Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Like a psychotic docent in the wilderness,
I will not speak in perfect Ciceronian cadences.
I draw my voice from a much deeper cistern,
Preferring the jittery synaptic archive,
So sublimely unfiltered, random and profane.
And though I am sequestered now,
Confined within the walls of a gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55 lunatic asylum (for Active Seniors I am told),
I remain oddly puerile,
Remarkably refreshed and unfettered.  
My institutionalization self-imposed,
Purposed for my own serenity, and also the safety of others.
Yet I abide, surprisingly emancipated and frisky.
I may not have found the peace I seek,
But the quiet has mercifully come at last.

The nexus of inner and outer space is context for my story.
I was born either in Brooklyn, New York or Shungopavi, Arizona,
More of intervention divine than census data.
Shungopavi: a designated place for tribal statistical purposes.
Shungopavi: an ovine abbatoir and shaman’s cloister.
The Hopi: my mother’s people, a state of mind and grace,
Deftly landlocked, so cunningly circumscribed,
By both interior and outer Navajo boundaries.
The Navajo: a coyote trickster people; a nation of sheep thieves,
Hornswoggled and landlocked themselves,
Subsumed within three of the so-called Four Corners:
A 3/4ths compromise and covenant,
Pickled in firewater, swaddled in fine print,
A veritable swindle concocted back when the USA
Had Manifest Destiny & mayhem on its mind.

The United States: once a pubescent synthesis of blood and thunder,
A bold caboodle of trooper spit and polish, unwashed brawlers, Scouts and      
Pathfinders, mountain men, numb-nut ne'er-do-wells,
Buffalo Bills & big-balled individualists, infected, insane with greed.
According to the Gospel of His Holiness Saint Zinn,
A People’s’ History of the United States: essentially state-sponsored terrorism,
A LAND RUSH grabocracy, orchestrated, blessed and anointed,
By a succession of Potomac sharks, Great White Fascist Fathers,
Far-Away-on-the Bay, the Bay we call The Chesapeake.
All demented national patriarchs craving lebensraum for God and country.
The USA: a 50-state Leviathan today, a nation jury-rigged,
Out of railroad ties, steel rails and baling wire,
Forged by a litany of lies, rapaciousness and ******,
And jaw-torn chunks of terra firma,
Bites both large and small out of our well-****** Native American ***.

Or culo, as in va’a fare in culo (literally "go do it in the ***")
Which Italian Americans pronounce as fongool.
The language center of my brain,
My sub-cortical Broca’s region,
So fraught with such semantic misfires,
And autonomic linguistic seizures,
Compel acknowledgement of a father’s contribution,
To both the gene pool and the genocide.
Columbus Day:  a conspicuously absent holiday out here in Indian Country.
No festivals or Fifth Avenue parades.
No excuse for ethnic hoopla. No guinea feast. No cannoli. No tarantella.
No excuse to not get drunk and not **** your sister-in-law.
Emphatically a day for prayer and contemplation,
A day of infamy like Pearl Harbor and 9/11,
October 12, 1492: not a discovery; an invasion.

Growing up in Brooklyn, things were always different for me,
Different in some sort of redskin/****/****--
Choose Your Favorite Ethnic Slur-sort of way.
The American Way: dehumanization for fun and profit.
Melting *** anonymity and denial of complicity with evil.
But this is no time to bring up America’s sordid past,
Or, a personal pet peeve: Indian Sovereignty.
For Uncle Sam and his minions, an ever-widening, conveniently flexible concept,
Not a commandment or law,
Not really a treaty or a compact,
Or even a business deal.  Let’s get real:
It was not even much in the way of a guideline.
Just some kind of an advisory, a bulletin or newsletter,
Could it merely have been a free-floating suggestion?
Yes, that’s it exactly: a suggestion.

Over and under halcyon American skies,
Over and around those majestic purple mountain peaks,
Those trapped in poetic amber waves of wheat and oats,
Corn and barley, wheat shredded and puffed,
Corn flaked and milled, Wheat Chex and Wheaties, oats that are little Os;
Kix and Trix, Fiber One, and Kashi-Go-Lean, Lucky Charms and matso *****,
Kreplach and kishka,
Polenta and risotto.
Our cantaloupe and squash patch,
Our fruited prairie plain, our delicate ecological Eden,
In balance and harmony with nature, as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce instructs:
“These white devils are not going to,
Stop ****** and killing, cheating and eating us,
Until they have the whole ******* enchilada.
I’m talking about ‘from sea to shining sea.’”

“I fight no more forever,” Babaloo.
So I must steer this clunky keelboat of discovery,
Back to the main channel of my sad and starry demented river.
My warpath is personal but not historical.
It is my brain’s own convoluted cognitive process I cannot saavy.
Whatever biochemical or—as I suspect more each day—
Whatever bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity,
My weltanschauung: my world-view, as sprechen by proto-Nazis;
Putz philosophers of the 17th, 18th & 19th century.
The German intelligentsia: what a cavalcade of maniacal *******!
Why is this Jew unsurprised these Zarathustra-fueled Übermenschen . . .
Be it the Kaiser--Caesar in Deutsch--Bismarck, ******, or,
Even that Euro-*****,  Angela Merkel . . . Why am I not surprised these Huns,
Get global grab-*** on the sauerbraten cabeza every few generations?
To be, or not to be the ***** bullgoose loony: GOTT.

Biomechanical protocols govern my identity and are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic and optical white rooms, cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations manned and ready,
Standing at attention and saluting British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click, ramrod straight and cheerful: “Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous, lusting for something, anything to process.
Any memory or image, lyric or construct,
Be they short-term dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all in deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious, most vaporous;
Others--the scary ones—eidetic: frighteningly detailed and extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts; recollected so richly rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.

The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless, places and things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from biomechanical storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral repositories and vaults,
All the while the entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that all-subservient British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data in batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working in seamless syncopation,
Self-referential, at times paradoxical or infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but there’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
A curse and minefield for the cerebral:  metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
But the information technology of thought that baffles me,
As adaptive and profound as any evolution posited by Darwin,
Beyond the wetware in my skull, an entirely new operating system.
My mental and cultural landscape are becoming one.
Machines are connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:
It is the information technology of who I am.
It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape.
It is the machinery connecting the two.
This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition--your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear:

“LISTEN:  The machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or not at all.
(Incoming TEXT from my editor: “Lighten Up, Giuseppi!”)
Reminding me again that most in my audience,
Rarely get past the comic page. All righty then: think Calvin & Hobbes.
John Calvin, a precocious and adventurous six-year old boy,
Subject to flights of 16th Century French theological fancy.
Thomas Hobbes, a sardonic anthropomorphic tiger from 17th Century England,
Mumbling about life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Taken together--their antics and shenanigans--their relationship to each other,
Remind us of our dual nature; explore for us broad issues like public education;
The economy, environmentalism & the Global ****** Thermometer;
Not to mention the numerous flaws of opinion polls.



And again my editor TEXTS me, reminds me again: “LIGHTEN UP!”
Consoling me:  “Even Shakespeare had to play to the groundlings.”
The groundlings, AKA: The Rabble.
Yes. Even the ******* Bard, even Willie the Shake,
Had to contend with a decidedly lowbrow copse of carrion.
Oh yes, the groundlings, a carrion herd, a flying flock of carrion seagulls,
Carrion crow, carrion-feeders one and all,
And let’s throw Sheryl Crow into the mix while we’re at it:
“Hit it! This ain't no disco. And it ain't no country club either, this is L.A.”  

                  Send "All I Wanna Do" Ringtone to your Cell              

Once more, I digress.
The Rabble:  an amorphous, gelatinous Jabba the Hutt of commonality.
The Rabble: drunk, debauched & lawless.
Too *****-delicious to stop Bill & Hilary from thinking about tomorrow;
Too Paul McCartney My Love Does it Good to think twice.

The Roman Saturnalia: a weeklong **** fest.
The Saturnalia: originally a pagan kink-fest in honor of the deity Saturn.
Dovetailing nicely with the advent of the Christian era,
With a project started by Il Capo di Tutti Capi,
One of the early popes, co-opting the Roman calendar between 17 and 25 December,
Putting the finishing touches on the Jesus myth.
For Brooklyn Hopi-***-Jew baby boomers like me,
Saturnalia manifested itself as Disco Fever,
Unpleasant years of electrolysis, scrunched ***** in tight polyester
For Roman plebeians, for the great unwashed citizenry of Rome,
Saturnalia was just a great big Italian wedding:
A true family blowout and once-in-a-lifetime ego-trip for Dad,
The father of the bride, Vito Corleone, Don for A Day:
“Some think the world is made for fun and frolic,
And so do I! Funicula, Funiculi!”

America: love it or leave it; my country right or wrong.
Sure, we were citizens of Rome,
But any Joe Josephus spending the night under a Tiber bridge,
Or sleeping off a three day drunk some afternoon,
Up in the Coliseum bleachers, the cheap seats, out beyond the monuments,
The original three monuments in the old stadium,
Standing out in fair territory out in center field,
Those three stone slabs honoring Gehrig, Huggins, and Babe.
Yes, in the house that Ruth built--Home of the Bronx Bombers--***?
Any Joe Josephus knows:  Roman citizenship doesn’t do too much for you,
Except get you paxed, taxed & drafted into the Legion.
For us the Roman lifestyle was HIND-*** humble.
We plebeians drew our grandeur by association with Empire.
Very few Romans and certainly only those of the patrician class lived high,
High on the hog, enjoying a worldly extravaganza, like—whom do we both know?

Okay, let’s say Laurence Olivier as Crassus in Spartacus.
Come on, you saw Spartacus fifteen ******* times.
Remember Crassus?
Crassus: that ***** twisted **** trying to get his freak on with,
Tony Curtis in a sunken marble tub?
We plebes led lives of quiet *****-scratching desperation,
A bunch of would-be legionnaires, diseased half the time,
Paid in salt tablets or baccala, salted codfish soaked yellow in olive oil.
Stiffs we used to call them on New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn.
Let’s face it: we were hyenas eating someone else’s ****,
Stage-door jackals, Juvenal-come-late-lies, a mob of moronic mook boneheads
Bought off with bread & circuses and Reality TV.
Each night, dished up a wide variety of lowbrow Elizabethan-era entertainments.  
We contemplate an evening on the town, downtown—
(cue Petula Clark/Send "Downtown" Ringtone to your Cell)

On any given London night, to wit:  mummers, jugglers, bear & bull baiters.
How about dog & **** fighters, quoits & skittles, alehouses & brothels?
In short, somewhere, anywhere else,
Anywhere other than down along the Thames,
At Bankside in Southwark, down in the Globe Theater mosh pit,
Slugging it out with the groundlings whose only interest,
In the performance is the choreography of swordplay and stale ****** puns.
Meanwhile, Hugh Fennyman--probably a fellow Jew,
An English Renaissance Bugsy Siegel or Mickey Cohen—
Meanwhile Fennyman, the local mob boss is getting his ya-yas,
Roasting the feet of my text-messaging editor, Philip Henslowe.
Poor and pathetic Henslowe, works on commission, always scrounging,
But a true patron of my craft, a gentleman of infinite jest and patience,
Spiritual subsistence, and every now and then a good meal at some,
Sawdust joint with oyster shells, and a Prufrockian silk purse of T.S. Eliot gold.

Poor, pathetic Henslowe, trussed up by Fennyman,
His editorial feet in what looks like a Japanese hibachi.
Henslowe’s feet to the fire--feet to the fire—get it?
A catchy phrase whose derivation conjures up,
A grotesque yet vivid image of torture,
An exquisite insight into how such phrases ingress the idiom,
Not to mention a scene once witnessed at a secret Romanian CIA prison,
I’d been ordered to Bucharest not long after 9/11,
Handling the rendition and torture of Habib Ghazzawy,

An entirely innocent falafel maker from Steinway Street, Astoria, Queens.
Shock the Monkey: it’s what we do. GOTO:
Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey/
(HQ music video) - YouTube//
www.youtube.com/
Poor, pathetic, ******-on Henslowe.


