Here is a primer on the history of poetry

Features of Modernism

To varying extents, writing of the Modernist period exhibits these features:

1. experimentation

belief that previous writing was stereotyped and inadequate
ceaseless technical innovation, sometimes for its own sake
originality: deviation from the norm, or from usual reader expectations
ruthless rejection of the past, even iconoclasm

2. anti-realism

sacralisation of art, which must represent itself, not something beyond preference for allusion (often private) rather than description
world seen through the artist's inner feelings and mental states
themes and vantage points chosen to question the conventional view
use of myth and unconscious forces rather than motivations of conventional plot

3. individualism

promotion of the artist's viewpoint, at the expense of the communal
cultivation of an individual consciousness, which alone is the final arbiter
estrangement from religion, nature, science, economy or social mechanisms
maintenance of a wary intellectual independence
artists and not society should judge the arts: extreme self-consciousness
search for the primary image, devoid of comment: stream of consciousness
exclusiveness, an aristocracy of the avant-garde

4. intellectualism

writing more cerebral than emotional
work is tentative, analytical and fragmentary, more posing questions more than answering them
cool observation: viewpoints and characters detached and depersonalized
open-ended work, not finished, nor aiming at formal perfection
involuted: the subject is often act of writing itself and not the ostensible referent

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Expressionism

Expressionism was a phase of twentieth-century writing that rejected naturalism and romanticism to express important inner truths. The style was generally declamatory or even apocalyptic, endeavoring to awaken the fears and aspirations that belong to all men, and which European civilization had rendered effete or inauthentic. The movement drew on Rimbaud and Nietzsche, and was best represented by German poetry of the 1910-20 period. Benn, Becher, Heym, Lasker-Schüler, Stadler, Stramm, Schnack and Werfel are its characteristic proponents, {1} though Trakl is the best known to English readers. {2} {3}

Like most movements, there was little of a manifesto, or consensus of beliefs and programmes. Many German poets were distrustful of contemporary society — particularly its commercial and capitalist attitudes — though others again saw technology as the escape from a perceived "crisis in the old order". Expressionism was very heterogeneous, touching base with Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, Dadaism and early Surrealism, many of which crop up in English, French, Russian and Italian poetry of the period. Political attitudes tended to the revolutionary, and technique was overtly experimental. Nonetheless, for all the images of death and destruction, sometimes mixed with messianic utopianism, there was also a tone of resignation, a sadness of "the evening lands" as Spengler called them.

Expressionism also applies to painting, and here the characteristics are more illuminating. The label refers to painting that uses visual gestures to transmit emotions and emotionally charged messages. In the expressive work of Michelangelo and El Greco, for example, the content remains of first importance, but content is overshadowed by technique in such later artists as van Gogh, Ensor and Munch. By the mid twentieth-century even this attenuated content had been replaced by abstract painterly qualities — by the sheer scale and dimensions of the work, by colour and shape, by the verve of the brushwork and other effects.

Expressionism often coincided with rapid social change. Germany, after suffering the horrors of the First World War, and ineffectual governments afterwards, fragmented into violently opposed political movements, each with their antagonistic coteries and milieu. The painting of these groups was very variable, but often showed a mixture of aggression and naivety. Understandably unpopular with the establishment  — denounced as degenerate by the Nazis — the style also met with mixed reactions from the picture-buying public. It seemed to question what the middle classes stood for: convention, decency, professional expertise. A great sobbing child had been let loose in the artist's studio, and the results seemed elementally challenging. Perhaps German painting was returning to its Nordic roots, to small communities, apocalyptic visions, monotone starkness and anguished introspection.

What could poetry achieve in its turn? Could it use some equivalent to visual gestures, i.e. concentrate on aspects of the craft of poetry, and to the exclusion of content? Poetry can never be wholly abstract, a pure poetry bereft of content. But clearly there would be a rejection of naturalism. To represent anything faithfully requires considerable skill, and such skill was what the Expressionists were determined to avoid. That would call on traditions that were not Nordic, and that were not sufficiently opposed to bourgeois values for the writer's individuality to escape subversion. Raw power had to tap something deeper and more universal.

Hence the turn inward to private torments. Poets became the judges of poetry, since only they knew the value of originating emotions. Intensity was essential.  Artists had to believe passionately in their responses, and find ways of purifying and deepening those responses — through working practices, lifestyles, and philosophies. Freud was becoming popular, and his investigations into dreams, hallucinations and paranoia offered a rich field of exploration. Artists would have to glory in their isolation, moreover, and turn their anger and frustration at being overlooked into a belief in their own genius. Finally, there would be a need to pull down and start afresh, even though that contributed to a gradual breakdown in the social fabric and the apocalypse of the Second World War.

Expressionism is still with us. Commerce has invaded bohemia, and created an elaborate body of theory to justify, support and overtake what might otherwise appear infantile and irrational. And if traditional art cannot be pure emotional expression, then a new art would have to be forged. Such poetry would not be an intoxication of life (Nietzsche's phrase) and still less its sanctification.  Great strains on the creative process were inevitable, moreover, as they were in Georg Trakl's case, who committed suicide shortly after writing the haunting and beautiful piece given below

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SYMBOLIST POETS
symbolism in poetry

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), the high priest of the French movement, theorized that symbols were of two types. One was created by the projection of inner feelings onto the world outside. The other existed as nascent words that slowly permeated the consciousness and expressed a state of mind initially unknown to their originator.

None of this came about without cultivation, and indeed dedication. Poets focused on the inner life. They explored strange cults and countries. They wrote in allusive, enigmatic, musical and ambiguous styles. Rimbaud deranged his senses and declared "Je est un autre". Von Hofmannstahl created his own language. Valéry retired from the world as a private secretary, before returning to a mastery of traditional French verse. Rilke renounced wife and human society to be attentive to the message when it came.

Not all were great theoreticians or technicians, but the two interests tended to go together, in Mallarmé most of all. He painstakingly developed his art of suggestion, what he called his "fictions". Rare words were introduced, syntactical intricacies, private associations and baffling images. Metonymy replaced metaphor as symbol, and was in turn replaced by single words which opened in imagination to multiple levels of signification. Time was suspended, and the usual supports of plot and narrative removed. Even the implied poet faded away, and there were then only objects, enigmatically introduced but somehow made right and necessary by verse skill. Music indeed was the condition to which poetry aspired, and Verlaine, Jimenez and Valéry were among many who concentrated efforts to that end.

So appeared a dichotomy between the inner and outer lives. In actuality, poets led humdrum existences, but what they described was rich and often illicit: the festering beauties of courtesans and dance-hall entertainers; far away countries and their native peoples; a world-weariness that came with drugs, isolation, alcohol and bought ***. Much was mixed up in this movement — decadence, aestheticism, romanticism, and the occult — but its isms had a rational purpose, which is still pertinent. In what way are these poets different from our own sixties generation? Or from the young today: clubbing, experimenting with relationships and drugs, backpacking to distant parts? And was the mixing of sensory perceptions so very novel or irrational? Synaesthesia was used by the Greek poets, and indeed has a properly documented basis in brain physiology.

What of the intellectual bases, which are not commonly presented as matters that should engage the contemporary mind, still less the writing poet? Symbolism was built on nebulous and somewhat dubious notions: it inspired beautiful and historically important work: it is now dead: that might be the blunt summary. But Symbolist poetry was not empty of content, indeed expressed matters of great interest to continental philosophers, then and now. The contents of consciousness were the concern of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and he developed a terminology later employed by Heidegger (1889-1976), the Existentialists and hermeneutics. Current theories on metaphor and brain functioning extend these concepts, and offer a rapprochement between impersonal science and irrational literary theory.

