care enough to even explore the simplest question much less begin thinkin' about askin' what I was thinkin' when I settled on the option I ultimately, on more than one occasion, failed at miserably while attemptin', like the byproduct of rabbits ******' my faults are multiplyin' as my spark goes dark at the same time my shine went dim, not worth restorin' this vessel that sits as decoration in a white trash front lawn deterioratin', startin' from the back end then devourin' the engine

One step forward, two giant leaps back pedalin', that was the general motion of regression, lookin' like I'm plagiarizin' Michael Jackson when he's on stage performin', masterin' that classic moon walkin' he's known for doin', never as smooth as him but you get the picture I'm paintin', losing track of my destination as it began droppin' out of sight behind the horizon, followin' the trail the sun was blazin'

Can't see the forest for the trees and vegetation, could have heard the pre-lumber fallin' if you would only humor me and at least pretend to listen, but that there is somethin' you have zero interest in which is interestin' cause if the past has taught me anythin' about what you find pleasure in it's that you're lovin', above everythin', the chance to keep pointin' out and highlightin' how I'm a terrible human bein', a garbage person but not a man and no CDL license, I'm not pickin' up the trash I'm metaphorically dwellin' in only then to have it pile back up again times ten, ultimately creatin' my own land fill location within, wilfully lettin' recycled misfortune to continue hittin' me on the chin, it's due to inadequate trainin', not for the lack of tryin' to defend

No direction just a lie practiced to perfection too keep 'em from noticin' my state of depression, leave 'em guessin'. But to keep the honesty rollin' in I have a confession, I'd loan you the money to pay attention but you'd never take that good for nothin' offerin' and I ain't even placin' blame, just sayin', I know my position, I'm fully aware I'm on the losin' end of this game of tug-a-war life and I are playin', though I think it's cheatin', countin' cards to ensure a win, gamblin' that I'll give in and fold before noticin' I'm the mark bein' taken, the journey of life is a rigged expedition

What am I doin' besides losin'? Why am I here became the daily question, how do I get out this mess of confusion that's drownin' me to the point of extinction? It's an impossible equation even for a mathematician with years of education, so you know for certain I'm lyin' when, for no good reason, I have a go at answerin'. The slipknot is workin' just as I was expectin', slippin', goin' taunt, slidin' into its final position

I should mention, if you're thinkin' this has taken place solely for attention you're sorely mistaken, you never come to that realization, dodgin' conversation in an attempt to avoid confrontation, leavin' me noticin' there's no one standin' by and extendin' a hand to help and lookin' back there's never been. No one attendin' my lonely execution by decapitation in an effort to stop the spreadin' of harmful misfortune I feed myself, bad for my mental health, a deadly addiction that's become somewhat of a tradition through repetition, turnin' a weapon on myself, worsenin' my condition, that's a fact based observation not an opinion

No resolution in the hard hitting revelation that there's no salvation for someone who's gone and done what I've done and gone on livin' in a web of fear that I first spun for protection but couldn't stop the infestation from gainin' the traction it was needin' for the completion of my complete elimination

Cravin' anythin' real to place my faith in, I'm bein' told the hate and pain I'm bathin' in is of my own creation, I can see the connection as I sit broken down in the intersection of real life and fiction, I've lost control again and once again there's no mulligan. Am I seein' the glass half full or half empty or maybe it's all an illusion regardless of perception? Lost my vision, can't see through the pollution and corruption runnin' rampant with no solution comin', I'm a simpleton so this ***** gettin' confusin', a complete brain malfunction

I've awoken the beast within and just as I was predictin' we instantly began battlin' to the death, fightin' for position and a quicker end to the situation I'm always findin' myself in then findin' out for myself that it's always been my own reflection startin' back in my direction, the ugly inside is finally outwardly projectin', can't even pretend to be my own friend, enough is enough, I'm saying when

Its lurkin' just under the skin, waitin' for the moment to strike and beat me down to nothin'. When will it end? Never I'm guessin'. I'm gonna have to try to put an end to it all myself again, tirin' of the repetition to the point I usually take no action, sometimes due to exhaustion but still just lettin' it all happen like that's what I was plannin' from the beginnin' but that makes about as much sense as quittin' ****** right after the needles insertion or waitin' till after overdosin'

Frustration givin' way to aggravation and aggression leavin' little satisfaction even if I could squeak out a win, but I'm no longer wastin' time waitin' for that to happen so I'll probably most likely be caught sleepin', dreamin' about what could've been had I listened to my gut feelin' and put in the same amount of stock I place in what my treasonous mind and heart are always sayin'
and not let doubt creep in and claim top billin' as it's permanent position, knocking out compassion and reason, replacin' both with the hate and weight of a nation