Fennyman :  (his avarice is whet by something Philly screams out about a new script)  "A play takes time. Find actors; Rehearsals. Let's say open in three weeks. That's--what--five hundred groundlings at tuppence each, in addition four hundred groundlings tuppence each, in addition four hundred backsides at three pence--a penny extra for a cushion, call it two hundred cushions, say two performances for safety how much is that Mr. Frees?"
Jacobean Tweet, John (1580-1684) Webster:  “I saw him kissing her bubbies.”

It’s Geoffrey Rush, channeling Henslowe again,
My editor, a singed smoking madman now,
Feet in an ice bucket, instructing me once more:
“Lighten things up, you know . . .
Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.”
I digress again and return to Hopi Land, back to my shaman-monastic abattoir,
That Zen Center in downtown Shungopavi.
At the Tribal Enrolment Office I make my case for a Certificate of Indian Blood,
Called a CIB by the Natives and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The BIA:  representing gold & uranium miners, cattle and sheep ranchers,
Sodbusters & homesteaders; railroaders and dam builders since 1824.
Just in time for Andrew Jackson, another false friend of Native America,
Just before Old Hickory, one of many Democratic Party hypocrites and scoundrels,
Gives the FONGOOL, up the CULO go ahead.
Hey Andy, I’ve got your Jacksonian democracy: Hanging!
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mission is to:   "… enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. What’s that in the fine print?  Uncle Sammy holds “the trust assets of American Indians.”

Here’s a ******* tip, Geronimo: if he trusted you,
It would ALL belong to you.
To you and The People.
But it’s all fork-tongued white *******.
If true, Indian sovereignty would cease to be a sick one-liner,
Cease to be a blunt force punch line, more of,
King Leopold’s 19th Century stand-up comedy schtick,
Leo Presents: The **** of the Congo.
La Belgique mission civilisatrice—
That’s what French speakers called Uncle Leo’s imperial public policy,
Bringing the gift of civilization to central Africa.
Like Manifest Destiny in America, it had a nice colonial ring to it.
“Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent,
Allotted by Providence for the free development,
Of our yearly multiplying millions.”  John L. O'Sullivan, 1845

Our civilizing mission or manifest destiny:
Either/or, a catchy turn of phrase;
Not unlike another ironic euphemism and semantic subterfuge:
The Pacification of the West; Pacification?
Hardly: decidedly not too peaceful for Cochise & Tonto.
Meanwhile, Madonna is cash rich but disrespected Evita poor,
To wit: A ****** on the Rocks (throwing in a byte or 2 of Da Vinci Code).
Meanwhile, Miss Ciccone denied her golden totem *****.
They snubbed that little guinea ****, didn’t they?
Snubbed her, robbed her rotten.
Evita, her magnum opus, right up there with . . .
Her SNL Wayne’s World skit:
“Get a load of the unit on that guy.”
Or, that infamous MTV Music Video Awards stunt,
That classic ***** Lip-Lock with Britney Spears.

How could I not see that Oscar snubola as prime evidence?
It was just another stunning case of American anti-Italian racial animus.
Anyone familiar with Noam Chomsky would see it,
Must view it in the same context as the Sacco & Vanzetti case,
Or, that arbitrary lynching of 9 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891,
To cite just two instances of anti-Italian judicial reach & mob violence,
Much like what happened to my cousin Dominic,
Gang-***** by the Harlem Globetrotters, in their locker room during halftime,
While he working for Abe Saperstein back in 1952.
Dom was doing advance for Abe, supporting creation of The Washington Generals:
A permanent stable of hoop dream patsies and foils,
Named for the ever freewheeling, glad-handing, backslapping,
Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF), himself,
Namely General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man they liked,
And called IKE: quite possibly a crypto Jew from Abilene.

Of course, Harry Truman was my first Great White Fascist Father,
Back in 1946, when I first opened my eyes, hung up there,
High above, looking down from the adobe wall.
Surveying the entire circular kiva,
I had the best seat in the house.
Don’t let it be said my Spider Grandmother or Hopi Corn Mother,
Did not want me looking around at things,
Discovering what made me special.
Didn’t divine intervention play a significant part of my creation?
Knowing Mamma Mia and Nonna were Deities,
Gave me an edge later on the streets of Brooklyn.
The Cradleboard: was there ever a more divinely inspired gift to human curiosity? The Cradleboard: a perfect vantage point, an infant’s early grasp,
Of life harmonious, suspended between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
Simply put: the Hopi should be running our ******* public schools.

But it was IKE with whom I first associated,
Associated with the concept 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I liked IKE. Who didn’t?
What was not to like?
He won the ******* war, didn’t he?
And he wasn’t one of those crazy **** John Birchers,
Way out there, on the far right lunatic Republican fringe,
Was he? (It seems odd and nearly impossible to believe in 2013,
That there was once a time in our Boomer lives,
When the extreme right wing of the Republican Party
Was viewed by the FBI as an actual threat to American democracy.)
Understand: it was at a time when The FBI,
Had little ideological baggage,
But a great appetite for secrets,
The insuppressible Jay Edgar doing his thang.

IKE: of whom we grew so, oh-so Fifties fond.
Good old reliable, Nathan Shaking IKE:
He’d been fixed, hadn’t he? Had had the psychic snip.
Snipped as a West Point cadet & parade ground martinet.
Which made IKE a good man to have in a pinch,
Especially when crucial policy direction was way above his pay grade.
Cousin Dom was Saperstein’s bagman, bribing out the opposition,
Which came mainly from religious and patriotic organizations,
Viewing the bogus white sports franchise as obscene.
The Washington Generals, Saperstein’s new team would have but one opponent,
And one sole mission: to serve as the **** of endless jokes and sight gags for—
Negroes.  To play the chronic fools of--
Negroes.  To be chronically humiliated and insulted by—
Negroes.  To run up and down the boards all night, being outran by—
Negroes.  Not to mention having to wear baggy silk shorts.



Meadowlark Lemon:  “Yeah, Charlie, we ***** that grease-ball Dominic; we shagged his guinea mouth and culo rotten.”  

(interviewed in his Scottsdale, AZ winter residence in 2003 by former ESPN commentator Charlie Steiner, Malverne High School, Class of ’67.)
                                                        
  ­                                                                 ­                 
IKE, briefed on the issue by higher-ups, quickly got behind the idea.
The Harlem Globetrotters were to exist, and continue to exist,
Are sustained financially by Illuminati sponsors,
For one reason and one reason only:
To serve elite interests that the ***** be kept down and subservient,
That the minstrel show be perpetuated,
A policy surviving the elaborate window dressing of the civil rights movement, Affirmative action, and our first Uncle Tom president.
Case in point:  Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman & Metta World Peace Artest.
Cha-cha-cha changing again:  I am Robert Allen Zimmermann,
A whiny, skinny Jew, ****** and rolling in from Minnesota,
Arrested, obviously a vagrant, caught strolling around his tony Jersey enclave,
Having moved on up the list, the A-list, a special invitation-only,
Yom Kippur Passover Seder:  Next Year in Jerusalem, Babaloo!

I take ownership of all my autonomic and conditioned reflexes;
Each personal neural arc and pathway,
All shenanigans & shellackings,
Or blunt force cognitive traumas.
It’s all percolating nicely now, thank you,
In kitchen counter earthen crockery:
Random access memory: a slow-cook crockpot,
Bubbling through my psychic sieve.
My memories seem only remotely familiar,
Distant and vague, at times unreal:
An alien hybrid databank accessed accidently on purpose;
Flaky science sustains and monitors my nervous system.
And leads us to an overwhelming question:
Is it true that John Dillinger’s ******* is in the Smithsonian Museum?
Enquiring minds want to know, Kemosabe!

“Any last words, *******?” TWEETS Adam Smith.
Postmortem cyber-graffiti, an epitaph carved in space;
Last words, so singular and simple,
Across the universal great divide,
Frisbee-d, like a Pleistocene Kubrick bone,
Tossed randomly into space,
Morphing into a gyroscopic space station.
Mr. Smith, a calypso capitalist, and me,
Me, the Poet Laureate of the United States and Adam;
Who, I didn’t know from Adam.
But we tripped the light fantastic,
We boogied the Protestant Work Ethic,
To the tune of that old Scotch-Presbyterian favorite,
Variations of a 5-point Calvinist theme: Total Depravity; Election; Particular Redemption; Irresistible Grace; & Perseverance of the Saints.

Mr. Smith, the author of An Inquiry into the Nature
& Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
One of the best-known, intellectual rationales for:
Free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism,
The latter term a euphemism for Social Darwinism.
Prior to 1764, Calvinists in France were called Huguenots,
A persecuted religious majority . . . is that possible?
A persecuted majority of Edict of Nantes repute.
Adam Smith, likely of French Huguenot Jewish ancestry himself,
Reminds me that it is my principal plus interest giving me my daily gluten.
And don’t think the irony escapes me now,
A realization that it has taken me nearly all my life to see again,
What I once saw so vividly as a child, way back when.
Before I put away childish things, including the following sentiment:
“All I need is the air that I breathe.”

  Send "The Air That I Breathe" Ringtone to your Cell  

The Hippies were right, of course.
The Hollies had it all figured out.
With the answer, as usual, right there in the lyrics.
But you were lucky if you were listening.
There was a time before I embraced,
The other “legendary” economists:
The inexorable Marx,
The savage society of Veblen,
The heresies we know so well of Keynes.
I was a child.
And when I was a child, I spake as a child—
Grazie mille, King James—
I understood as a child; I thought as a child.
But when I became a man I jumped on the bus with the band,
Hopped on the irresistible bandwagon of Adam Smith.

Smith:  “Any last words, *******?”
Okay, you were right: man is rationally self-interested.
Grazie tanto, Scotch Enlightenment,
An intellectual movement driven by,
An alliance of Calvinists and Illuminati,
Freemasons and Johnny Walker Black.
Talk about an irresistible bandwagon:
Smith, the gloomy Malthus, and David Ricardo,
Another Jew boy born in London, England,
Third of 17 children of a Sephardic family of Portuguese origin,
Who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic.
******* Jews!
Like everything shrewd, sane and practical in this world,
WE also invented the concept:  FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The lyrics: if you were really listening, you’d get it:
Respiration keeps one sufficiently busy,
Just breathing free can be a full-time job,
Especially when--borrowing a phrase from British cricketers—,
One contemplates the sorry state of the wicket.
Now that I am gainfully superannuated,
Pensioned off the employment radar screen.
Oft I go there into the wild ebon yonder,
Wandering the brain cloud at will.
My journey indulges curiosity, creativity and deceit.
I free range the sticky wicket,
I have no particular place to go.
Snagging some random fact or factoid,
A stop & go rural postal route,
Jumping on and off the brain cloud.

Just sampling really,
But every now and then, gorging myself,
At some information super smorgasbord,
At a Good Samaritan Rest Stop,
I ponder my own frazzled neurology,
When I was a child—
Before I learned the grim economic facts of life and Judaism,
Before I learned Hebrew,
Before my laissez-faire Bar Mitzvah lessons,
Under the rabbinical tutelage of Rebbe Kahane--
I knew what every clever child knows about life:
The surfing itself is the destination.
Accessing RAM--random access memory—
On a strictly need to know basis.
RAM:  a pretty good name for consciousness these days.