So why has the Symbolism legacy dwindled into its current narrow concepts? Denied influence in the everyday world, poets turned inward, to private thoughts, associations and the unconscious. Like good Marxist intellectuals they policed the area they arrogated to themselves, and sought to correct and purify the language that would evoke its powers. Syntax was rearranged by Mallarmé. Rhythm, rhyme and stanza patterning were loosened or rejected. Words were purged of past associations (Modernism), of non-visual associations (Imagism), of histories of usage (Futurism), of social restraint (Dadaism) and of practical purpose (Surrealism). By a sort of belated Romanticism, poetry was returned to the exploration of the inner lands of the irrational. Even Postmodernism, with its bric-a-brac of received media images and current vulgarisms, ensures that gaps are left for the emerging unconscious to engage our interest

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.
IMAGIST POETRY
imagist poetry

Even by twentieth-century standards, Imagism was soon over. In 1912 Ezra Pound published the Complete Poetical Works of its founder, T.E. Hulme (five short poems) and by 1917 the movement, then overseen by Amy Lowell, had run its course. {1} {2} {3} {4} {5} The output in all amounted to a few score poems, and none of these captured the public's heart. Why the importance?

First there are the personalities involved — notably Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams {6} {7} {8} {9} — who became famous later. If ever the (continuing) importance to poets of networking, of being involved in movements from their inception, is attested, it is in these early days of post-Victorian revolt.

Then there are the manifestos of the movement, which became the cornerstones of Modernism, responsible for a much taught in universities until recently, and for the difficulties poets still find themselves in. The Imagists stressed clarity, exactness and concreteness of detail. Their aims, briefly set out, were that:

1. Content should be presented directly, through specific images where possible.
2. Every word should be functional, with nothing included that was not essential to the effect intended.
3. Rhythm should be composed by the musical phrase rather than the metronome.

Also understood — if not spelled out, or perhaps fully recognized at the time — was the hope that poems could intensify a sense of objective reality through the immediacy of images.

Imagism itself gave rise to fairly negligible lines like:

You crash over the trees,
You crack the live branch…  (Storm by H.D.)

Nonetheless, the reliance on images provided poets with these types of freedom:

1. Poems could dispense with classical rhetoric, emotion being generated much more directly through what Eliot called an objective correlate: "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." {10}

2. By being shorn of context or supporting argument, images could appear with fresh interest and power.

3. Thoughts could be treated as images, i.e. as non-discursive elements that added emotional colouring without issues of truth or relevance intruding too mu
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PROSE BASED POETRY
prose based poetry

When free verse lacks rhythmic patterning, appearing as a lineated prose stripped of unnecessary ornament and rhetoric, it becomes the staple of much contemporary work. The focus is on what the words are being used to say, and their authenticity. The language is not heightened, and the poem differs from prose only by being more self-aware, innovative and/or cogent in its exposition.

Nonetheless, what looks normal at first becomes challenging on closer reading — thwarting expectations, and turning back on itself to make us think more deeply about the seemingly innocuous words used. And from there we are compelled to look at the world with sharper eyes, unprotected by commonplace phrases or easy assumptions. Often an awkward and fighting poetry, therefore, not indulging in ceremony or outmoded traditions.
What is Prose?

If we say that contemporary free verse is often built from what was once regarded as mere prose, then we shall have to distinguish prose from poetry, which is not so easy now. Prose was once the lesser vehicle, the medium of everyday thought and conversation, what we used to express facts, opinions, humour, arguments, feelings and the like. And while the better writers developed individual styles, and styles varied according to their purpose and social occasion, prose of some sort could be written by anyone. Beauty was not a requirement, and prose articles could be rephrased without great loss in meaning or effectiveness.

Poetry, though, had grander aims. William Lyon Phelps on Thomas Hardy's work: {1}

"The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention — I find even the drawings in "Wessex Poems" so fascinating that I wish he had illustrated all his books — I am always conscious of the time and the place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession. Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm."

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OPEN FORMS IN POETRY
open forms in poetry

Poets who write in open forms usually insist on the form growing out of the writing process, i.e. the poems follow what the words and phrase suggest during the composition

A living breathing inauthentic dialect of amalgamated spirituality mixed with an ever so pervasive mix of tomfoolery and diluted astrotheology

An inexcapabley unexhausted aproproptraiton of extrapulated constipation
homeginzed and watered down to make it easier for the minds of the masses to swallow it down.

You want to read little pristine pretty posies
not get involved betwixt & ignore the thorns of life
whatcha gonna do when your scratch becomes infected
hiding in the bushes of denial will get you hives
of the contradicting type, bucking like a bronco
amidst the flowery storm clouds of refusal
riding through wild fields of four leaf clovers
on unicorns wings of phantasmal puff'd perfectly pink skies
pseudo fairy tales conjured up in the mind
never to cross the median line of reality's mock deception
swallow the chimerical pill of inauthentic utopia
just be sure your mythical allegory never plays havoc
in your secret garden of rainbow streaming sublimity,
the fall is greater from the zenith of repudiation

I'm on a social networking site on the internet,
What is the internet?
Forgive me for my ignorance 18th century friends,
It's a connection of machines that can share information.
Yes, and that "social networking site"
is part of the connection of machines
to try and make people feel less lonely.

It does feel strange sometimes when I'm on there.
And then the possession inside the machine says;
"but without me you wouldn't know this music, this picture, this place, this girl."
And now, for the first time, I am not subdued.
For the first time, I answer back, but what things would I know without you?

What forests would I have walked through? What people would I have met?
What noises would I have heard?
O the less trivial things I would have learned.
What streets would I have crossed (both in this layer of reality, in metaphor and metaphysical)
What girl's eyes would be staring towards mine, instead of those of a camera's.

I've got to talk about the internet
I've got to talk about the facebook^tm
(though in a year it will be gone)

It feels all so inauthentic
so I indulge in the scary technology
but then omit it from my memories
when I see your pics online
I write about them like they are authentic
genuine photographs I have yellowing
in an album in the attic
I don't have an attic either

tonight she’s clipping her obstinate fingernails
healthy, hard and alone on her atoll of sofa
surrounded by a stony sea

automatically I look down; my deficient talons
at a loss and uncreative; thumbing the possibility
of courageously communicating with her complexity

******* the idea of getting close to her
beyond my standard compulsion to
use flattery, force a smile or be mutually inauthentic

leafing through the elementary school years
that predeceased her current level of intelligence
grappling with my empty handedness, and
finally locking us in on the folded faith of hopeful futures

Sara Fielder © Apr 2017

Inside, Your cancer's beating heart
My ******* shakes, dirt dust gone
I swipe the sand away. For every ounce of ****
Laughing out meaty red raw steaks and size zero thighs.

     - For everythingsobad. You rattle my dream box with your sweet blue face and your gauges for neither being an idiot or being human. Too cute of you booboo. Captivity claws at you, you big bafoon, intolerant, shuffling your predicates back and forth during your 12am nonsensical *******. So long as it doesn't interfere with your curfew.