It's a fools mission, I WILL be beaten' into submission, the last thing I'll hear as my energy gives up on existin' is the mortician statin' then time stampin' my expiration, that and the body bag zippin', family left pickin' out a coffin from the bargain bin, not worth payin' a fortune, only payin' little respect to the fallen then quickly forgotten at the drop of a pin

You're sayin' I have a purpose but I'm witnessin' me wastin' every minute of the earths rotation and never reachin' the conclusion that I was slackin', far to laxed in the preparation for a home invasion of this mental prison I'm caged in where I'm servin' a life sentence and I'm mentally and emotionally starvin' while my vision of any kind of future begins to darken

No open invitation, but that's not stoppin' my personal demon from just walkin' right in and startin' the killin' spree up once again, focusin' first on positive motivation just for existin', of course that's just my imagination, but could you imagine? A horrible vision to the average pedestrian, I know, but I still crack a grin at the thought of it happenin', the devil on my shoulder is at it again

My light fractured through a prism and some went missin' and I never got around to lookin' so no chance of gettin' it back into my possession, there's no raignin' it in, goin' from a fools errand to a search and rescue mission seemingly overnight but for what reason, just to teach me a lesson? I don't test well, I won't make it to graduation

Choices made out of desperation got me lookin' and feelin' like a felon, to survive I had to become the villain of the biography I'm narratin', this isn't livin', at best it's just barely holdin' on for dear life and weakenin', a measly attempt at survivin', forced into an intimate relation with the unforgivable, each of the sinful deadly seven

The line not to cross was paper thin, walked it like a drunk person in front of a couple corrupt police men, heathens but feelin' better than, lost control long ago, before I fell off the wagon, I ain't talkin' about drinkin', it started way back when with prescription medication, ones that were suppose to be helpin' but then used for wreckreation and that's when it began draggin' me down to an underground parkin' garage elevation

I didn't have a break down, like I said, it was a break in home invasion with the assumption there was somethin' worth takin' to begin with but everythin' inside is broken and you can see the corrosion of the foundation built on sand, makin' this temple worth nothin', even self worth is fadin'

Graspin' at the air and yet again findin' nothin', grapplin' with the notion I'm nothin', prayin' my emergency flotation device will suffice cause the water is ragin', feelin' the undertow currant strengthen in it's concentration, I think it's attackin' and there's no escapin' so I began blinkin' SOS in old fashion morse code hopin' you don't need help with the translation, if that's the case then I'm done for, why bother debatin', I'll take myself out of the equation, preparin' my soul for the comin' evacuation

You begin lyin' just to raise my spirits but I ain't buyin' into what you're sellin', counterfeit concern bein' spoken with no emotion or conviction, after the extensive evaluation I see it's no garden of Eden I'm livin' in, again, someone's been lyin', I'd be wakin' right into the den of a rabid lion shrouded in original sin, I ate the fruit knowin' full well it was forbidden, straight up poison but zero ***** were given, so this was bound to happen, the writin' was on the wall, who am I kiddin'?

You have my permission to begin the process so let's just go ahead then and get this over with so I can silence the voices within, I've eliminated every complication, layin' on the tracks at the crazy train boarding station, awaitin' the unavoidable, provin' I was correct in the assumption that this is the right time to initiate my endin', a personal Armageddon...oh, well hello, you must be that Satan guy I've been hearin' so much about from everyone preachin' directly in my ear then going out the other, it's still hard not to listen, I'm just tyin' up a loose end or two then I'm yours for the takin'

...alright, thanks for waitin', now then, let the journey to my endin' begin shall we? I'm takin' the lead on this one cause I know where we're goin' and I'm no good at followin' direction...obviously, it goes without sayin'

©2022
Revolute Jay Aug 2012
Foster, what family? Lower class, dream of  vacation
******* what trickles down, affecting a life situation
White to Blue Collar; a rebuild or invasion?