If I were an Asimov or Sir Arthur (Sri Lankabhimanya) Clarke,
I’d get freaky now, riffing on Terminators, Time Travel and Cyborgs.
But this is truth not science fiction.
Nevertheless, someone had better,
Come up with another name for cyborg.
Some other name for a critter,
Composed of both biological and artificial parts?
Parts-is-parts--be they electronic, mechanical or robotic.
But after a lifetime of science fiction media,
After a steady media diet, rife with dystopian technology nightmares,
Is anyone likely to admit to being a cyborg?
Since I always give credit where credit is due,
I acknowledge that cyborg was a term coined in 1960,
By Manfred Clynes & Nathan S. Kline and,
Used to identify a self-regulating human-machine system in outer space.

Five years later D. S. Halacy's: Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman,
Featured an introduction, which spoke of:  “… a new frontier, that was not,
Merely space, but more profoundly, the relationship between inner space,
And outer space; a bridge, i.e., between mind and matter.”
So, by definition, a cyborg defined is an organism with,
Technology-enhanced abilities: an antenna array,
Replacing what was once sentient and human.
My glands, once in control of metabolism and emotions,
Have been replaced by several servomechanisms.
I am biomechanical and gluttonous.
Soaking up and breathing out the atmosphere,
My Baby Boom experience of six decades,
Homogenized and homespun, feedback looped,
Endlessly networked through predigested mass media,
Culture as demographically targeted content.

This must have something to do with my own metamorphosis.
I think of Gregor Samsa, a Kafkaesque character if there ever was one.
And though we share common traits,
My evolutionary progress surpasses and transcends his.
Samsa--Phylum and Class--was, after all, an insect.
Nonetheless, I remain a changeling.
Have I not seen many stages of growth?
Each a painful metamorphic cycle,
From exquisite first egg,
Through caterpillar’s appetite & squirm.
To phlegmatic bliss and pupa quietude,
I unfold my wings in a rush of Van Gogh palette,
Color, texture, movement and grace, lift off, flapping in flight.
My eyes have witnessed wondrous transformations,
My experience, nouveau riche and distinctly self-referential;
For the most part unspecific & longitudinally pedestrian.

Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools,
I’ve been using to shape & make sense of my environment,
Have reared up and turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain & central nervous system.
Remaking me as something simultaneously more and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin and septic now, a cluster of implanted sensors,
Content: currency made increasingly more valuable as time passes,
Served up by and serving the interests of a pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human; simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn--

Humanoid.
poeticalamity Jun 2014
She once told me
she was terribly afraid of
the 889 blades of grass
in the park down her street,
of the 889 worn books
in her local library
of the 889 gum-covered steps
to her bus stops
of the 889 looks
she must make over her shoulder
of the 1 778 pairs of greedy eyes
stealing looks away from me.

I missed her when she sent me pictures
because I couldn't bear to look
at empty frames of empty eyes
(red dows no match red
unless it is the scarlet of blood on broken glass
after a year and two months of tranparency)
and also because the things that slipped into my phone
could only remind me of moments that could never be
and dreams
that would never come true.

I don't know what to say to her
without breaking her
(like the broken glass)
(the image still hasn't left my head)
but she inspires me toward metaphors
and the adromeda galaxy
isn't so far away anymore.

How can I stay by her side
when she triggers me to want to fall
but how can I ignore her call
when she is the only person I feel safe with
to coincide

I am afraid to tell her
(or myself)
how I feel
because in a cliche
I don't know how I feel myeslf
but dear, together, we are formidable
and apart --
I don't know about you,
but I catch myself on the dry spells --
we are fort minable

this song has been stuck in my hear
since it reminded me of you
and this could be another metaphor for something heartfelt
and not altogether original

But I want us to be
the figures in the painting
you said you saw us in
I want to be
that feminist duet
(even if I can't sing and you voice is that of the devil's)
I want to be
the cats in the picture
with the intertwined tails
or the flowers tangled up
on a vine
(I was going to send you that on
but I thought against it
because you were too beautiful to be compared
to a simple petrichor-scented bougainvillea)

So I will be
the 889 poetry books
you dog-ear and highlight
and secretly slightly plagiarize
and I will be
the 889 plants growing
in your backyard,
sparkling for you like replacement diamonds
after the rain
(and better yet I will be the forest
of 889 trees
looming not frighteningly but protectively
over you)
and I will be
the 889 strides
of golden brick road
to follow to your favorite coffee shop every day
and I will be
the 889 innocent peaks
at a delicate pinkie finger or a nose
(because a delicate rose such as you
cannot be seen all at once and truly appreciated)
and I will even be
the 1 778 pairs of eyes
stealing my own looks,
and hopefully you will not be afraid anymore.

I will split myself
into
6 228 parts
to make you feel comfortable
and if this is not a love poem
then it is an apology
and gratitude
and anger/resentment/not really/how could I resent you/you are everything

what I'm trying to say is,
we could go so many different ways,
and what's one more expression of love to you
after all you've been through.
Iskra Aug 2018
This is a tale of love and a tangled lie,
An apology.
A letter to a brown eyed firefly.
Our players being a naive spark,
Lost in feelings without a map
A broken, bittersweet charmer,
A dancing, reading dreamer with his face always turned to the skies,
And of course, the rosy orange firefly with warm coffee-bean eyes.
I hope that fireflies can glow a rosy orange, but my knowledge on this matter can’t be promised.
We live in a dreary place, one without lightning bugs to keep us honest.

A charming schemer once began to toy with a young, carefree spark,
Pushed her away when she got too close.
He tried to win her back, trying for a fresh, clean start
But soon he realized her trust was something to earn.
She was frighteningly cold when she was angry,
But even frozen, sparks have a tendency to burn.

As she brooded, pain and confusion kicking up a spiteful flame,
The bitter boy found a firefly, another pretty light with whom to play his game.

The spark’s young heart began to thaw, but the charmer continued to play and tease.
Wanting to shield herself from heartbreak, the spark turned her attention to a dancing, stargazing dreamer.
He made her feel much more at ease.

Firefly whispered to the spark, in girlish gossip,
Admitting to a love affair with the charmer, whose lips she could only describe as delicious.
But to the firefly’s chagrin, the bitter boy had demanded that their romance remain surreptitious.

The reading dreamer had a beautiful mind, his intelligence capturing spark’s glow.
But his lust for her, while with respect, was not something she cared to know.
Caught in a romance with the dreamer boy, while her desire for the charmer began to grow.

And so the game of cat and mouse resumed, until the spark succumbed to a kiss, too great was the desire.
The charmer told her there was no one else...
Poor firefly. Her lover was a liar.

A bruised plum mark seared into her neck
Dimmed the spark’s glow in burning shame.
Next day when told that charmer boy had left his firefly, she cursed herself, for she was the one to blame.

Such a tangled web of lies, all from the foolish girl’s mistake.
She’d tried to force a romance with her starry-eyed dreamer boy,
In finding that his feelings were one-sided, she’d tried to feel something new
With someone who treated her as if she were a plaything, just a toy.

And out of debt and friendship,
she comforted poor firefly, with words like balm, but all in vain:
For when the leaves turned yellow, charmer and firefly were in bed together, just the same.
But this time, charmer called it a dalliance, and but a pitiful echo of romance and sweetness remained.

Confusion thickened in the mapless maze, when once the firefly let slip
Ephemeral infatuation had overcome her in the spring when looking at the spark,
And all the lanterns of the maze were dimmed,
Wavering flickers in the hazy dark.

But truth came quickly to her mind,
As spark dreamed more and more of the firefly,
Spark loved her soul, her soft full lips,
And in doing so, she condemned her own youthful heart to die.

Oh such sweet torture fate had concocted for the foolish spark.
To crave the one she had betrayed.
To carry a love unrequited, all while watching the firefly’s innocent kindness be wasted away.

And this, dear readers, is the last chapter of this tale.
The spark left the dreamer, realizing her heart had been hiding behind a flimsy veil,
For she found herself more drawn to nymphs than gods.
And now there are three suffering heartbreak,
The dreamer missing his bright spark, the firefly wishing for just a simple date,
The spark knowing she’ll have to let a fate with the firefly slip away.
If only I had known my actions would cause you this much pain.

And so,
I’d like to apologize.
I can’t do it in person,
Cowardice being my excuse.
I can’t even call you by your proper name, because you can’t know this letter is for you.
So in my writing, you were a firefly.
A firefly burned by a spark.
And as a spark I’ve yet to learn,
Altruistic in every other path of life,
Not to yield to Selfishness:
The vice that doomed my soul to burn.
Time to let this go.
J Arturo Dec 2017
A little bird tried to fly through the screen door and I thought, 'if only there were more air up here'.

The view from the second story deck encompassed miles of low scrub hills, piñon, and was daily growing less hazy as the fires subsided. The little bird was dead. Was not even twitching or rolling or whatever idiot birds do to fight or hold onto life. Or maybe it was unconscious. If it was a head impact, it could just be out cold. I could take it in for a bit, see if it revives. But the brains of birds are very small... maybe not large enough to switch out of consciousness without damaging the whole system. It could wake up brain damaged: amnesic, whistling gibberish, unable to collaborate or co-worm-locate or sit on eggs or whatever other higher functions birds perform. Angry, all the time. Likely a burden and a danger to the community. Condemned to either death or a life of lonely suffering. I'd rather not be culpable for that.

Prospective buyers are arriving at four, the realtor as well, for a tour, so I grabbed a broom and swept the quiet body into the shaggy juniper that surrounded the house. Swept up with maple leaves that had settled on the porch since this time yesterday, together a mass of decomposing matter, under the railing and into the dark.

I'd spent a lot of time alone in the house on Grand. Watched nature slowly creep through the iron fence and into the faux-pond, up under the patio bricks, purple flowered and needley plants growing taller and more hostile daily. Increasing numbers of little brown birds mistaking the reflected sunset in the plate glass doors for real sky.

"If only there were more air up here." A little joke I repeat out loud while sweeping broken bodies into shrubs. The thickest places, where they wouldn’t be seen when (if) someone ever dropped by to view the house.


I don't live here, the house is soon to be foreclosed. But a friend of mine knew I needed a place to stay and offered this, his third home, empty of everything except a coffee maker, some landscaping tools, a few boxes that had yet to be moved. I have a twin sized mattress in what must have been a child's room: a strip of Denver Broncos wallpaper runs the circumference, every other surface painted complimentary blue.


The couple arrived at five. She wears a salmon coloured shawl over a white blouse. They’re performing the theatric act of young couples in love (with the idea of a larger house): she ecstatic over the seven jets in the master Jacuzzi tub, he hesitant about the people-paths in the wall-to-wall-carpet, the everpresent pastels we know were once in vogue but will take weeks and at least two layers of base to fully eradicate. It’s the realtor’s job to showcase the place but I often stand outside the plate glass windows of the living room, keeping an eye. Playing the role of groundskeeper because hitchhiker is so much less glorious.

So far it’s been the same. Always she with a genuine smile that will be gone forty minutes after she’s left the driveway. He, always in t-shirt and “trying to be casual” jacket calculating the square footage of each room, the viability of the fireplace. Opening cabinets, but not concerned with storage space. He wants to see if the brass hinges really have brass pins. Is it wood, linoleum? Look closely at his eyes and watch them dance across a virtual blackboard, adding up the gallons of primer and paint needed to cover up the colour mistakes of a before-his-decade.

  2

You can almost watch his eyes dart across the blackboard. A house is a house but the home must be shredded, burned, before making it yours.


But they all do this. A dozen or so now, this summer. And I spend a lot of time alone. Injecting my thoughts into people who think they know what they need next, before getting in a small car and checking out a properly closer to town. Making little jokes to myself as I sweep the porch. The isolation even maybe altering small parts of my self. The social parts, perhaps. I feel good, most days, but find myself repeating the same phrases: “****. Shower. Shave”, “If only there were more air up here.”, “I could learn to love a leopard”, even recently a little Old Testament, which like a ******* I’ve been taking to bed with increasing frequency and a growing selfish guilt, repeating,

“As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him.”