Like soggy altered-state popcorn. Your butter catches more flies than knives, the inauthentic gestures spattering over the rhythms and rolls of your fingertips is torture to watch. Kitchen countertop influenza. A tired dictionary of sad words, poor misfortunes, tired eyelids, silty and sandy crusty inside corners of the eyes

                           .rearing privilege

countertop crawlers. inaudible coos used by muses who can't keep their musings from tangling the long distance dial tone soaring through the ears like an Italian operatic melodrama. A horse, three brides, and a funeral. One woman, a sick child, blindness, blinding caused by toxins of the body stuck inside your gelatinous fishlike eyelids. Where's there an eye bib and a lance when you need one? A nifty electric toothbrush shank with extra reach and plaque protection. You're the kitchen sink they threw in, a budget meeting with a data analysis staph infection. A government where nobody wins. All the kids grow up with thin skin and an aorta with no ventricles in it. It's like the cynical prison system that we had to survive in our 8th grade basement dungeon. Thundering, curmudgeons drugging sluggishly, **** teen thugs. Preteen pornstars sluicing cash through their meaty canals, ******* the ******* and ******* the back bare in a messy afternoon of **** *******. Crusty infectious rumors made worse by brothers and moms, eating handfuls of Norco just to keep the family strong.

You cringeworthy, evil pismire;
Your father did surely miss-sire
This personification of flatulence,
The embodiment of self importance
Overflowing with abject peccancy
Devoid of any sign of respectability
Replete with gross odoriferousness
Horribly and infamously unscrupulous.

You have reveled in misrepresentation
And tried to elevate your calumniation
Disinformation and deception exists
As capitalistic dissembling persists.
You’ve collected an evil government
Built mostly of human excrement
And have such a lack of veracity
That you speak in constant mendacity.

Sycophantic eructations of dogmatic bile
Issue from your unsympathetic smile
And your inauthentic glad-handed gropes
As if we all of us are unbright gullible dopes
That buy your fabrications completely
While you pilfer and prevaricate indiscreetly.
You are a Vaudevillian villain miscast as star,
But most of us know exactly what you are.

Deceit, deception, dishonesty; a tragedy
But not for you, for us and our country.
Distortion, evasion and fabrication the rules;
You despair of any other kinds of tools.
Falsehoods, fictions and forgery are your tricks.
You demand we build with straw-less bricks
Your erections that are planned to be palaces
Filled with your giant golden carved phalluses.

Those monuments, inanotomically correct,
Established to celebrate and somehow protect
A mountebank on the way to an overseas bank
Claiming to eradicate the scoria he creates
That decades of privation will not quite alleviate.
But you, the Great Prevaricator, will always blame
Other players in your sick, unconstitutional game
Instead of admitting your complicity and guilt
About the disgusting, putrid swamp you built.

i had a friend once,
and she taught me
not to say "i love you too,"
because it sounds false and inauthentic,
and little white lies are worse than the cold, hard
truth.

i had a friend once,
and she taught me
that you don't have to do anything;
it's simply a matter of whether you should
or shouldn't.

i had a friend once,
and she lived in a small, boring town
with small boring people.

i had a friend once,
and she was not a small, boring person.

i had a friend once,
and she hated herself,
every last inch of her,
but she still always knew
how to make me smile.

i had a friend once,
and she would always reference books
or music
or movies,
because to her,
the real world just wasn't as appealing.

i had a friend once,
and i left her.

she stayed.

she waited.

i'm sure her hope wavered at times,
but she waited still.

and i came back,
only to leave again.

she didn't stick around this time, though.

so, you see,
i had a friend once,
and she taught me
to think deeply,
to live freely,
and to love truly.

i had a friend once.

she's gone now.

(a.m.)

did you ever stop writing about me?
did you ever really start?

Many contrive du-jour fêtes to make love look self-evident; whilst the taken hold hand's, making locution the regular, in letters they trade off into lusting hands.

Winsome cut-out caricature cards, sell fresh off the press, whilst lovers meet at bars; to await the next years
Valendine.

A holiday for only once in a darkly year, as the meanwhile divorce rates spike from cheaters, woman-beaters;
Amour's no longer of the creator, but made to be the abzere.

Mine jane, please do not fear, I know I mayest not hath much, but a soul and spirit; I connect to thine.

None inauthentic word's, or thoughts you'll find;

Only what I hath to give thee.

The indigenous necklet that grows around this neck, a buttoned up longsleeve, that holds mine back;
With a black vest that caresses mine chest- with a smile I hardly show
Because of mine soda stained, missing teeth in a mouth where
Poetry speaks of pain, yet where
Affection is created by mine tongue
That creates wonders and Shame.

I hath not much material thing's, though material is temporal; not fit for kings and queens.

As I hath thou, as thou dost me,
I hath not much mine jane; though
Thou dost hath the key.

The key that open's this beating
Heart for thee; wherein mine
Love is always seen, in the
Specks of thy eyes.

The more ourn love grows, it burns
As a wildfire, I hear the wedding bell's
Require; ourn calling in
The distance.

©lonesome poet's poetry
©Brandon nagley
©earl jane sardua nagley dedication ( Filipino rose)

Falling in deep,
Or...sending you 19 consecutive text messages
Because I can't sleep without knowing that your head and heart is racing with mine.

Or...smiling for the first time at a compliment
After years of inauthentic grins because you
See my scars ...and you love them.

Or.... Questioning everything I do
Because the day feels meaningless
Without exchanging torn pages
Of our histories to cherish like bibles.

Or... Falling deeply into your melancholy
And wondering if I can ever breathe again.
..It's 5 am and I find myself amidst
The shards of your heart again....

I lay them around me like diamond dust
Scraping the hopelessness from each
Resolved to peer into your memories
and find the light to rebuild the heart
that has blinded you
From shining for two for so long.

Falling... into your twilight...
...and finding my own beauty along the way.
Falling is flying for the first time.

Deeply, I'm falling.

Thank you for destroying me,
Dear ex
I had never loved another so deeply,
Or let down my walls more
Than I had with you
And what did you do with me?
You tortured my soul
And burned me like embers
You toyed with me
Making promises you knew deep down you would fail to keep,
But still,
I thank you
For destroying me

Because, you see
You were the fire I needed
To burn away
All the parts of myself that were inauthentic,
Turning to ash all my ego,
Obliterated my sense of self
Losing you and all of the promises you made
Was like losing one version of my life,
That I had come to cherish so much
It was like being the captain of
The sinking titanic,
Choosing to die
With the damaged ship

But I reemerged from that icy misery I existed in for so long,
Realizing that **** happened
And I couldn't do anything to change that
But what I could do
Was take the actions required to have the life I want,
Instead of wasting my time wallowing over how someone I once loved
Hurt me,
Almost destroyed me,
And we called that love
But it WOKE ME UP
It destroyed me and woke me up,
Do you understand?
Yes,
I lost something I had invested so much time and love and care into,
But I can't control that
And it's time to reconcile with the pain,
By making peace with the past,
So I can live in the right here, right now,
In the present.

Hi, I’m lost.
Can you find me?
I don’t know where I’ve been
And I don’t know what just happened.
But can you direct me where to go.
I’m just lost and
Did you see that squirrel that just passed on by?
It’s tail was so fluffy and it looked like a troubled one.
And
I don’t know where I’m going with this but,
I’m just lost

And if you ask me why it is so,
Then I will tell you I don’t know.
I’m just lost.
And I need to find myself again.
And when the rain falls from the sky,
Is it’s destiny just to land on the ground?
Or will it land on trees
And pass on from leaf to leaf?
Will it go into the mouth of some poor animal
And quench what ever thirst it my or may not have?