Millions inside the boxes of convention
Justified superficial, backhanded salutations
Refute Love, proposed as mankind’s invention
Pulled by a string of instant gratification
Finding freedom’s temporary
If ever, long term locations
Constricted, system of classifications
The socially admissible connections,
Not to mention gangs of corrections
Flowing through the previous, my own generation

For the infinite hours
One after the other
Trade integrity for the illusion of power
Not all those with a gun should be considered a coward
Face the souls sold on Wall Street,
Remember those from Twin Towers

Ground zero, abandoned. Now bare, desolate
The idea of terrorism denied, while some wrestle it
Rationales dislocate, post hairline fracture
Frontal lobe imposter, posing in rapture
As if talent, love, or hate could ever be captured
Held at gun point, then forgotten years after
My children will one day look to me for the answer

What’s society, this twisted maze we live in?
I will gaze in their eyes with the same exact question
And don’t ever allow me again not to mention
Real criminals can’t learn from minute or life-long detentions
Some incapable of that level of retention
As our battered soldiers forever sleep at attention

Politically correct, tongues in consistent hesitation
Kiss police ***, only to go to the station
Before the thought of who signed the citation
Treated as if it were a felony violation
Our basic rights according to our nation
Arizona & Co for minority elimination

Die fighting the statute of poverty’s limitations

vi.i.xi
Copyright © Jimena Zavaleta 2012
VENUS62 Jun 2014
I refuse to participate
In this race
so corporate

Where nothing but competition rules
Where competitors
get thrown to hungry wolves

They call it survival of the fittest
And elimination
of the weakest


Competition they say breeds innovation
As if a creative soul
needs any confrontation!

They corrupt you with conviction
Of wealth, riches, fame and
instant gratification

They put a noose round your neck
With a cabin
enclosing your desk

You toil night and day
To keep
the wolves at bay

You die a little every day
Dreaming of things
to do your way

Only you can these fetters break
By doing what you love
Even if it is  for a smaller cheque

In the extra time that you have
Gaze at the world  
with wonder and awe

Go paint on a canvas, or weave a web of words
Or simply go watch
wild animals and birds

For when you finally go up for review
He will treat us all
with the same view

He
for sure
will ask

Did you laugh, did you cry
Did you
Your precious life enjoy?

I refuse to participate
In this race
so corporate
Locked away in a city of dust ;
Not keen to know or see anyone .
Emotions left to rot and rust ;
A simple thing but it ain‛t all fun .
Heart still throbs with forgotten lust ;
Thou knowest every concern is a pun .
For at hand there's too many a task ;
Yet never will be enough place to run .
Delicate glass hearts break at last ;
All becomes invincible when we become none .
The Dedpoet Oct 2018
Inventing the day,
Circular possessions,
All I own cannot be touched,

Everything lost in a fire,
Blazing nocturnal,
The slab of marble becomes
A tin marker,

Watching with stillness
As fleshes mesh with time,
     A poet remains:
The spherical elimination
   Casting lights on dark
I find my axis
      I find myself the epitome
And the footsteps
      In the puddles resound
In my minds echoes;
My body is a transparent verse,
        Night unfolds , I
Can see myself again.

      Listen to me as you listen
To the water,
     I am the unhindered thunder,
The shadow in the light's
     Ignorant glow,

      From my footsteps rise the
Steam,
I am still The DedPoet,
    As you sleep in your bed
I invent my new homes:
   Nightly I bocome a
Poem of The Nocturne.
Quentin Briscoe Dec 2011
Tension clouds suffocate... he who waits...anticapates...complication...Of atmospheric pressure...Pushed down around ones thought...process of elimination...what shall be removed...what release will be choosed...Liquid, soild, gas...condensed behind the mask...Steam, Clouds, Rain...Suffed behind the Pain...Suffocation...breath.after.breath.after.breath.after....Cl­utter...Breathe, Stop , and Release....The tension Clouds that are around...Hope.Pray.believe. yes it takes all three..to breathe.Deep....Deeper.......Deeper..........Release....
It sounds like a broken record
Feels just like a revolving door
When another tin-star soldier
Explains what somebody died for
When both sides are crying "justice!"
But when all things are complete
There's another broken family
There's more blood out in the street.

And there's nobody to answer for
The systemic elimination
Of innocent black men and boys
Across this old and broken nation.
When guilt is predetermined
And last resorts become reflex
A whole race of Americans
Are forced to worry "Am I next?"

You don't have to like the truth
In order for the truth to be.
You can cry out furiously
When men in protest take a knee,
But if you deny the evidence
When the truth is brought to light
Then, you're a sucker or a liar,
Either way, you're just not right.
I try not to judge situations based on emotion, but my heart is heavy, and I'm angry, and emotion is all I can offer right now.   If you're the kind of person that would belittle or justify the ****** of Terance Crutcher, then you're the kind of person I don't care of I offend.
The truth doesn't need you to accept it in order for it to be the truth.
My paradise is a field of sunflowers,
surrounding me as the sun shines it's rays on me.
My paradise is the non-exsistance of starving, abused, and neglected animals.
My paradise is the focus of equality in every aspect of life;
marriage, ***, race, politics, the rich, the poor. EVERYTHING.
My paradise is the end of ****** and ****,
suicide and stealing.
My paradise is the death of depression, illness,
addictions, and loneliness.
My paradise is the elimination of judgement,
of bullying, of disrespect.