They won’t be back, but for the first time now there’s a deer in the yard. Meaning there must be a hole in the fence. A doe, and fawn too, and I can sit and stare with my broom in hand because my job is to sweep the deck. Dead birds and maybe rats, leaves of course, but with all the water the bank is wasting on this waste of a lawn, come deer: come all ye deer, come and eat. Maybe you will even eat the frighteningly thistly things. Regardless, in exchange for this room I was given a broom and deer are far too large to sweep.



When my student visa expired in Canada I left the country with no identification, five Canadian dollars, a five litre backpack mostly occupied by a camera, and in my mind some distillation of the romanticism from On The Road that I’d managed to power-read in a Heathrow bookstore four years before (lacking the pounds to actually purchase the book). I crossed the border via ferry, and entered the country without identification. I thought this was impossible but it turns out that when you have no time but your whole future ahead of you, and nowhere to get to anyway, insisting “I am a U.S. citizen and you need to let me into this country” does in fact work, if you repeat it enough, and are willing to wait. In my case border patrol even gave me a twenty note and a pat on the back before sending me on my way.


How I ended up sitting on the floor watching birds die, backlit by a desert sunset, in the mountains of New Mexico, is a long story, and to be honest the details have largely escaped me. I do remember I was reading Hemingway. “The Innocents Abroad”, and trying to find myself in any character I could lay my hand on. The word “Innocent” in the title, I suppose, far moreso any actual character, struck the most.


It’s the middle of The Great Recession. Or The Great Depression. The Great Compression. I can’t remember any longer which economic period this particular episode occupied (why can’t they name them more sensibly, like hurricanes?) Call it, then, The Great Introspection, as I narrated myself through the dozen rooms of a million-dollar house: the material self still alive and thriving inside in a self-congratulatory spiral over the personal ROI that left Canada on five dollars and put me, rent free, in a home worth that multiplied 200,000 times. The home where I first had my own key. The home where I learned to drink a glass of water before my morning coffee.

(Five years and $98,000 in college expenses later that was, easily, the best advice I’ve ever received.)


Eventually the phone was disconnected, the water, the power. The jacuzzi, though dry, was still a good place to lie and read. And the piñon and snakes, cacti and juniper, then inklings of pine trees came in steadily. When you would look at them they would freeze. But every morning something new was growing, some new pink flower popped up promisingly to crack the mortar in front of the door. Sweetly at first, then growing thorns, and I walking the perimeters saying “if only there were more air out here”, saying, “can not feel her anymore”, as if the decadent madness of the lawn could be silenced by speaking out loud. Trying to walk the edge of the fence, increasingly losing it in the encroaching bush, then resigning myself to the living room, the **** carpet flattening into a forest path while I impressed miles into that offensive floor.



words. seeds. thistles. marvin morales.


Sleeping on that filthy mattress, the Denver Broncos looking down, still optimistic about their upcoming trophy, or cup. Whatever it was that a bunch of cartoon horses could win. But the sweeping gave me solace, even though the growing thistles made the bricks uneven and caught in the bristles of the broom, leaving little shards of transplanted pink flowers emedded in the yellow polyethylene. I loathed them, but looking back I can see I played straight into their plan. Transplanting little seeds to new weak places in the cement, where they could grow tall again and **** up what little good was left of the land. Bring deer to eat them. Bring little idiot birds to pick the seeds out of the faeces, recycling with pure intent, and flying off into the bright light of sunset. Then crashing broken to the floor.

And like the lawn, like the porch, like what happens when you read Twain, something in me changed. “If only there were more air”, yes, but there is never enough air. Piling up among the deer, among the doe, among my now all-consuming pacing and talking to ghosts who don’t live here anymore, among the many birds who ate their worms and went on to hatch a dozen more, flew into a plate glass sunset, and were ignored.
9/22/2014
K Balachandran Feb 2016
Fierce faced warlord's
frantic antics were mere ploys
to hide from the world
his real face; the most
frightened was he, of the lot.
The bravest person is the one who is most calm, from inside out.
fear rules the world in many disguises, breeds more fear in turn.
the world would eventually learn to heal itself by meditative calm
Alan McClure Sep 2012
Little Johnny Piccolo is sitting in his room
and he’s gazing out his window on a stormy afternoon
He sees the clouds a-tumbling topsy-turvy through the gloom
on a wind that whips the winter through the trees
And there’s lashing licking raindrops streaming down the windowpane
So the scene is shimmer-shaking and can never stay the same
And wee Johnny’s all a-tremble with excitement in his veins
When Mummy enters, saying, “Johnny, please,

PICK up your lego now, PUT away your pens,
TIDY up your soldiers, and I WILL not ask again:
You NEED a tidy bedroom, I’m EXPECTING you to try!”
But Johnny stands defiant, shouting “WHY?!”

Well, Mummy is exasperated, horrified and cross,
she shakes her head in anger and she’s really at a loss
She calls into the corridor to show the boy who’s boss,
And Daddy enters, standing by her side.
“Now look here, boy,” his dad begins, “let’s lay it on the line:
I shouldn’t have to talk like this to any son of mine.
When Mummy gives an order you should smile and answer, ‘Fine!
I shall obey with pleasure and with pride!’

DON’T answer back, my boy, DO as you’re told
you MAY think it’s clever and you MAY think it’s bold
but BAD things can happen if you GIVE the wrong reply!”
But Johnny, slightly smiling, answers, “WHY?”

Well Daddy looks at Mummy now, and Mummy looks at Dad.
“D’you think that we should tell him?”  “Yes, I think we better had!”
Outside the weather worsens till it’s frighteningly bad
And dripping darkness gathers round the room
Daddy drops his voice as if he’s whispering in fear
Johnny has to hold his breath and turn his head to hear
“My boy,” his Daddy whispers, “there’s a fearsome buccaneer:
the Whyrate Captain, coming to your doom!

PLEASE pick your words, my lad, DON’T let him come!
TRY a little harder John, for ME and your mum!
IF the Whyrates come for you it REALLY is goodbye!”
But Johnny, rather shaken, answers, “Why?”

Oh, Heaven only help us!  What a stupid thing to say!
Johnny looks in shock, as both his parents back away
Their hands are up in panic as the black and stormy day
Begins to shake the window in its frame!
Then SMASH! goes the glass as lightning streaks across the sky
The wind goes whipping round them as his parents turn to fly
And through the crashing darkness Johnny hears a shrieking cry,
“We’ve got him lads!  The Whyrates stake their claim!”

IN through the window comes a GRINNING, swarthy man
a QUESTION mark the cutlass that he’s WAVING in his hand
“COME, lad,” he wheezes, “you are JUST our type of guy!”
And Johnny, frozen, barely whispers “Why?”

“Ya-HAR!” The captain bellows in a whirlwind of glee,
“I knew it lads, this boy’s the one!  We’re taking him to sea!”
And quick as thought he grabs him with a one and two and three
and bundles Johnny through the rising dark
Now, maybe you’d be frightened – I am sure I’d yell for aid
If a bunch of crazy Whyrates hauled me off upon a raid
But Johnny, little Johnny, he is not one bit afraid –
Instead, he thinks, “At last! I’ve made my mark!”

OUT of the garden now and INTO the night
BACK through the gloom his bedroom DISAPPEARS from sight
OFF to the shoreline where a SAIL obscures the sky
And stitched in silver letters – simply, ‘WHY?’

Now Johnny doesn’t know it, but these Whyrates he has met
are about the most notorious of villains you could get
and many weary kingdoms are unlikely to forget
the day the Whyrates sailed into their shores
And what is it that makes them just so deadly and so feared?
Is it all the men they’ve murdered?  All the children they have speared?
Well, no – in fact the truth of it is really rather weird:
They simply ask what’s not been asked before!

WHY should the people have to BOW before the king?
WHY should the government rule EVERY little thing?
WHY should so much be owned by OH so very few?
And no-one anywhere has any clue!

And so it is in Bannerland, a country miles away
Whose population struggles just as Johnny’s whisked away
The lives that people lead there – well, I hardly like to say –
you can hear them weeping, wailing in the streets!
They live around the palace where the crazy King does lie,
just taking – never giving – in a bed that’s warm and dry
His dungeons break the bedrock and his turrets split the sky
while folks below must work so he can eat.

SUCH is their misery that NOBODY has thought
to ASK of anyone how this has COME to be their lot
When OUT of the east upon a FOAMING ocean swell
The Whyrates land, and Johnny’s there as well!

Well word gets to the Palace, and the King jumps from his bed
Shivering and shaking, comfort overcome by dread
“Burn the ship!” he hollers, “and I want the captain’s head!
We’ll have no questions here in Bannerland!”
But up from the harbour Whyrates bundle by the score
A ripple of inquiry from the palace to the shore
And Bannerlanders flock to them, all asking more and more,
determined that it’s time to make a stand.

“WHY should we help a man who TREATS his people thus?
WHY should we think of one who NEVER thinks of us?
WHY should we hold him up, when REALLY, he should fall?”
The Whyrates crackle-cackle through it all.

Well Johnny stands in wonder and delight at what he sees
As questions shake the kingdom like a tempest through the trees
And Johnny thinks, “You know, this is my realm of expertise,
I think I’ll go and see what happens now!”
And there, before his very eyes a miracle begins
The palace starts to crumble as the King goes mad within
And the jangling of treasure can be heard above the din
as gold and silver spill across the ground!

GOLD for the beggar-men, GOLD for the slaves
JEWELS for the serving girls in SPARKLE-jingled waves
FOOD for the hungry and CLOTHES for them to wear
(Of course, the Whyrates take a modest share!)


Well that was just the start, of course, of Johnny’s long career
He travelled with the Whyrates out to countries far and near
Starting revolutions everywhere they would appear
A simple question, then it’s back to sea
But when at last he wearied of the buccaneering days
He travelled bravely homewards through the tumble tossing waves
To Mummy, and to Daddy, and that’s where our Johnny stays,
A most obliging son, they both agree!

And IF he should grow weary, and BEGIN it all once more
and START to grumble grumpily when ASKED to sweep the floor
say “WHY should I go back to life the WAY it always was?”
Well, Mum and Dad just smile, and say, “Because!"
For children, obviously!
C S Dec 2013
He told us the truth.
Writing isn't so hard, really.
You just sit with a pen and paper,
And bleed.
Maybe pounding my head
Isn't the right way to elicit bleeding.
But it did bring the kind of headache
That reminded me what I had to bleed for in the first place.
White House.
White papers.
Black suits.
Black president.
For change.
No better.
They pretend to have a headache, but their incompetence leaves us with headaches we're too young and shiny to deserve.
Aren't we?
Filled up
With life,
Potential, hope.
Why do we shoulder their burden?  
The black suits in the white house made their own headache.
It doesn't matter to us.
Until it does.
Stimulus.
Filibuster.
Health-care.
Bail-out.
Drowned-out.
S­hut-down.
Shout-down.
Bring-us-down.
We could be on our way to the top.
Mess-up.
Then complain about the headache it brings them.
What about us?
Because we're the ones affected.
Then is the worst part.
They do it frighteningly quick.
So easy, too.
Give-up ,
And leave for us to
Fix-up.
We have to shout.
Make you listen.
Stand-up.
One-two.
Thousands, millions.
Make them listen.
March-up.
Three-four.
Slogans, protests.
Make them change.
Head-up.
Five-Six.
Defeat, Regret.
See the impossibility.
Sit-down.
Seven-eight.
They won't listen.
**** the system.
**** the suits.
**** the house.
**** growing up.
Because you know,
Now we're grown.
So this is the headache
They talked about.
So this is why
We spill our blood.
Where's the cancel button?
How to delete?
It's a cycle,
Don't you see.
You can't wipe the memory.
Why we thought
We could ever get rid
Of the headache…
Beats me.
This is a spoken word poem I plan to perform sometime soon, so just putting the words on paper is like asking a tent to assemble itself by putting it on the ground, but better than nothing.
We hardly fit with our jagged edges
and our heavy breathing, our holes
don't even coincide. Our symmetry
is imperfect, as imperfection can be.
We can't call it home. We're too
edgy to ever do so. It doesn't even
come close to that feeling of
comfort and love. We're not in love,
nor are we friends by any means.
Hardly acquaintances. We wouldn't
lift a finger a finger to help the other
No, this isn't home, love or friendship.
Our weapons are still on us. The poison's
hidden in the secret compartments of the
rings we gifted each other. We never
believed in anything but practicality.
I specially sharpened the blades I
brought with me. I know he loaded
some 'special' bullets in his gun.
We deal like this, like rival gang leaders
It's the only thing that has remained
the same through all these years,
frighteningly comforting in it's stagnancy.
It doesn't even come close to companionship.
It's definition lies somewhere between
hatred, addiction and need. Quiet intimacy
will prevail between us and anyone who walks in,
feels like they're intruding on something a bit
more private and clandestine. Though no one
notices, our spines don't relax even once.
Helpful critique welcomed. :)
Evynne Apr 2013
After I met you
I discovered how dangerous of a thing
Eye contact is
Frighteningly dangerous
But lovely
So *very, very lovely
Lauren Sage Jan 2014
If there's one thing I fear will always be a mystery to me, it is with the ease that some people fall asleep.