And if you ask me why I ask these things
Well it is because…
I
I don’t know.  
And if you ask me who I am
Then I wouldn’t know how to answer you
Because I don’t even know
And if I even were to give an answer
Then I would just go off on philosophical rants
And look out to nature and
Just go off on whatever is going on like
The wind.
How freely it runs.
Roaring through trees and trees,
And spreading leaves all over the ground
How it must be
To feel free
To be the wind.
Going where ever you please and
Just getting lost and knowing where to go.
And maybe I am the wind..

But no,
I am lost.
And I don’t know where to go.
And as I continue to whine about how lost I am.
I continue to question why do I want to be found?
If you were to ask me who I am,
Then I would answer that with a name
Because I am lost.
And frankly, I don’t want to be found.

I am not lost in the physical sense where I can look at a reflection of myself
And see how ugly I am.
No.
I am lost in a mental sense where I don’t know where I’ve been
And I don’t know where I am .
But isn’t that great?
Because that’s what life is really about.
Not knowing where you are.
And not knowing where you’ve been.
Continuously losing yourself.
Not to be found.

Because when you find yourself
You find yourself in a herd
You identify with the same things as everyone else does
You become inauthentic and you lose your true self
And you succumb to the herd,
Following a mindless leader because maybe their ideals are right
Turning your backs on the ones who stand out
The ones who are different
Because when you find yourself in a herd
You find yourself in a miserable world.
Because you don’t know if your dreaming or if your awake
And you’re just looking for answers that no one will take.

And if I were to find myself,
I would find myself with no heart because
“I may be single, but my heart is taken by someone I can’t call my own.”
And it’s only because I found myself a person who accepts rejections before it even happens.
So excuse me while I lose myself
Because I don’t want to identify myself as girl who knows what it feels like to lose to that.
And excuse me while I lose myself
“Because I took the road left traveled by”
And even though it made all the difference
I am still a black sheep in this herd.
So as I lose myself,
I shouldn’t ask anyone to find me because

Hi, my name is Lost.
And even though I will continuously ask someone to find me
And even though I will continuously whine about trying to be found
I would rather be lost
Because even though I’m spewing a bunch of **** I learned from philosophy lectures and what I’ve read on Tumblr
I started to think this clicks and makes a lot of sense
Because no matter how many times people say
“Life starts once you’ve finished college.”
“Everything clicks in at this certain age with this certain job and this certain income and this certain life.”
It doesn’t.
And the “sooner you figure it out, the better off you’ll be.”
The sooner you learn life starts at this certain minute and ends at the other.
You will be better off.

So don’t tell me I’m wrong
Because at the ages from 0 - 5,
You started life,
Trying to figure out what everything is
From the ages of 6 - 12
You begin to figure out how everything clicks in
And you start freaking out
Because from the ages of 13 - 17
You’re caught at the stage where “You’re too young to do this but you’re to old to do that.”
And from the ages of 18 - so on
You finally figured out how much ****** you were when you found yourself in the crowd.
So excuse me while I get lost.

Because
Hi, I’m lost.
And I’m not physically lost in the sense where when I look into a reflection of myself.
I see what beautiful thing I created and
If I were to duplicate myself,
You have no idea how hard I would go out with myself.
No.
I’m lost in the mental sense where I don’t know where I am
And I don’t know where I've been.
So excuse me while I continue to be lost.
Recreating myself day in and day out.
Because that’s how authentic I’ll be.
And I will do that for an eternity and

Hi, I’m lost.

In a castle of dream everybody dreams
of  diamonds and pearls
of sheer happiness....
tears are shed and hidden within...
a silent scream... shout and cry...

Everything looks real in a castle of dream...
we only wake up the next day
to find out the ugliness of reality...
and to decide whether to believe in golds...
and we choose whats best
to suit our life...
do we really have to choose after all?
..Still we go far away from the reality..
and become inauthentic in life ..
for a second.. lets live in our luxurious dream
in the comfort of the  satin smooth linen
and feel the dazzling excitement..
even if it is only
just for a moment of ecstasy...

By Rina..

Remember our portfolio of poetry?
Our call and response.
I would write
You would sort of reply?
I stapled them all together
So glad, so relieved to share
Something at last
I stopped sharing at the end
You claim you have written two since then
I have written more than I can verbalize

And at the end
At the end of it all
The sharing felt so good so right
I convinced myself in the morning and in the night
But it was always me calling out
Awaiting your weak inauthentic reply.

monogamy means I am a thing
an object possessed by someone else
their trophy, their conquest
their maid and chef, too

I want to be loved, not owned
held loosely and with courage
treasured, valued, and desired
instead of confined to chains

monogamy is stifling
monogamy is jealous
monogamy is cruel
monogamy is immuring

I have always been your everything
rather than comforting, it's exhausting
love is complex but not binding
and sometimes love isn't enough

fifty years down the road
will I regret the time I've spent
being inauthentic and forced
living someone else's dream?

i found that only the mono-phonetic peoples of this earth act like neanderthals did: protectively... implying i had a chance with one of their ****** counterparts... the loss of monotheism in a largely diffused area creates them, they're prone to shouting drunk slogans when watching a football march: with no foreign invasion impeding... to say the basics: that they can't intellectualise drinking is their downfall... drinking is shamanic like eating certain mushroom is: drink is liquidated fungus, it's an implication of all things thriving on the degenerative, to thrive on decomposition... even those championing the psychedelic escape route with the fungus can't see for a miles' worth of **** the potential of liquidating mushrooms / wheat and bottling it... i never expected to say profound things... and even if i did, i wouldn't get a ***** from saying them as those quasis who say profound things and leave me limp-dicked anyway.