My paradise is so out of reach. It does not have to be, but it is.  This paradise will stay in my dreams, I fear, until my departure from this earth.
Glenn McCrary Feb 2012
A beloved friend enticed my senses



Appeasing whines with tasteful tunes



Awakening amour at heights of suspense



To serenade me as spry I shall swoon





Euphonies swallowed my bones



Delighted be I to ever have found



Divine obscure ways to atone



Ghastly memories quite profound





Triumph has monopolized tribulation



Along hollow skylines nimble she fleets



Colloquies spewing frost shan't stand elite



Taunted be grief by elimination











© 2012 (All rights reserved)
Jamie L Cantore Nov 2014
Float thy thoughts of me upon an electric sea streaming,                
thy warm memories splashing into existence by rippling waves,    
and brought by thought into untouchable being,                                
or else to head for yawning graves.                                                      
Bear in mind the day mayst be coming when all life                          
is but a forgetful dreaming;                                                        ­              
and I wonder if I wilt be alive
in yours upcoming                                
or just a *casualty in the piling wreckage.
Nat Lipstadt Jan 2017
humans born a mess,
messengers carrying blank notepads, sheet music,
brought from within to the without

a baby-sized handful of historical residues retained,
garnered from all too brief a prelim existence,
arriving possessing hints of what may be

most emerging crying,
crying over loss of the womb security,
for seers all, all see unaccountable futures clouded
by an inevitable chance of rain
and death

all of us, no one excepted,
covered for months in **** stained fluids ,
a holy, ***** combination
of amniotic nourishment,
and our own waste

a hint of what is to come?

human then spends the rest of life
cleaning up after himself,
mostly with tasks of addition,
punctuating by the occasional cleansing of
elimination subtraction

making room for the next love,
labored birthing of a baby poem,
from your womb, midwifed,
haunting ghosts of three note tunes,
begging for a set of lyrics and a
great chorus everybody can sing,
a completion competition

going along, all along, to the goings on,
all our routes preternatural crooked,
lived a life of pretense, a straightened out life,
which is the nuanced, connected summary of our components
which are all curves, dots on a line

and the composition source,
the secret chords employed,
tech installed just prior to birth,
effacing glorious sadness, glorious joy,
the human building blocks,
with the certainty that
everybody knows,
that's how it goes
everybody knows,

only fools believe,
you'll live forever

but live at least long enough to sing and write of
a man cleaning up his own life's messes,
and perchance, after our absence,
leaving the world better for it
Hemlata Roy Aug 2019
No one is our enemy
No one is our remedy.

It is only the situation
To take careful elimination.

In our imagination
With many ambitions.
Is the situation making you sick and you are falling in depression, no one is good, no one is bad, the situation will be okay in it's own time.
tread May 2011
Osama bin Laden is dead.
That pretty much sums it up right there- the tag-line to the War on Terror we've all been waiting for;
The adherent doctrine dealt out like a decoration to add decor to the death and destruction distributed so freely like health care should be,
But isn't because Fox News and the Tea Party see it differently;
"The only thing that should be free is the freedom to spread freedom against the wishes of the oppressed by utilizing force of arms to instill upon them a will to fight what we see as their evil sheikdoms,"
Stage 1 in a dramatic ensemble of violence all directed at the elimination of human toil in pursuit of the spoils of unjust construction,
A naive assumption based on silly presumptions against Islam in conjunction to the real world.

Osama bin Laden is dead.
A euphorically jubilant crowd applauds outside the steps of the White House,
And I listen with incrementation as the news station sponsors discrimination to add flames to the hate machine,
And I wonder;
Can we not just cut the cake? Clean the slate of the human race just to cut to the chase and reach the release we sought in world peace in the first place?
Probably not, as it is our woes that have brought men from silver to gold, modest to bold, caring to cold, and 'on sale' to 'sold' in this system.

And I can't accept that.

It would be a different case if my sad face brought a poor man back to first base in terms of sustaining the ability to remain within the mile-high club that is the human race,
Or if my woes brought all poverty stricken panic from financial rags, to spiritual riches,
Instead of all this **** where people are paid to dig ditches just so, in turn, they begin to build bridges over said ditches simply to stimulate an abstract mathematical construct a few inches further from rock bottom.