Like, seriously just lie down and that's it. That's it?

That's it.


It's 4am and when I lie down my mind is still racing a million miles an hour, even when I'm so tired I can't even walk straight. And I check every limb for a sense of weighted-down, for that sleepy-fuzzy feeling in my knees and calves, tense abdomen, fixed shoulders, arms crossed like a saint, or flung up, whatever feels right, trying to find the holy grail of comfort that may or may not exist depending on what night and how long until I have to get up. 5 hours. 4 hours. 2 hours and 46 minutes.


It's the sound of an entire town sleeping, the privilege of hearing the secret noises that houses make when nobody else is lucid, praying your mind will wander, willing yourself to wander into it, setting traps, trying to find solace when you're left out of sleep, when everyone else sleeps, and it's tantamount to the feeling of being picked last for a soccer game in elementary school.


I used to imagine making soup. I would imagine my feet on the ground, planted firmly, gravity on me vertically instead of horizontally. The gritty tile, barefoot. Savor every step to the drawer, rummage for the can opener. On your tip-toes to reach the can of mushroom soup on the second-highest shelf, turn the can around to see the label and make sure it's the right one. Get a pan out. Scratch a flake of dried food off the metal side. Open the can, pull the little slice of paper off the jagged rim, pour in the water and mash the solid with a fork. Turn on the stove. I would be asleep by now. Or I would have wandered into a variant scenario. The saucepan was full of water and dead flies. I had to drive to Giant Tiger for more dish soap. I was a kid again, when I was wearing a swimsuit and anxious they wouldn't let me in. I needed a watergun. It was summer. It was finally a dream. Free of reality.


But it isn't. I feel my head heavy, the grinding feeling on the inside of my forehead. I ease myself with facts that hold little solace. Insomniacs have higher IQs. Insomniacs function better. Insomniacs succeed. You know what? Insomniacs have higher rates of breast cancer. Insomniacs have frighteningly higher rates of depression, anxiety, memory problems, automobile accidents, functional issues, all because they soup trick didn't work one time cause I tried it with tomato, all because I woke up too late this morning, it's 4:30 and I have 2 hours and 30 minutes to sleep and is it even worth it?


When your head falls back into the pillow and you feel the muscle unfurl, the slight pain that loosens into nothing, warm legs, heavy knees, weighed at your ankles, arms crossed like a saint, flung up, fetal with your knees grinding into each other, your hips off-kilter, and your mind still races a million miles a minute, dances around every trap you set, your stomach clenches in panic at nothing, you hear the secret noises that houses make when nobody else is lucid, you see the orange haze of the sky from the streetlights of the city next over, you've seen so much half-light the color is saturated into the skin under your eyes, bleary blue, sharp blue, blue raspberry kool-aid powder, half-everything and you know you've lost the fight, it's over, it's morning.



Can you dream during the day?
Can you stop your head from lolling on the desk?
Can you finish the assignment when you're ankle-deep in IQ?
Can you simply get into bed and go to sleep?


That has to be the worst advice I've every gotten from multiple people.


"Just go to sleep."

I can't describe the dark, moreso how it fades away to blue or hazy orange depending on whether we're rural or urban. I've not slept in a hundred places. I've not slept while a thousand different birds chirped and it blended into some sort of organized chaos and I can still hear the most persistent of them to this day. I've not slept in light-polluted cities where the falling snow was tinted orange and the closest thing to a star was the airplane that I mistaked for Venus. I've not slept in my boyfriend's bed where I woke him up to half-stroke my hair at 2am when he'd been asleep since 12. I've not slept in camp rooms where I  lay there in the darkness, scared to wake them up, surprised when the prettiest girl snored the loudest. I've not slept on couches, after ***, before scaling 30 foot poles in some version of a trust exercise, above and all else in my own bed, and you can just lie there and go to sleep?


You can just lie there and miss all that?
Sam Jan 2018
and here are the reasons why no one tells you to go be a third cultured person:

its not easy.

When you are one of us,
different and foreign are not even a blip on your radar,
(because my life has always been detachment - meeting and smiling and beginning to say "hi", only to have to wave goodbye.)
you will always be different and foreign, belonging to a place is a wish and not a reality, home has always meant people as opposed to a place (not that people are at all constant).
leaving is normal too, just pack your bags and go go go, doesn't matter if you never come back, onto a new place now, and goodbyes are hard -- but seldom unexpected.

when you are one of us, you are shifting and turning and never never staying, always changing and moving forward, frighteningly frighteningly fast, all impermanence and hopeful, but broken promises-- you will perhaps stay in one place for some period of time.
(you will never belong)
Livingdeadgirl Apr 2015
“No one understands me. I don’t want any of these guys; they just won’t leave me alone!” I said to my best friend, Sarah Heart.
“Well, Μαρία, try not to look so nice!”
I am 17; long black hair, hazel eyes, and deep red lips, am about 5’8”, and have unusually pale skin. “I don’t ever look nice, and you know it! Besides, you’re the one who looks great, one of the best in Femenino.” Sarah is 16, long blond hair, blue eyes, pale pink lips, is about 5’, and has very tan skin. “They only like me because I am almost of age.” Here on Femenino, when a girl turns 18, she is ready to be wed. The guys are born with their wings patterns. When the girl decides to marry a certain person, she will mirror the design the guy has after they both say their vows.
“Μαρία, why do you always talk down about yourself?” Sarah said.
“I don’t know, but can we discuss this tomorrow? I’m tired.”
“Ok, but tomorrow we’ll talk about who you’re going to marry. You only have 1 week left to decide.”
“Ok, Sarah,” I yawned, “good night, sweet dreams.”
“Yeah, I’ll have sweet dreams, of the prince marrying me!” she said with a devilish grin. No one knew the prince’s real name, so we just called him ‘prince’.  We laughed at that, “but, good night, girl, we will definitely talk tomorrow.” I fell into a fitful sleep, plagued with the question of who I was to marry in 1 week.
Raven black hair, one eye brown, one eye black, tall, tan, and body like a warrior.” kiss me, Μαρία” he said, “Never leave me, please.”
“I won’t leave you, ever, I swear.”
I woke up, not knowing who the man was. ‘Well, all I know is, it’s time to make a new potion.’ “Ok, let’s see, a bit of baby’s breath, wild flower, lilac blossoms, and a pinch of rose petals. Ok, add them in boiling water, mmmmm that smells good.  Hmm, now, before the dream with him, what did I do with the potion? Oh, yeah, I dabbed it behind the ears, and everyone was happy to see me, even, surprisingly, the girls.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t try it, because some of the girls have never liked me, and I’m probably going to forget what I did, and wonder why they are happy to see me all day, I’m always forgetting things, that’s why I put all my spells in a book, after all.” I mumbled to myself. I went to write it down, calling it the ‘Like Me’ spell. Ok, I have the ‘Love’ potion, a few body, hair, and ****** changing spells, a ‘Find it’ spell, a spell to bind the heart to a specific person. Oh, cute, I still have the spell I made when I was seven, so my heart wouldn’t break if I found a guy, but I didn’t cast it because then I would be sad in the end if I never found the guy I had asked for.
‘Oh, boy, I’m going off to dreamland again. Sigh, will I ever find my kind of guy?’ Well, the only thing that could be worse is the prince picking for me, well, except that we were born on the same day, but at different times, he was born about an hour before me in a room next to me, and since he’s royalty, he chooses a wife before I choose a husband, and I will be mortified since I have to stand next to him, but I doubt anyone would want me as a wife because I’m, in my Aunt Feranium’s words, “an inexcusable excuse of an abomination, no one could possibly want to even be near me, much less marry me”. Well, Aunt Feranium, you’ll get to see if your right or not in 1 week.
Well, today I have to go meet up with some of the guys here, and get some ingredients for my potions and spells. I’m hoping at least one of the guys is ok with how I am and who I am. I guess I’ll meet with guys before I get my ingredients, so I can cheer myself up afterwards.
I met with three guys for the first half hour. Each and every one of them was wealthy and smug. All I could think was, ‘I can’t wait to get away from here and finish up talking to some other guys.’ One guy, named Damien was saying, “When we get married, you will love your life.” Another named Lucas said, “No, when WE get married you will be in the laps of luxury, far more than either of these two could ever give you, Μαρία.” The third guy, named Jordan said, “We all have wealth, so why don’t we let Μαρία choose for herself?”
They all turned to me and looked expectantly. I smiled politely and said, “Well, I have quite a few more people to talk with, so I must not say who of you fine,” and I almost choked on that, “gentlemen. I’m sorry to say, I must go now to meet the others. Good day.” I smiled, got up and left before they could argue/complain/persuade me to stay longer.
I went to meet one of my friends, who was being forced by his mother to court/marry me. I saw him and waved. “Hey, Alejandro, what’s up?”
He did a slight nod of his head, telling me his mom was nearby, eavesdropping on us. He said anyway, “Not much, but you look lovely today. How are you?”
I smiled, because he was not usually like this when his mom wasn’t around. “I am fine. You don’t look so bad yourself.” He blushed, which made me smile, since he only sees me as his one of his best friends, which is the same way I feel about him. I nodded to him, letting him know his mom can no longer hear us, or see us. ‘Goodness, I love being able to do spells with little effort. I just wonder where his mom thinks we went.’
“Thanks Μαρία. So who’d you have to deal with first?”
“Three rich guys.”
He rolled his eyes. “Let me guess. Full of themselves and saying who you were going to marry?”
“Yea, well, except the one, he actually asked ME who I’d marry. It was interesting, since no one would usually care what I thought.”
“What did one of them look like?”
“One, named Jordan, who asked my opinion, had short brown hair, tan skin, about 5’ 10”. A second, Damien, has medium ***** blonde hair, dark skin, about 6’. The third, Lucas, had sort of long blonde hair, sort of pale skin, about 5’9”. Why?”
“I think they are following you.” He pointed behind me, and when I turned to see, there they were, a few tables over.
I looked back to Alejandro, smiled, and called for a waiter. “Excuse me, could you send a note and a round of drinks to those three gentlemen over there?” I pointed to the three guys, and gave the waiter 50 coins, and a tip of 20 coins, which is our currency. He smiled and lightly bowed, for the most a waiter would usually get as tip was 5-10 coins.
“What is your note?”
I told him, “Chill out and have a fine day.” He nodded and did as I asked.
When the guys got their drinks, I told Alejandro to come on. We left them there, and made sure they didn’t follow. We got to the market district, because, in truth, Alejandro was the only other person I was to meet. We got there and I showed him a list of ingredients I needed. The list went as follows:
Dew Drops
Sunlight
Sun flowers
Fresh Baby Laughter
Freshly Fallen Snow
Tear of Love
Hair of a Beauty
Sob of a Broken Heart
A Child’s Doll
Petal of a Fully Bloomed Rose
Lilac
Babies Breathe
Final Breath of the Dying
Rose Thorns