a bottle of beer in between glugs of whiskey as they are:
the most refreshing and happy: sunshine down
my throat... and with those words unsaid
but typed: how i too can adopt a sarcasm
for all the woes that un-inebriated
people state, middle-aged and sexually frustrated
from socially-invoked inhibitors concerning image...
sarcasm is all they get back...
it's kinda sad... kinda...
all i'm doing in writing this verse
is an attempt to re-enter the haunting
house of the epic i started
writing two days ago...
    on the principle of ensō i find myself
unable to reenter than narrative,
every time i think about doing so
i think of: inauthentic...
                and it would be,
authenticity and the equivalent of
said once, therefore said properly...
but i wish to: only to erased the (pending)
in the title...
   but then i look at the script and think:
i've moved past this...
    why would i want to turn a river
of yore, into a lake of the now?
then unto man, who unable to coerce the elements
sought a fifth for elemental as too sensory
encapsulation and boundary,
   lightning being the fifth element...
candles v. light-bulbs, right?
       for too long the tetra-said-and-tetra-experienced...
or toward encapsulating man in
     water (creativity)
       and within wind (empty talk)
          as with earth (proverbs)
so too with fire (rhetoric)
                    so too with lightning (genius),
how i wish to have been able to write those
belittling notes down in industrial print
away from what would be considered
mindless sketching: that is why industrialisation
of print has created a medium of uniformity,
but also the Picasso's worth of hand-craftship
in what appeared at Belshazzar's feast in
the invention of late, western origination of graffiti:
******* rebel. can anyone else imagine
saying something like that, instead of asking
us why the flu or the tapeworm exists?
       the re-, the one true unfathomable monstrosity
apart from the logic of moving from point A to
point B... the re-, the one true unfathomable
monstrosity that burdens us all: who are rested...
the repetitive dream when we are instilled into
lying back and unconscious...
   for the blinking of the eye: and what is sight...
     for the first oyster gulped wriggling down
our oesophagus, alive,
    to the second and third, on a date with a lovely
   at Harrods... for all that re- is, without the -s,
it can only be a thing...                        as
thus said: that ancient curse of the vampiric
insatiable thirst to continue: under whatever circumstance,
repeat, replicate... oh the woe of the re-
                         as to be endured, heard, seen, felt, tasted...
with the demagogue all suicides rebel against:
master pro, master pro,
         who ***** his re *****, who ***** his re *****
in all of us: as transcendental genetics might not teach
us... bound to only escape such a formula,
staging ourselves within the groundwork of
the pre formulae; or how i can understand true will,
or the existence of will, as only a suicide might
investigate: to take death into his ***** and say:
for what will continue in me is but mere an apathy
of submission, but if i take death to the dancefloor,
i will truly find death's master: for in old age i will
not find wisdom, but merely the plagiarism of
childhood with less haste: to chase, to hide, to speak...
i find old age as not blessing with that childhood
already was... let me take death to the dancefloor,
on the seabed, in the hands of a hurricane,
         in the sunken sockets of gravity...
       please, here, in the crescendo of what i feel,
rather than in a congregation of mourners who
weep only in the thespian courtesy for others.
suicide? that is what i understand as true will -
              man, bacterium infernum: lost within
a blinking of an eye - within which all fates of things
freeze, undisturbed, as if alive and relentlessly blooming,
for within them an untrodden path and
within them a hand that never endured tilling as
a scythe... of that Edenic hope: to live among
the less mechanised things and in turn be a lessened
replica of that mecha-...           should this be seen
as an encouragement? too long has the asylum been
romanticised...
                    few have ventured to romanticise
the eventuality of Camus' culmination...
of what had to become the *sole question...
          hence the taboos... people demand to think
that certain cognitive states are akin to viral infections...
   as if all those bound to the unexplained are
pulverising leprosy to the general public...
   a common trait, among neanderthals.

Crack of dawn
On a tar-kissed lawn
The rules of the nascent day
Will have us impaired

Watch the fawn
That was born from the pawn
Who bleeds for his pay
And eats unprepared

Where will she go?
Ask no day, they never know
Over the noon's sickly throat
I am under the looming crow

There is nothing to find
In the joywheel's fleeting time
How will we know when it has come?
What's there to see beneath the ****?

We are so calm and unprepared

I am gone or going away
I am gone or going away
For very, very long
For far too long

She came onto everybody
A ragged and holy fiend
The night could never live again
Life could never gasp again

She is so
She is so
She is all
She is all

Calm and unprepared
How could she afford to be
When she cannot see?
When she is on her knees?

So calm and unprepared

Am I happy now?
Am I happy now?

Common roaches feeding on vintage ceilings
Where one goes when they can't get up to feeling
The inauthentic rust that keeps me seated
There is nothing sacred that is not beaten

Am I happy now?
Am I happy now?
Am I happy now?
Am I happy now?

Where do I go when the winds don't blow?
How will I know when I am owed
All the splendour from this pain
How could anything ease my brain?

Calm and unprepared
We must be
Calm and unprepared
We must be

To have an affair ... is different than to cheat
cheating is bad but the affair has it beat
My affair, not one that had been planned
It's something i'm ashamed of ...
I musn't ... I cant.
the pushy counselor pressuring me to talk, let it out, she predicts that it'll fell good ...
she has no idea what's about to come out of this messy confession. an affair, coming from under the trunk of this hood.
i'll be the first to testify of it's illusion
opposite of its face value,
misery and loneliness will be the only winner.
Like dying and going to the medium place where utopia does not exist, contingent to utopia's disappearance it only makes sense that hell would delete itself as well?
haven't we longed for the day when there'd be no such thing as hell? Then we'd be free?
Life's twisted humor,
everything has an opposite, an article of faith
being positioned isn't possible without opposition to accompany its lifeless soul,
It preys on the thriving, takes from the present, holds the living hostage as it meets up with  fear and justice, freedom and sadness. birthing the first of many to come,
dicontentment is born and swooned and rocked, fed and held, growing so strong
these thoughts in my mind ...?
you see,
i thought were mine were mine that I could actually be SAFE for ONCE the only place i am safe and free of interference, has been compromised...
discontentment has spread like a wildfire this morning, the remains the evident unsupervised testimony.
and as conciousness demanded an invite inside my mind, I insisted i would clean and make space first, denying my insistence of alone time.
i opened the door, my body quickly analyzed a familiarly foreign emotion,
My mind, the mitochondria, could detect a feeling like this in a crowd of a million waldo's,
This home has felt plenty of drive by emotions all of which fall sorrowfully short,
Relief, one  emotion i've never known well, but good enough to  consider an aquantaince, My higher self, the God dwelling in me
is only awaken by my ego's alarm going off at the maximum volume alotted,
My ego has always disappointed me and always will, a true representation of its impulsiveness no awareness of self control
Demons survive,(yes survive) the lowest level of vibration due to it's subsisting unvarnished truth,
shame and survival are the vibrational levels of those who die,
living and surviving,
"He who is slow to wrath has great understanding,
and unlike my actions, he who is impulsive exalts folly"
God says it himself, a fool will never see the gates
those pearly gates, I pray, will be a presentiment that the abuse i've endured on earth has always been accounted for.  I pray my damaged,not to mention, and terribly fragile sixteen year old learns to stand up for herself.
I'm sorry for the fear I put her through and all the criticism, My God i don't even think it's normal the tight leash i set before my, adolescent at the time
I snap out of what seemed like a continuous paralysis where i cant stop vomiting out my emotions.,
"I feel .... not good amie,"
Of course this is your ego denouncing its reign, you better believe it's stopping it's feet like mad,
I get what you're getting at Doc, but that's not the case for me,I work in recovery so i know how tough it can be to let go of ego's control.
If it isn't you ... tell me more about your sixteen self, what happened to you? why are you sorry to her? How did you hurt her?
the real inquiry to be at is, was that you that hurt her? you an innocent teeny bopper,
I know you don't see yourself as innocent,because you felt all grown up,
or maybe you've felt misunderstood since a child which is it for you nisey?
she notices the sting of silence,  must've been chilly for a princess like her
she probably has never known a cold night, i think and quickly think better of, once i feel the green-eyed monster creeping up, my enemy, the one i resist
so with that said it is the one that pursues, I know it is because I delight in it that it has an extraordinarily special control over my ego
"Or maybe, my sixteen year old snapped I am exhausted of justifying my actions to people who never listened"
I am the party that shame and depression loves to crash late at night, whenever they spot out happy with their
laser beam focus and their macular degeneration"
God acting as an Implantable Miniature Telescope,
as I unleash my arsenal of scriptures, he sits with his mouth pursed, his pursuit to relinquish his pain and hate, written all over him, his body vocalizing all the hate he refused to articulate through linguistic expression as his special form of punishment, wrapped specifically for me
I give the gift a home and take it as an
accolade of the abuse my ego thinks i'd win for staying.
water and oil.
needless to say, these enemies are not holding one another hostage, instead their proverb differing in hindsight,

Their moral compass, primarily, astray from the "good" commandments".,
the same commandments seen as good, although there is no such thing as good or bad, obviously i've had one too many philosophy lessons,
Now like every great philosopher I delight in inquiry,
It used to bother me amie,
surpising to those who know me as goddessnisey, my altar ego that is ingenious in its successful attempts at imitation of my authentic self, minus the flaws, has people fooled,
My inauthentic self, the one that needs to know everything before trusting, the one that misses out on opportunities because she let's impulsiveness govern her actions.
To that little girl, I owe the grandest of apologies, I'm talking like the kind the cops owed rodney,
the one's that took hold of me,  Covered me in shame and loneliness, .
dolizing
finally got on top and now it's my *****, only thing is
now habituated by their entire nation of people go by the saying birds of a feather flock together, they do not associate, because they are opposite.