Osama bin Laden is dead.
For the past ten years, what ground did he tread?
Not a lot; at least in comparison to his pursuers who tread streets full of hot lead and ****** head's, each still scarred with a lingering dread left unsaid;
And so vivid, is the anger, so vivid the hate and horrors of war, to the point that one is beyond asking 'what is this all for?' and simply hits the floor as rockets **** by like angry boars, and bullets shatter walls and **** at a pace that a pill couldn't heal your soon to be charred corpse,
And life looses all meaning;
War is no longer a late-night TV show screening, it's men and women screaming with their guts spilled and steaming,
And the tears don't suffice, as everything cuts deep like a knife to symbolize this endless strife,
The trial and tribulation.

But, don't fool yourself.
Osama bin Laden is dead, he was shot in the head, now all the men and women can go back home to their countries and back to their own beds,
To night terrors instead, as they realize their sanity is caught on a thread,

But the truth still remains quite complacent;
As it is the truth that is adjacent to the lies of news stations and corporations looking to make a dime off the fall of a nation,
All caught in a frenzied impatience at how long the castration of the Haitians is taking to make a dollar towards their next Palm Springs vacation,
And all the concentration, under-the-radar conversations or over-the-top public declarations at anti-capitalist demonstrations, whether in New York City or the Appalachians,
Goes unheeded amidst Wal-Mart's new decorations, or the Palestinian deportations, or Quaran desecration's carried out by ignorant delegations filled with a fundamentalist generation of observations,
So we're blind.

Amidst all this truth, we are blind.
And to this day, my head still sways at how insane we make this world with our memes and the capacity of our brains that go unharnessed in our head,
But none of this really matters, does it?
Because Obama said Osama is finally dead.
Edward Coles May 2014
I am drunk within the brand new light of morning,
This cigarette sends spirals to my head,
All I have come to do is now forgiven,
And all I’ve meant to do is an outcome all the same.

I should be sleeping now in the yellow sun-lit alleys.
The growling pigeons are my hostile call to sleep,
But all I can think about in this division,
Is how daylight is but the malformation of dreams.

So what time I lay my head, it doesn’t matter.
No, all that matters is the cycle of the sun;
All that has come to pass will remain in the Earth and
In the soil that becomes purchased into land.
c
Corkey Hawley May 2010
If man follows evolution
He'll come to distruction
No more revolutions
Nothing like reconstrution

A little humiliation?
One more deduction
No such thing as a nation
No chance for creation

A Sea of Tranquility

Only elimination, Mother Earth's abortion
What about salvation? Not even mutation?

We've lost our ambition, so we loss our reincarnation?
No more benedictions? Only discrimination?

A Sea of Tranquility?

Total annihlation? Call it "Holy Assaignation"
We should find our anticipation confronted with meditation
With no reservation for our obligation
There is no solution for a simple conclusion

A Sea Of Tranquility?
Lyrics 2 a song 1974, I've been digging them up 4 my forthcoming book, Poems, Pix & Songs, 4 & From A Pilgrim, Doc
Brent Kincaid Jan 2017
"I always wanted to wander."
"To wander? To where?"
"From Walla Walla to Uganda."
"That's a wide world to wander!"
"You wanna?"
"Wanna what?"
"To wander?"
"To where, Uganda?"
"Youbetcha!"
"I don't want to onomatopoeia anymore!"

"Are you refusing me?"
"You're confusing me!"
"Do I do that usually?"
"Yes, and it's abusing me!
"I didn't used to be."
"But you see it's no use to me,
So start talking lucidly!
You're coming across abstrusely
By talking so loosely.
You've got a lot of 'splaining to do Lucy."

"It started out grand!"
"But quickly got out of hand."
"But you fail to understand."
"You should have planned."
"Is that a reprimand?"
"You're like the ampersand."
"I don't understand."
"It means 'and per se and';
The pronunciation became bland
And three Latin words became 'ampersand'."

"But, don't you need a vacation?"
"What is the relation?"
"It's a matter of pronunciation,
And sometimes punctuation.
Some words deserve elimination.
Yes, and some deserve illumination.
Thus my original illustration.
In the interest of communication,
Some things deserve enunciation."
"I will accept that explanation."

"But, I'm still hugely fond of
The two of us going to Uganda;
As we internationally wander
I'm sure it will make you fonder
The more the two of us wander."
"But I really don't wanna!"
"Don't wanna what?"
"Go to Uganda!"
"That's what you don't wanna?"
"You betcha!"
"It's okay. They probably won't letcha."

— The End —