He whistled low at how much I needed.  I smiled; because that was the least I needed in quite a few months. We went about getting my stuff and just hung out, until we came upon Sarah, who knew me and Alejandro did not like each other, but teased us saying we did all the same.
She smiled and said, “Hey lovebirds. What goes on? Oh, are you guys finally realizing you’re meant for each other and going to marry each other?”
We said in unison, “No! We are not.” Alejandro scowled while I laughed.
“Sure sounds like you’re meant for each other to me!” Sarah laughed while Alejandro’s scowl grew longer.
I said, “Sarah stop teasing, poor Alejandro couldn’t possibly take all the scowling.” ‘And the heart break, since he’s in love with you Sarah, you just never see. I’m about to tell you straight up.’ I looked over at Alejandro and smiled, since he didn’t tell me, he didn’t know I knew, even though it was written plainly on his face, he thought he was discreet.
He looked down at his feet, letting the hurt pass over his face for a brief second. “I need to get the rest of my ingredients from my list. Okay, let’s see, just a few rose thorns is all I need to get.” We went to go get them. And there, a few feet away, were the three guys again. I pointed them out to Alejandro, and he rolled his eyes. I walked straight up to them.
They acted surprise to see me, I said, “Why are you following me?”
They were all flustered, but Jordan said, “We weren’t following you!”
“Oh, really, you three, follow me, Alejandro, Sarah, you can come to.” We went into an alley way and I continued, “So you three just happened to be at the same café only a few tables away, and then be just a few feet away from me?” They nodded in unison, and I got raged. I used a spell and had them pinned against the wall behind them and asked angrily, “Who are you working for?”
They looked fearful, and Lucas said stammering, “You ought to stop, ‘cause there are witnesses.”
I looked at him, “They are the only thing keeping me in check, you idiot, now, answer my questions, why were you following me and who are you working for?”
They looked at each other, then at me, and swallowed loudly and hard. Damien said, “Sheesh, when we saw you, we thought you’d be no problem to us, but dang! We might as well tell her since she got us, and ‘cause I don’t know her limits.”
They all nodded their heads, before looking frighteningly at me. Damien continued, “We are guards, some of the finest, and I now see we are some of the most arrogant.” I rolled my eyes.
“Why were you following me?”
“We were told to act as the people that we were told to be. It seems your something of interest.”
I glared at them, “You’re lying.” They were wide eyed with fright.
“No! That’s all that we were told!”
“You two might, but he was told more, and he’s not telling.” I glared at him and came close to his face. I looked in his eyes and asked as calmly as I could, “What are you hiding?”
He would not answer, so I let them go, and said, “Don’t follow me anymore! Just leave me alone.”
They stayed in place, frozen with fear, but Jordan piped up, “Wow, with your strength in spells, Μαρία, would you ever consider joining the guard? We really need you and your strength.”
I glared at them and said, “Go!”
They ran, still not sure of my limits when I was mad. My friends burst out in laughter after the guards were well out of ear shot. They said in halting gasps, “I can’t believe you bluffed them while you were mad!”
I smiled, knowing I wasn’t someone that could harm anyone. When I get angry at someone, I always try to bluff them, I guess I’ve either gotten better, or they were not good at telling my bluff. “Well at least we learned something out of this whole episode. Now, let’s get my ingredients and get back to my house, I had a dream about a new spell last night.” I felt a pair of eyes on me, but when I looked, there was nothing there. I shrugged and thought, ‘I must be getting paranoid.’
When we got back to my house, they helped me put my ingredients away, and I showed them my new ‘Like Me’ spell. “I don’t know how long it lasts, so I won’t let it be used on either of you.” I felt the eyes on my back, I turned and saw nothing. “Do either of you two feel like someone’s watching us?”
They shook their heads no, Alejandro said, “Maybe you should do a spell for protection over yourself for whoever’s watching you.”
I nodded, and found one that was simple to do but difficult to break through and lasted a long time. I cast it over my friends as well, who smiled when they felt the spell cover them as well. Sarah said, “Ok, now, Alejandro, shoo, me and Μαρία have a few things to talk about.” She grinned wickedly, and so he left.
He said, “Bye.” And got out as quick as he could.
I looked at her, “Now why’d you do that for? He doesn’t even count as a marriage choice; it’d be too much like marrying a brother.”
She shrugged, “Does it matter? This is girl talk, now spill who you like.” She looked at me expectantly.
“I really don’t know, I’ll just go with my gut when the time comes, okay?”
She sighed dramatically, “Fine!”
I laughed, “You know, it’s not your time to pick, you have a few years, and more than a few admirers.”
She flipped her hair and laughed lightly, “I can’t help if guys like me, Μαρία!”She shrugged, "That's my image, Μαρία, I have to keep up with it, or I'll be ruined!" I laughed.
"You can be so dramatic. You know that?"
"Yea, and now I know you can be to. ‘They are the only thing keeping me in check, you idiot', nice one, especially with the idiot, it added to your tone."
I looked at the floor sheepishly. "It just came to mind, and I went with it. Was I that convincing to you?"
"Are you kidding, I thought you would of killed 'em on the spot! Your bluff is way better Μαρία."
I smiled, "Thanks Sarah."
We went about our own thoughts for an hour, until it was time for Sarah to leave. "I'll see you tomorrow Μαρία."
"Okay, see ya." I flicked my wings out, mostly because I still felt like someone was watching me. I thought about my wings, and how soon I'll have a design. I remembered a type of fairy that used to exist long ago. They were called the florescent fairies. Unfortunately they died off. They all had wing patterns of their own. Even the females had their own patterns that they kept after marriage. Their wings were always so big and elaborate.
I felt my wings tingling, so I went to my front door. There on my doorstep was the guard that I knew as Jordan. He was in his uniform. I said, “What do you want, Jordan, if that is really your name?”
He cleared his throat. He was afraid, but put up a brave front and said, “I came for you were summoned by the head of the royal guard.”
I rolled my eyes, “And why would I be summoned this late at night?”
His bravado was fading when he said, “Because the head of the royal guard wants to see you now.”
“Why?”
His bravado was completely gone now and he was shaking in his boots, “He just wants you to come.”
I rolled my eyes again, turned out the lights, and locked my house up. “Lets’ get this done and over with. I do need to sleep like others’, you know.” Then I felt magic welling up around me. I found them easily with my magic, and brought them out in front of me. I threw them all into a pile in front of me. “Tell me three good reasons I shouldn’t put you all in a magic hold that would leave you motionless for the rest of the night.”
They were all struggling, and I was holding Jordan with a glare. “I am tired, and would not regret it. And you all need to learn to hide your magic. That’s how I knew where you were.”
They all tried to plead for me to let them go, but with a wave of my hand, they fell silent. Jordan said stammering, “They were only supposed to be back-up in case you wouldn’t come.”
I waved my pointer finger side to side, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, not nice to play tricks with me.” I used my magic to send the pile of guards back to the palace, while I looked at Jordan and said, “I told you to leave me alone.” I flicked my hand at him, and he went flying back to the palace. I went back into my house, went to my room, and after taking a hot shower, went to bed.
The next morning, I got up and ready for the day. I was about to leave my home when my wings tingled. Someone was at the door. I looked through a peep hole and saw my friends, Sarah and Alejandro. I opened the door, and they came in talking at me. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, so I said, “Slow down, now what?”
They started laughing. Sarah said, “Apparently, you gave all the guard’s a scare. What did you do?”
I looked at them, confused for a second, and then I remembered, and told them the events of last night. They laughed, so I said, “What? I was extremely tired, I wasn’t taking their crap.” That just made them laugh harder.
Alejandro said, “Remind me not to get on your bad side, Μαρία.” He chuckled and said, “Can you teach me some of your **** kicking moves?”
I grinned devilishly and made to look like I was going to use it on him and said “Sure,” and mocked what I did with the guards without using my magic. We all laughed. There was a knock on the door. I rolled my eyes and yelled, “Who is it?”
Whoever it was just knocked again. I went to the door and looked through the peep hole. There was no one there. I motioned my friends back, away, and I used a searching spell. I calmly looked all around my house, then finally smiled. I opened my door fast and
Comments appreciated/wanted!!
jad May 2013
I trust much too easily
Much too frighteningly
Yet, if I could only trust one thing
If one day I became a cynic and grew senile
If only one place i were to place my trust
Then I trust only Future.
Past is manipulative,
He has only false consistency
He tells my mother he will have me home by 12
And I find my self spending the night.
Present is only sneaky
And finds joy in the fright that she gives small children.
Not to be trusted...
While the Future,
The Future is noble....
I believe to be trustworthy.
Always pulling through,
when the Present is stabbing you in the back.
The Future will always be there,
Pulling through on the promises made of a better tomorrow.
The Future is a rolemodel.
Guiding the Present on her path to righteousness.
The only one I trust is the Future.
Even now, when I trust everyone.
I only truly trust the Future.
Because the Future has control over everything,
We can conquer everything,
If only with trust in the Future,
The Future can end this poem
however would make the biggest impac.......
Madeline Feb 2015
INTP
Introvert
Intuitive
Thinker
Perceiver
Highly intellectual but
score lower than expected on
standardized tests
Fascinated with the world
Plan maker and
abandoner
Frighteningly unemotional and seemingly moves on from devastating events rapidly
Acts self absorbed but
truly cares for people under the cold exterior
Often feels detached from the world
Unable to articulate great idea and thoughts exactly
Loves to argue and debate
for learning sake but
some don’t see it as
friendly banter
Called the mad scientist without
convention
An absent-minded wonderfully built learner,
That INTP
Akemi Aug 2013
The bleached mask reflects the words
A new white glow over black hurts
Brooding bones, charred and cracked
Buried with himself between

Thought he could
Learn to shrug some strangers’ names
Off

The skin grows thick
The scales slough
The eyes go blind, the fingers drop
Before he’s had it all
Before he’s had

But aches betray
And masks fall
The smile breaks when teeth are worn
I think he’s had some terrifying thoughts
Would no longer recognise his face at all

Because . . .
Some black eyes never open up
And blue deaths carve a hole no one can fill
The red lust leaves us chilled
Breathless, to temporary emerald pills

Some crimson lips just chew and chew
And violet pupils grow then still
The pale skin tightens its caress
Over awkward bones and burnt out chests

How frighteningly
Cruel
Our capacity
To ****
And ****
And ****
11:48pm, August 7th 2013

Cruelty is not restricted to those in high power. It seems even the smallest people crave it, and exert it on others.

Don't be cruel to others.
staying the night
up high
in rainclouds
& I feel safe now
when I look down
the wide world
is so small.

we are all
tiny specimen
divinely dissected
subdivided into
lively sections
by wants by fires
by greed by needs
& secret desires;

one nation
under god’s feet
tired slaves perspire
unnecessarily
for possession
& obsess over  
what they each acquire.

it is you, it is I,
and we are
frighteningly alike.

my attention’s quite untidy
all the time
my mind gets redirected
it walks like hell
& talks like heaven.

I am not well
I never have been.

but this hex is a blessing,
it’s too **** precious.

we are spilling
into the ocean
over the edges.
The Land is dead and
has been, days now.
I find it kinda pleasant &  
I wonder if
they’ll ever
get around to
disinfecting the nest
of decaying flesh,
before it infests the rest,
y’know, the ones that got left.

rot is a pox
spread by proxy
& is not bonded
by neither
lock nor key; that’s like,
‘**** what you got
**** what you be
**** what you thought
what you think
what you see.’