Where did this relationship go i ask amie, my,newly discovered personal guru, that i'm paying a **** load to vent to,!?
like the housing of my body I am inconsistent
personification live in the flesh, as absolute irony and it's downer cousin named realistic, tag along to keep this broken law of language a secret,(only writers will get what im saying)
GASP* a breath of fresh air  reveals itself in the highest light promising that if you choose your freedom, and reveal your secret, she will personally bring you freedom and peace.
neighboring discontentment,  I am a survivor of fire at it's wildest,
Like an incurable error the pilot finds in the computer's main frame,
I am that pilot as i begin to confess, called it a day...
beckoning for professional help
but they were not my doing
long time enemies and both close to me,
old-time cliches they love to preach ....
"you'd do best to keep your friends close that way it
distracts your enemies from the intentional tenure you have on them."
weighing my options i decide to speak, silence is death, im smarter than that
I just can't tell you how sorry i am, I told him
not because of what i've done
but because i'd do it again
His mouth was closed,
But he wasn't quiet I could hear him,
The sound of his heart begin to slow,
and for every woman out there, this is when you know...
heart-break is real.
He refused word of mouth but that did not forestall the howling of his heart, an injured wolf
true to character, injured, no forced deal.
His eyes spoke everything that his genetically encrypted ability to stay poker face, failed to exceed at
it took for him to shut his mouth, and just listen as he'd promised
we may need a doctor over here stat,
I know once I've told him that if given a choice ,
Him or her ...
he'd end up disappointed .
he had a way of upholding his secret self hate from childhood,
just like us all, carrying across our baggage, picking up more and expecting to climb mountains.
converting it into tortuous rituals and facades, he wears it across his chiseled countenance so well, you'd think this is who he is.
My problem is , so does he...
I tell HER about him all the time, in hopes that the buddhist teaching will be the key
They say what you hate is a reflection of what you resist in yourself.So i know he'd maintain face, at least until I got on with the confession,because I'd do the same,
that's the honest painful truth... an artifact in this raw and true moment, The highest self in me has decided I am ready
for yet another piece of wisom,
every year,
a new piece watching as if they were refereeing the play offs.
then i realize, this is the play offs I am the main star and I have the ball, the therapist told me herself, it's my turn to talk ..
worry filling the abyss in the center of me, as nervousness takes over my anatomy, triggering negative feedback and certainlymy body breaks down in an immediate cry for ventilation,
Then it dawned on me, I am the negative feedback , an excuse, a sad one.
Catlystic I am it's true, negative feedback, the return of part of an output signal to the input
blaming my conditional love on a lack of attention on your part ... wow excuse me for the foot,
the one i put in the door when you begged for my explanation and my honesty,
putting out the foot has been the biggest aid in our demise, I know how bad i hurt you,
that's the thing about a fleshy soul,
we tell our stories through our eyes.
so worried of what others think of me that I can't focus on
That's what's important to you isn't it? saving face i wanted to yell, but preserved for another time, when yelling could raise the stakes far past what I could gamble.
when we sat to write with a pen in hand,
a private affair began.
I' was afraid,
afraid that this would happen,
fate would force a baby shower that would give birth to the haunting of my heart, my secrets befallen.
As the doctor proceeds to clip the umbilical from my median,
seperating the blood i've shed with the body that is supposed
to house vital fluid but  nowholds senseless emotions.
l a gallery of clips and photos like a drawn out trailer that gave away all the parts you pay for,
  no way to express myself, choosing introversion over conversation... what a bore.
I was afraid this would happen because I know my death is timely,
gambling in these neck of the woods could cost you your family, primely... of course,
some of your loved ones may understand, either way
the other literature sorcerest's don't resist to spill the main course, guess what it's YOU.
This secret could tear me apart and feed me to the sharks,
parallel to satan, its only objective is destruction, insisting i like the dark,
a spell cast upon me of course I hate the dark, this secret can't get out or my friendly facade will melt like a witch dead in a pool of salty raindrops,
slowly burning the witch, as water was foreign,
life without literature is surely foreign to me,
my partner will be sorry if he makes me leave her
tantums, panic attacks and more take her away and a blur will ride her vision and taunt her in her maturity as the blur grows stronger
she will have amnesia
and once my partner finds out that she was feeding us, not aiding in our demise, reconstruction is to come.
like a newborn, failure to trhive, the difference between you two ? I need one to survive
My mind no longer would focus on anything else ..
this affair started between a muse and myself
He understood things without having to say a word
To talk to him all i needed was a pen and a journal.
all faithfulness adjurned.
It was a poetic journey as we entered another element,
a renewal of spirit and soul,
My partner and i would have to call it quits.
A "no trespassing" sign was posted and the door shut
Locked with no key, just us alone
no one to bother me.
It is in this affair that he has given me purpose
on my previous relationship i have closed the curtain
to have an affair is different than to cheat
poetry is the mistress
and has him beat <3

i'm a product of capitalism.
my momma shoulda known better,
there's no reward for social reproduction,
i'm a bad investment
and my history attest to that
and my trajectory is already set to a certain degree
for freedom demands strength and bravery
but i'm running deficits in those sectors.
and i often question if it's too late
for course correction.
i'm inauthentic.
crises are endemic to my life cycle.
i exhale pollution.
i feed off my own festering flesh.
i'm a breeding ground of oppression.
a tendency to lie to myself: austerity is the answer.
the competition is killing me;
when pressure doesn't make diamonds it intensifies violence.
my breath left when my father moved his assets offshore.
i'm poor, sordid and a parasite to the core.
my bread was plundered from unpeople in the name of a privilege i never asked for.
tell myself problems can be solved through purchase.
i'm stressed and spent and i can't pay my debts.
my passions arrested, i can't confess: looking for the door.
i'm not sure the least worst of all systems is worth it any more.

I tried to capture my authentic voice
My inner voice, my true-something-me-ness
But the little ****** is elusive
And free it remains, wild and free, to this night

So I deploy an inauthentic voice
An outer voice, only maybe it’s not;
Perhaps it’s an Hegelian dialectic
A voice cobbled together from castoffs

On a sale-table down at Goodwill, I found
A gently-used voice – so how do I sound?