*******,
**** me,
**** everyone,
**** everything.

it’s lovely, it’s lovely.

I even think it’s kinda funny,
I laugh at nothing.
Oh, the irony
Voodoo Wizdumb
Andje Aug 2014
Everything I've waited is so frighteningly real
Everything I feel is meaningless and fake

-

I've been chased from my dreams too many times

And longing has been my only
feeling

For too much time

*And I forgot who I really am
The Human Being Jan 2018
Everything in life is so beautifully precious, yet so frighteningly temporary.
Joan Karcher Aug 2012
emotionally drained
past calling back
echoing all around
haunting and foreboding
threatening to reemerge
or is it just past expectations
past fears,
that I place over the present
though these words
are frighteningly familiar
too close to heart
to ignore
too close to past pain
past insecurities
to not worry,
not worry that it is
all too true
not worry that
the pattern will continue
that it really is cause of me -
the mine shaft is
closing all around
K Balachandran Oct 2014
The shadows get frighteningly long,
he watches in silence like a painter
whose mixed up colors in the palette
are found to be of no use, the pictures
are muddled by inept handling of colors.

once colorful skyline is suddenly
pecked in to pieces by winds,
the belligerent evening birds in discord;
the child playing in the park now gives up
her carefully structured house,
receiving cues from swarms of darkness,
looks at her mother as if she isn't  interested,
anymore, as if feeling the encroaching loneliness.

"Evening is a spoiler of beautiful things"
he jots down on the page of the day in his mind
"it's  enticing beauty is just a masquerade"
a truth he would vouch as a fact of life.

It's time to be back home, the dusk falls
holding mom's finger she goes
back to the lighted space of warmth
that has an assurance of kiss any moment,
on his way she sends a smile, just a stranger
till two days before, as if saying "See you tomorrow"
this little one is a fresh guest of breeze
a pure blessing, sunshine rare in winter.

This rusted garden bench knows him well,
the fragrance of mango blossoms from a land distant
in a season long past still spreads the scent of musk
touches somewhere deep, brings
memories from a land so far,  a land where
evenings were spent under the shades of mango trees
in exhilaration, awaiting the mango fruit season.

A change in the lighting of sky overturns everything.
time administers it's hidden poison drop by drop,
the memories of an evening from afar asks in a feeble voice
"Will the child come to the park to play tomorrow again?"
"can you get your shoe off of that chair please?"
i've been lost in your magic. i had forgotten.
still, i don't get in trouble. ever.
you laugh. it makes me laugh, out loud. unfiltered laughter.
he's still standing over us, waiting for me to move.
he's awkward. so tall he might blow away in the wind.
adult acne. needs a shave. eyebrow arched in distaste.
and we are invincible. untouchable.
frighteningly adult and unbearably childish.

fast forward
20 minutes.

"i'm not letting go."
my heart bursts a little in my chest.
you made me beg for that hug
but i melt into your arms all the same.
i like the way your clothes smell
and the way your cheek scratches mine.
i like the shape of your hands
when they are on me, touching, holding.
it's not perfect, but it's whole.
and i haven't been whole in years.

we were whole. that was whole, there.
frighteningly adult and unbearably childish.
perfectly exhilarating.
Bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity
And are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--
Is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic & optical white rooms,
Cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations
Manned and ready,
Standing at attention, saluting
British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click,
Ramrod straight and cheerful:
“Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous,
Lusting for something,
Anything to process.
Any memory or image,
Lyric or construct, be they short-term
Dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all
In deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious,
Most vaporous; others--the scary ones—
Eidetic: frighteningly detailed,
Extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts;
Recollected so richly, rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, & olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.
The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless places & things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma
Enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from cloudy storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral
Repositories and vaults, all the while,
The entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that servile British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data,
In batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working
In seamless syncopation, self-referential,
At times paradoxical and infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but
There’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
The curse & minefield for the cerebral:
Metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
It is the information technology of thought
That baffles me, adaptive & profound
As any evolution posited by Darwin.
Beyond the wetware in my skull
Dwells an entirely new operating system.
My mental & cultural landscape are now one,
Machines connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:

"It is the information technology of who I am. It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape. It is the machinery connecting the two."

This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition—your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear.
LISTEN: the machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or
Not connected at all.
Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools
I’ve been using to shape & make
Sense of my environment, have reared up,
Turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain,
Remaking my central nervous system.
Turning me into something simultaneously
More and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin, septic now,
A cluster of implanted sensors.
Content: currency made increasingly
More valuable as time passes,
Served up by & serving the interests of
A pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human;
Simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn:
HUMANOID

(Excerpt from "Confessions of a Hopi *** Israelite")
Jen Jordan Mar 2016
I've been keeping a journal of trips I wish you'd taken with me.
An album of photos you should have been in.
A list of nights I wish you'd spent in my passenger seat.

I've been collecting all of our favorite pieces of myself in a mason jar;
Fireflies to leave by your bedside so if you wake up in the middle of the night you won't feel alone.

I know too well the hourglass purgatory that is your absence;
Frighteningly similar to the sensation of waking up in empty darkness, unable to remember falling asleep.
Mia Mehnaz Mar 2019
Time had evaporated into the dingy air of the hospital
Day merged to night, night to day.
Sleep turned to endless bouts of prayer and whispering into your ear. Whispering that it wasn't your time yet,
That everyone was waiting for you to come back.
All that came back to my ears
were the incessant beep of machinery
Machinery that was your lifeline,
that kept your beautiful heart beating.
Coiled and crimped tubes running in and out of your body
And you looked frighteningly ethereal;
A ghostly angel in the place of my sister.
A tangle of exterior veins; pumping foreign liquids into you
And though I loathed the thought of those cold substances
Stealing away the warmth from your blood, they kept you safe.
They ushered you away
From that distant white shore,
We have come to call death.
Until one day they simply could not save you any longer.
But there was a lingering flame
Amongst the grief that was waiting to pounce
Because? You were fighting.
Like a soldier you were fighting,
With your bare hands struggling against the predator called death.
You fought with every last ounce of will in your body,
Until God called your name,
And you grew your wings, and you left.
Visitors come and go
An endless flurry of desperate hugs
Fairy-like kisses upon my cheek; soaked, saturated in tears.
Because that was the first time,
I had ever felt absolutely, completely, powerless.
I was shrinking back into a shell of myself,
Speak when spoken to I reminded myself.
And through the night I would choke back my fear,
And I sang to you. Childhood melodies.
And they seemed so far away; out of my grasp.
I clutched a strangers hand
Your hand, was delicate and soft
This hand was swollen; foreign.


But I didn’t let go. Not yet.
I ran my hand through your hair,
And I didn’t get the scent, of lavender and soap.
I retched. Inhaling something harsh.
Because as I put one finger to your head,
It came away with blood.
Still.
You layed so, so, still.
Your chest rising and falling; with breaths that weren’t yours.
And I still,
Still, read you stories and talked to you-
In that scarce hope that you would wake up,
And I could hug you for real.
Not having to heave myself over you;
Being delicate, in fear of choking you.
But I still hoped.
God, I hoped with everything in me that you would make it.
I prayed on my knees,
Screaming in a silent room that,
I would abandon my faith- if God stole you from me.
And yet, stolen from me you were.
The doctors were hopeless,
Reminding us- the damage is irreversible.
If not today, you would die tomorrow.
But I would not desert you.
I still hoped.
I hoped.
I kept hoping.
And the next day came.


The day before you died.
The white sun broke through the window,
Embraced the room and clarified.
The shadows that the limbs,
Of the simple oak tree make on the hospital wall;
Stark and bellowing.
The leaves are all gone.
The leaves and the colour are gone.
The tree is devoid of youth and joy;
And in the tree- I see you.
It hurts.
You are the mannequin of a sleeping girl.
But the heaviness of you,
As though your insides have turned to lead.
I believe it is lucid now,
A dying girl.
Trapped in a coma.
Tomorrow, you’ll be gone.

My sister’s eyes are closed.
I pull her closer,
Inhale what remnants of her pure scent is left.
I want to hold her, In this world.
Keep her close,
Let her never to leave- not yet.
Her hair brushes my cheek.
She is still sleeping-
Why is she still sleeping?
And then,
I begin to cry
I do not stop,
And I lay my sister down.

On the white sheet.
My sister,
Her eyes flutter open.
And sees shadows,
Sparrows on the wall.
Flocking to the naked limbs of the simple oak tree.
She smiles,
A small, beautiful smile.
And she points to the shadows on the wall and says


“It’s okay now, look, the leaves are returning to the tree.”
This is probably the most personal thing I have ever written. The most raw, the most real account of my sisters death. This poem doesn't speak of my grief, as my others do. But rather takes on the perspective of the girl I was when my sister was dying, A small thank you for reading, God bless you all <3
Rose Ruminations May 2013
The gears in my clockwork heart
St-st-stutter and cough
Twisting, wrenching, straining
To turn back to our normal
"Click-clunk-click":
Our structured rhythm-dance
As clouds of rust-dust, lust-dust
Fly from my mechanized mind which,
Mis-wired, streams lifeblood data to my people processor
And my sights focus sharply on you.

Metal arms reach but are not seen,
Fingers touch but are not felt.
My mouth screams: "See me! Discern me!"
But the flat iron tone does not compute.
I say nothing that is real.
Nothing that is human.
You stand before me, unaffected
Frighteningly beautiful in your imperfection.

Kerchlunk.
The gears turn.
Oil: black-brown
Eases from my eyes.
Gun cocked, gaze steady,
We move on.
Ready.
Aim.
Fire.

Next victim, please.
Isklar_Glacial Sep 2009
You see the smile,

I feel its pain,

And the accused stands there,

Being guilty of everything but giving me the love I needed,

Sentencing me to a life of imprisonment within my own jail cell,

As each day passes,

I feel as if I was the guilty one,

Giving you what I didn't want to,

Letting you break down that barrier, behind which I stood,

Little did I know,

That you weren't the person that was going to save me from falling,

But you were the car whose headlights flashed so brightly in my eyes,

Leaving nothing but tears crashing in to my soul,

Stealing each breath of mine while I lay there,

I suddenly became a statistic that day,

She who loved, she who lost, she who felt each part of her heart breaking,

As though it was physically possible,

The illusion of an happy ending, was all that it remained,

An illusion,

This made so many like her live life in its utmost delusion,

When you give your heart away once,

The owner of the sparkle in your eyes then belongs to someone else,

And when they leave, they take that sparkle with them,

That is why you only need to look into the eyes of an individual,

And you will be able to see just how much they have loved and more importantly just how much They have lost in life,

For that's why we all walk without seeing,

Sometimes the truth you see in someone's eyes,

Is more than you could have ever expected,

So frighteningly honest and bare,

And one day, when you're looking at your reflection,

You may not even know whose eyes you're looking into.
jemma silvert Jul 2014
I beg you,
Do not make this out to be a love note;
Do not romanticise my words
     until a list of all that is wrong with you
          becomes a letter in a bottle, washed up on an island’s shore.
Do not teach the child I will never have
     that the locked wooden box of dated but unsent letters hidden beneath her bed
          will one day become a novel.
They are all addressed to you--
   just as every thought I think echoes with your name
              every song is about you
              every tear burns my skin with the acidity of your touch
         the smoke from
              every cigarette tastes of you.
It is you.
It is you
             who is the black mist enveloping my lungs from the inside out,
It is you
             swirling in my hollow veins
                as they wrap themselves like chains
                   around my organs, screaming for night,
and you capture my beating heart.