Lords Temple Basement Men
The first Book of The Word
In Nonsense we Trust

Assembled from pre-existing works by John Burroughs, Ryan P. Kinney, Jack McGuane, Cee Williams, Don Lee, Susan Grimm, Joe Roarty, Russ Vidrick, Dianne Boresnik, Mitch James, Tanya Pilumeli, Julie Ursem Marchand, Vicki Acquah, Terry Provost, Adam Brodsky, Lennart Lundh, Raymond McNiece, Hannah Williams, MaxWell Shell, Tim Richards, Ayla Atash, RC (Bob Wilson), Chuck Joy, Katie Daley, Solomon Dixon, Mary Weems, and Gordon Downie
Mostly taken as quotes during live poetry readings. Some stolen from other sources.
Additional content from predictive text by JM Romig, Linkin Park “Powerless,” “Saga of the Swamp Thing” vol. 1, T.S. Eliot, Amalgam Mythos, Kurt Vonnegut, Kevin Smith, John A. Kinney Jr., and Psalms (chap.):13
Added original content by Ryan P. Kinney, Eli Williams, and Kadie Good

“Lords Temple Basement Men,” it says on the door in a badly photocopied sign, replaced freshly each week. The original was built from torn up pieces of bootleg band vinyl stickers left plastered all over the windows of some teenager, surely passed into decaying adulthood long ago.

They gather in the bottom of an abandoned house in the heart of mostly warehouses. Something, someone long ago forgot to bull doze in the wake of morbid industrialization and the zeal to just get more men more jobs while giving them no life, no place to live. They built in their own obsolescence.

A Man stands outside; half catcalling, half showman barker; daring, tempting, bribing people to worship with him. In paint stained torn jeans, long shaggy hair with the bald spot landing pad directly in the center of his head, and shoes barely hanging together on his feet, he bellows out The Word. Somewhere between slam poetry performance and theology lesson, he entices and seduces people to enter. Here, they do not call him Father, or Brother, just person:  Man.  “Hey, Man,” is how they great him.

"God not only loves a sinner, he prefers them.”
“Come to my parish. Sinners only”
“The lostness of the found, the blindness of the seeing, the spirituality of the atheist, the silence of the spoken.”
“The Covenant of the Sacred Heart.”

People enter a crooked doorway. The Man pulls the peeling door behind them, scrapping the ground as he does so, and leads his flock down the concrete stairs to the basement. Some newbie looks nervously into the stairwell.
From the rear, a maternal voice coos,
“You will be used to the treatments.
Don't worry about it.”
They come to a dingy dirt gravel floor and spread out; filling the space like gas expanding into a cylinder.

The Man steps upon his usual milk crate to open the service. He intones the Capitalist Mantra,
“God Save the Queen
Long live the King
Hail to the Chief
The Lord of all Lies”

And the people chant, “I will not kiss you. I will not bow. I will not bow. I will not be moved.
I love the idea of what I have to be”

The maternal voice steps up to explain their purpose here,
“This is a strange, mad religious service. Everything is out of place, nothing and no one seems to fit together. We all gather here, but no one seems to-gether. This is less a sermon and more a discussion where the gospel is debated. The Word is critiqued, modified, discussed, and changes between its members at each meeting. At any time for no reason, people can interrupt The Man to deny, confirm, suggest, or challenge his statements. The group then decides on the next bit of gospel to be made up on the spot or if what has already been said is still the current phase of perspective. There is no central thought or plan, just a plan for thoughts. We, people, call this Faith. Our membership makes up a multitude. There are Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Agnostics, Atheists, Satanists, Buddhists, Capitalists, hippies, goth kids, Starbuck’s sipping bloggers, just plain weird kids in the back working on their latest D&D campaign. Dual Spirituality is a possibility. In fact, it is encouraged. Multiple realities are possible. Poly-spirituality is acceptable. The only interconnecting philosophy among us is, ‘Anything is possible at any time for any reason’.”

The People are ready to receive The Holy Spirit and his unique brand of performance poetry,

“In the beginning, there was only The Word, a word. And then more. Which were collected into a story; The Story. And from The Story came creation.
And then came the questions. And The Question was man. Who are we? What are we? Why? Who am I?”

The Man explains,
“The whole point of The Word is to make up new ones. To defy God’s Word by creating ourselves.”

The first interrupter asks, “How do you say No to God.”

The Man answers,
“You don’t like The Question. You are The Question.
We are relearning how to get lost, hoping to return to the birth of The Word.
Worship yourself and serve only humanity.
No one made you.
You created yourself.
It’s all the same story. The Story of I.”

“We are a beautiful blasphemy to God’s word (because we question).”

“How do you say No?
You don’t.
By understanding there is no such thing as,
No, I can’t. Only I won’t.
It was.
It is.”

A torn up, steel-studded, leather clad punk responds,
“we see others as they are
we see ourselves at every age
and all at once”

And the Man once again responds,
“All that we can think. All that we can imagine. All that we can write, paint, create, feel. All of this is real; somewhere. Depends on which universal perspective you are tuned to. Don’t like the current program playing. Change the channel.”

The professor sitting on the floor, shoeless, begins to riff,
“Yes, this is like that piece about imagination being the genesis of other worlds. About how imagination, all thought, is really tapping multiple frequencies from other universes. Our imaginative creations spawn, tap into, and play back all alternate universes in a non-linear time sense. Cause and effect are not in sequence. All that we think, all that we can come up with creates new worlds, but also accesses those already in effect and plays them. We create worlds that already existed by the time we come up with them in our imagination. They were already there and human minds are organic quantum analog receiving-broadcasting devices. We randomly switch channels with nonlinear frequency, simultaneously, and with varying signal strengths of each universe. We receive, but also feedback into a greater signal. So, we unknowingly create these universes, while also being fed from our own creations. Never, in order. We are the Father and the Son. Our own creators and creations. Our words are the genesis of all the other worlds, but also speak the gospel of the programs already in progress. All that we can imagine is as real as we can conjure.”

A black goddess queen asks, “Then, what do you call God?”

The Man retorts,
“You don't need his name, because you remember the man.
The idea of a memory of a man.
Perhaps the idea is better, stronger, more important than the man.
The idea of a man.
Sometimes, people are the absence of themselves.
And the absence of man is God.”

The semanticist-******* unzips its mask and chimes in, “When you name something you separate it and take ownership of it. We never name ourselves. So I ask you, what is your name? What do you own?”

A tie-dyed burnout rallies a battle cry protest chant,
“Who's the Boss?”
“You.”
“Who's God?”
“You.”
“Who are you?”
“I am (me).”

Another voice screams from the crowd, "I'm a monster, I admit it."

Like a rolling wave, the chatter once soft, “I’m a monster” becomes a chant. Faster and faster the adrenaline rises up, the voices rise up, thunderous shouting fills the room, threatening to burst through the walls and escape into the sky. No longer fearing what others might think they raise their fists and beat their chests, unleashing the monster they tried so hard to hide. Shrieks and guttural instinctual roars, animalistic crawling and seething anger, move through the crowd like a pack of wolves ripping apart a coyote.
The screaming voices spill out,
“God has left long ago and has taken no pity on the lonely wanderer.”
“We are not Abraham or Jesus. We are forgotten.”
“We are the forgotten demons pushed out of Heaven.”
“Or maybe we never belonged there in the first place.”

The maternal voice returns, feeling the scorch of the unrequited emotion, seeks to soothe, “Thus mollified she goes, harsh words forgiven, down highways in the dark by demons driven.”

The Man, the original instigator, adds more fuel to the fire,
“And what drive does she possess that we do not?  To seek out, to be blind to the trapping of the darkness within this corridor? We must look and see how we too can move past the shame and blame of others.  To move past the trappings of our own guilt.  To take within ourselves, our demons, true, but take and guide and build the new.  A new life that we can’t ignore, and when we fall, we feel the scorn.  We feel the bad faith and lies that keep us entangled in the want-to-be-with, the fear to be-without. But we also have a fear to be, to exist in the place of a true “self” and live out our dreams. Though time keeps happening, we remain stagnant, we remain in the place of an inauthentic being, a being-for, not a being-with.  We must seek to be-with.  To be-with our demons, our past, and our temptations toward the dark, toward the place in which the I becomes.  To be. To exist. In this.  That is the place where the divine can breathe.  Though we must remember to always embrace change, for everything is temporary, including our own pain.”

Having spent all his feeling and words carelessly and frivolously, The Man abruptly closes this meeting with the usual send off,
“The Word has evolved, my friends.”

It was a day like today
Thursday winds and blues
when I was ushered
on the volcanic soil

It was a day like yesterday
Wednesday lights and blooms
when I prepared to leave the womb
and touch the web of the world

The disconnect from the placenta
was the start of the absentness
inquisitive of this voyage
the forgone past I left

For what karma should I learn?
in a world that I am perceived
as weird and out of control
who can teach me to be?

For what karma should I learn?
as a non conformist creature
one who can't acquiesce
in this inauthentic existence

It was a day like today
A Thursday of torrential rain
When I felt the pain of the world
the unfaded tears of the masses

It was a day like tomorrow
A Friday of hope and love
when I long to make a difference
Fuel my being with zest and joy

Why do people always feel compelled to say
how are you
when they pass me in the halls?

Nothing feels more inauthentic than hurrying by each other
Hurtling the social script at retreating backs

Sometimes I don't respond, leave the question hanging in the air
Sometimes I don't say it back, an awkward lopsided exchange

We already know what I'm going to say
And, I'm pretty sure, we all already know
It isn't true

I'm tired of lying
And I'm tired of polite nonsense exchanges
Just smile at me and move on

I'm fine, how are you? I say

Everybody tells me to forget
But when I hear the song in your voice
I just can't get away from you
The feeling begins anew
That's how it was when we first met

Lovin' your skin was more important
Felt the tip of your tongue
When you had me all wrong
Even in your death
I've got life in my palm
But I just can’t get away from all these memories  

Every time I close my eyes
I wake up in a Paradise
Wishing someone else was here tonight
To push my desires
And carve out my dreams
To match the life  
I've been waiting for

There is no medicine for this kind of treatment  
Your face is one big memory
Your brain is like a eulogy split
into
All the things you've done
And it won't leave my mind

Your ghost is haunting me
But now it’s telling me that all we had
is dead

I wish for everything
To go insane
So I can rest my brain
Stay in bed
What you made me do
Was too much for you

I was too good to you
But it's not over yet

As this dream scene makes me
see all the things you've done
Once haunted by your darkened melody
All over again


I'm not here to stay in your waking mess
Not mesmerized by your burning soul
Your eyes so cold and alone
Even when I get to heaven
I know

Gratitude defines the truth
in My soul

I got out of that void a long time ago
Now waiting on the other side

Maybe one day I'll find him
People ask me how you live on
I tell em when you find true love
It lives within your blood
It lives it does not move on

Everytime I close my eyes
I wake up in a Paradise
Wishing someone else was here tonight
To help my desires come to life  
I've waited for so long

And all I can do
Is be true
Knowing you once made me feel
Alive

My heart has mended the wall  
And I won't stay to try to convince it to feel something else
That is inauthentic

As this dream scene makes me
See all the things you've done
Once haunted by your darkened melody
All over again
My standards have become all the more honest  
And I just can't wait to get away tonight

Born to beg
Human touch
Ask of it
Sell myself for it

Inauthentic thrift
Fed winter's coal
Drinking the winter sleet
A conscious envelope

Sympathy divulges vanity
The mind is borne on spines
Beaten backs and chalk lines
The factory smog blanket

The film reel is tainted
Nullified by the future
Blood is upheld through drink
Or the scraps 'neath the kitchen sink

Mistress and minstrel
Colliding in such fashion
The green of grass but the soil
Which accentuates the home

The smoking pipe for the open mind
And love's ill script
Black soot of night, laid on wheat
The farmer's purple grain

The miner earns alone

Christened on billiard paper
Lo and fro, oh no
Love comes to the town again
And I am rendered spent
A recalcitrant pen begging,
"God knows when,
He'll hurt my beard, rest me deep under again"

Mother! Mother!
Hear my forlorn screams
They are inauthentic
They yearn to be redeemed

Father, you, sister!
Watch this cold hand
They were born spastic
Neutered with a brand

A brand that loves to burn alone
A brand that seethes, kiss the bone
Take me to a walk in your grove
I couldn't do anything in your cove
Just a lover's weary shove
Until you take me above
There, the night will reign with a shadow

does life ever feel so desperate that you find yourself relentlessly convincing yourself that you're made of something the world needs, that the sun burns in attempt to let you shine, that oxygen flows in molecules through the air just to keep you breathing
but the convincing is so inauthentic that you can feel the hours passing by and the skin peeling off your cold body in an effort to escape the inner self-destruction going on
  my organs are afraid and my stomach turns, my eyes droop, my lungs deflate, my heart falls to the ground and shatters
    everything around me is trying so desperately hard to remind me of how much i don't matter, and how easily my life can be simply taken away
            you win
               because now
                    nothing matters
                        and in soon enough time,
             my heart wont have to pulse in fear
my lungs won't have to heave
    and my eyes won't have to swing down so low
because i won't matter either.

For 20 years
I suffer 20 tears
But more than you think
I slash out the tires
While I carry an albatross on my back
I can burn neither of them
And God laughs at me
For He knows that my heart
Is feeble and vulnerable


For 20 years
I’ve sat and drank the poison
Lived the good lies
Of an inauthentic life
For every sleepless night
I carry this body of mine
To the wonders of certainty
And miraculously make due
With this punctured hole in my soul

For 20 years
I melt into an iceberg
Warm on the edges
But ice cold in the center
I ask you
The one who loves me
In the times I lose myself
Break the pain
And the bones that suffer as well

I'm only but 19
Yet I've held it all in
Like a brazen bull
For 20

He is carved from marble

And I

The selfish sculptor

Want to dig into him

Like clay.


Everyone around me

Who sees my face

Hears my voice

Brushes my skin

Promptly speaks of ice

And yet, I swear

If he would just cast a ray in my direction

I'd be warmed all the way through.


I talk like obsidian

When really

Every bone

Every feeling that I have

Threatens to send me crumbling

Like porcelain.

The sickness in me

Leaves me aching for him to break me

And yet

He already has.


I want to pick his diamond brain

Pull it all apart

Plant a piece of myself

Where he won't notice it.


I want to cover him like paint

Piece all his parts together like a puzzle

Make him remix me like a song

Rearranging every inauthentic part

Until I'm just another one of his masterpieces.


...And I could write a million odes to him

In the ink of this cowardly weapon

And it would never change the fact

That his destiny's spoken for already.

Hanging on a weakened nail
hidden just beyond fraudulent glass
the vile mask on the other side
of the impeccable portrait enframed

Naive eyes, blinded by distorted ways
as deceptions were glossed over
though transparent, were not seen
nor heard, past mendacious lips

Unhanging a diminishing adoration
a cherry wood falls from the wall
indentations, untrusting fragments
adorn the tiles of a bare floor

For inauthentic memories to release
trickle, down upon morose cheeks
seeping through credulous hands
onto the photograph unframed.

By, Melissa June