And it is you
     who tells us to teach our children
                         to make sure to say their pleases and their thank-yous,
And we taught them not to talk to strangers,
  but we never taught them to say
                                                      ‘no’. --
Now I don’t speak to the kids hanging out on the corner
And I don’t speak to the man when he pulls up his van,
And now I don’t speak
                                  when I'm lying in bed
you never taught me to say no
I don’t speak when your hand runs down my body
          like I am something you own
          like my bones are the ivory keys of a grand piano
               and you must hit every note on your glissando
descending
   to
hell.



I don’t speak as you wrap yourself around me
metal chains on a summer’s day
I close my eyes
            and listen to my organs screaming for night
                   like a child who just wants her bedtime story,
                                                          ­   her mummy to come home,
                   like a child who is not afraid
                               of monsters in her head,
                          or of monsters under the bed,
                          or of you,
Lying
     beside her.


And we scream for night
   And we close our eyes
      And we float up into a moonless sky.
The definition of a black hole is
               ‘a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can
                escape’.
If it is the matter that creates the pull that traps the matter,
   then you are not so much in me
         and I am not so much in you
               as we are trapped inside each other.
The world made up of people and
      people made up of world,
                                          like Romeo and Juliet,
      we do not exist without the other,
                                          you and I.


For the words
           immorality and immortality
                                            may be frighteningly similar, but there is a difference between
                 apathy and anaesthesia;
I do not close my eyes to shut you out,
           I close my eyes because it is only darkness that can make the space between my bedroom walls appear infinite;
           It is only music that lets me hear your screams as you suffocate mine;
                  only smoke that lets me taste your toxicity as my ashes spread like a virus through your veins.


I want to die.
And I'm taking you down with me,
   So don’t you dare tell me to teach the child I will never have
      that her scars seek attention,
         or that she needs them as proof of what you have done to her mind;
   Don’t you dare teach us that the rope from which we hang is a diamond necklace;
          that corpses are more beautiful when drained of blood,
             that we are more beautiful when broken.


Dear world,
   I beg you,
Do not make this out to be a love note;
Do not romanticise my words
     until a list of all that is wrong with you
          becomes a letter in a bottle, washed up on an island’s shore.
Do not teach me that my suicide note is poetry
     when our existence is intertwined
          and my death is yours,
          and you are too cowardly to do it for the both of us,
  but, darling,
                    so am I.
So please,
   I beg you,
You can make this out to be a love note,
                                             a letter in a bottle,
   just close your eyes;
      float up into a moonless sky;
         dissolve into infinity.
                                            Die with me--.
                                                           ­                                                       *j.s.
Sydney Queen Apr 2015
I’m doing it again.
I’m getting mawkish,
from loving something without knowing why,
loving something so mammoth,
loving it so grandly,
that I don't even know where to put my heart down.
Ah, there it is.
You’re getting so much closer
to what your eyes remind me of.
That indefinite cavity,
that sweeping emotion of your piano teeth,
that bewitching graze of your pomegranate hands.
I almost can't bear to look at you.
The world is humming around your existence.
Shivering, trembling,
earthshaker, sunbringer.
You are frighteningly alive.
Nothing is the truth until you get your hands on it.
There is a careful and loving precision
to the way I glimpse at you.
Darling,
we’ve developed this habit
of closing wounds
but never cleaning them.
I don't recommend trying to make sense of this. I couldn't even do that myself.
Yue Wang Yitkbel Sep 2018
There are lights in the sky
Each a lamp lit for someone else
And none for me

I’d sent flame after flame
Up there for you hoping that
One day they’d be bright enough
To reach you

To listen to your words of white heat warmth
That will send a wave of fire through
The void and light a billion stars
For me
Even if you didn’t intend to
Your words, your smile,
Even your silence is what
Lit up the sky for me
So that I saw besides everlasting darkness
And ever more endless shadow
There are life brewing in the silence
Though not for me

The silence only smothers, and suffocates me
Like an invisible hand tightly gripping onto my throat
Without me noticing, ever so violently
Yet ever so slowly squeezing harder and harder
Till I cannot breath, not knowing the reason why

It forces me down into the depth of the abyss
Till I am no longer one, but one with the shadow
One with the bottomless pit of despair and fear
Till I am no longer within the void, but am the void

Yet, when I saw you
When I met you
I was lifted up out of where I thought I belonged
And could hold against the weight
Of all that is without light
The gloom, the shadows, the night
The black of space
The silence that cries
And floated weightlessly
Above, below, and within
All there ever was, and will be
For, even though I know not how
My love for you
Has the power to lift me up:

Beyond the wild fields of stars
Beyond the glistening ocean of light
Beyond the dreamless darkness
Beyond the unkempt bed of life
Beyond the inescapable swamp of death
And beyond
All of time

To a place where only the existence of you
Holds out its shapeless hand to me
And lead me
Rather the merely dust, and breath of me
Through the void, to the empty vessel
Carrying all the pure
Feelings, senses, love, and even pain

Though it is a place
Way beyond the rays of any sun
Way beyond the circle of life
Way beyond decay and apathy
Way beyond flesh and blood

I saw every color
Every being
Every state of being
Every possible and impossible thing
Every time and space
Pass through the ghost of you and I
And cease to be
At least that’s what they appeared to be

The twinges, the sharp electric sparks
You sent through out every atom of my body
And every participle of my soul
Told me that

They are no longer life that exist exterior to us
But within us, or rather
They are us, were us, and will always be
As they have never existed otherwise
In and since that moment of eternity

I see every river through me
My blood and hair
Every fish, your touch
Every dancing seagrass
The joy your gaze ripples through me

I see every mountain and valley
All around you
Every bump on your skin
Every wave on your fingertips
Every stone and sharp edges, my pain
Every field my words of love unending

Every burning star
Dots our shining eyes
Every moon, every heavenly body
That passes, they are the fleeting
Yet never ceasing reflection of affections
Waltzing again and again across our sight
Playful like children
Not yet exposed to any worldly sorrow

Every bit of space without light
Every pit of pure darkness
Caves of eternal shadow
Every howling silence that plunders pass
They are too, forever part of our love
For
They are the pain of longing
That makes each moment of proximity
So frighteningly precious
Afraid to be lost, so keeping it close
Like a token of innocent love
Pass down through generations
Till no being of flesh and mind
Remains, yet the dust still holds
Tightly onto it
Never letting go

And,
At last
Every bit of you
Like water droplets through the given earth
Like sunshine in an inseparable bond with life
Like rains of stars that will never leave the sky
Have seeped, melted, and spread
Through every drop sweet and bitter of me
Till I am no longer just acquainted with living
But am the very dream of life.
I have been struggling with writer's block again.
So here's a repost from not so long ago:
Originally posted:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2582547/the-very-dream-of-life/

And inspired by:
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2581869/star-seed-/
AD Sifford Apr 2014
I am without hope
Until I look upon the One
The holy One, my God
Who sent His only Son

I've been here before
Time and time again
Same old story
Same familiar place
I'm so frighteningly far from perfect
I want to hide my face

But through the open door
Blinding me again
Light so holy
Promises your grace
When I feel like I'm helplessly shipwrecked
I long to see your face

I am without hope
But then I look upon the One
The loving One, my God
Through whom all can be undone

I feel so weak now
I feel controlled by sin
I can't do this
I am my own slave
My dark desires keep me where I am
My heart's a dark, black cave

So I give up now
I know I will give in
I aim, I miss
Only You can save
So I give control to the great I Am
God, make it You I crave

I am filled with hope
For when I look upon the One
I know that in His hands
My battles will be won

I am filled with hope
Now as I look upon the One
Thank You, O my God
For giving me your Son

I am filled with hope
For I know the battle's won

I am filled with hope
For my Lord said, “It is done.”
|Written June 10, 2011|
* from my Ignite collection, being poem #2. Please see the collection page itself.

For the context of when and why this poem was written, see the Ignite page.

After writing it, my grandma read through it and I told her I was still having trouble coming up with a name. She said, "Hope!" I read through it again, and it hit me as obvious when I came across stanza 3. line 1. I named it Through the Open Door, and she said something like, "I'll leave it to you." haha :)

Being one of my favorite poems, especially at the time of its conception, I eventually converted it into song form, like many of my poems, and added some small parts.

This one's dear to me. Please let me know what you think.
God bless.

© 2017 A.D. Sifford.
I'm okay with you sharing my poems, but I ask that you show courtesy. Please be honest about the authorship by attributing it to my name. Thank you,
- Sifford
Tia Jane Jul 2015
We're at a crossroads ~
The path ahead is frighteningly unfamiliar ~
I may leave you standing here ~
I can't keep waiting for you to make up your mind ~
Because the pain, love ~
It stabs at my delicate skin ~
It tears out my too human heart ~
I was ready to walk with you ~
Now I just want to walk ~
We're at a crossroads ~
And you still ~ don't know which path to take ~

Copyright © Tia Jane Fajardo
#crossroads #pain #love #lust #decisions #hurt
Poetic visions of heavenly moments captured in mental pictures as if by old-time cameras. 
Black and white bodies with silken skin and moon kissed hair touch the stars to invoke
color flavored scents of passion and whispered promises. 
Only glimpses of things to come. 
Only possibilities sprinkle the vast landscape of open minds and tease the back of the eyes 
where dreams play on wide screens like drive in movies. 
Extinct now, except where it counts. 
Rarity causes sweet sensations across the tongue that hints at juicy strawberries eaten on sweltering summer afternoons. 
Perhaps watermelon passed across the fullness of lips swollen from kisses.
Endless roads mimic endless desires and dreams. 
The scenery constantly changes and sleep is something vile.
A cruel optical illusion no less tangible than aged lace found in an abandoned attic.
A heart slumbers amidst the sands of the desert-like rib cage, rearing it's head to roar for it's mate unexpectedly and frighteningly loud.
Impossible to ignore for very long.
Placate the beast with promises of more sleep, more dreams, more voices, more silent movie moments of words spoken with veiled glances and feather light caresses.
Promise to acknowledge what it already knows as truth and to stop dancing in shadows of fear and safety.
Victoria S Mar 2014
She


is a beautiful
giantess

painted with
blushing
rose-colored hues like

peaches-
-and-
cream;

her
soft hair
coils and
coils
of gold
with colors of
wild wheat
and
honey
twisted
throughout it;

with eyes
the color of the fairest
skies
in the world,
like ice cubes
with little dark blue flecks
of a mysterious
azure
stone,
cool and penetrative
and frighteningly
intense.
Actually,
they’re more like a Caribbean
Sea,
like when the waters shift
from a tender cerulean
to an amazing aquamarine…
and in the sun,
to the side,
they're the slightest hint of green…

Her
cheeks
are
blooming,
rugged
peonies
and her eyebrows
full
and the color of
sand
and
straw;
her
lips
ruddy plums
in every season of the year;
her gorgeous teeth
hug each other closely,
and when
she
smiles,
it’s a little
gift
from heaven…
her laugh is
infectious,
a hiccup of
giggles…


her arms are
pure shades of
pale
pink
petals
and in the summer,
graciously tanned: the lightest,
most
beautiful
bronze, a color
all
her
own.

Her
hands are
large
and
rough
and
strong,
wrapping one's own and all else
in a manner most

complete

and

indestructibly;

her demeanor is thrilling
and irresistible
and

intense.

her
moods
are
unknown
and
ever-changing….

pry into her

feelings

long
enough
and you will
meet
an
abyss

and never return

and
never

learn

anything
at all.

Her
eyes
are

immense

innocent

expressive

,

pupils darting to

everything

happening

at

once;



when she
walks, she’s
proud
and direct
and
she’s
the

light

of the
world;
everywhere
she
goes,
she
illuminates the
paths she chooses to
grace;
she carries the
torch of strength and beauty and mischief

and

daunts, races

the

flames --

she’s as

spontaneous

as they
are.

— The End —