"kinney" poems
by J.M. Romig, Ryan P. Kinney, Morgann Blackwood, and Aaron Kasunic
Here’s to vices and virtues
To living without apologies or regrets
To breaking in order to heal
This old bird no longer caged
She gets to look on the other side of the bars this time
He gets another stumble in the hallway
A headfirst dive into a bottle of pills
Purple sharks and goats
That glow in the dark
Banana dimpled belugas
Swimming wildly asunder
Then I met God
The most beautiful of all my conquests
I knew no one else would quite match up to her
Her hair in the porch light
Looked like the thunder god had an ******
Her face still cannot be manifest
This woman,
The most beautiful thing I’ve seen
She lingers in my conscious
And has a major role to play in what will be my swan song
If experience has taught me anything (an unlikely assumption)
It is that if a woman ever tells you
-Straight up-
That she is a *****
She is not lying
There are exceptions to that rule
As I myself am quite exceptional
Dec 18, 2015
Dec 18, 2015 at 8:39 AM UTC
Six humans trapped by happenstance,
In bleak and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood
Or so the story's told.
Their dying fire in need of logs,
The first man held his back.
For of the faces round the fire
He noticed one was black.
The next man looking 'cross the way
Saw one not of his church
And couldn't bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.
The third one sat in tattered clothes
He gave his coat a hitch,
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?
The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store,
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy, shiftless poor.
The black mans face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight.
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.
The last man of this forlorn group
Did nought except for gain
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.
Their logs held tight in
death's still hands
Was proof of human sin,
They didn't die from the cold without
But died from the cold within.
Sep 29, 2014
Sep 29, 2014 at 9:01 PM UTC
My Life is a Scratched CD (OR Blue Collar Lament- The Little Napper Remix)
Lines taken from poems by JM Romig (Ursa Somniculosa/CD Skipping Down Route 11) and Ryan Kinney (Blue Collar Lament)
It's long drive on this highway
The window creeks
- its jagged way down
I breathe in the new air for the first time in months
the CD starts skip-skip words
Hopping over - lines
Reminding me
Of finite fuel
repeat-
finite time
With work looming just hours away
repeat-
Death, just decades away
I spend most of my week
in the back of the factory
where I sell my free time
on repeat
in a semi-conscience trance
watching multi-million dollar machines work
repeat
in the back of the factory
where I sell my free time
is a constellation of dirt, chipped paint
and cobwebs
forming the shape
of a bear
lounging in a hammock
skip
They are more alive than I am.
Monday at 3 PM I click off my brain,
switch on automatic,
repeat
automatic
skip
- the countdown:-T-minus 40 hours.
Each minute that ticks by
in the dull monotony slowly steals my sanity,
bit by bit
Each minute closer to Friday
slower and slower,
until on Friday they seem to tick
backwards--
skip
I have coworkers
who insist that it's a monkey,
trapped in a net
Each day blurs into the other
making them indistinguishable.
Repeat-
My finite time
Monday,
the entirety of the previous week
on repeat-
T-minus 40 hours.
skip
they are wrong.
It's clearly a bear
In the back of the factory
where I sell my free time
repeat-
Death - just decades away.
The dictator they put in charge of the asylum
barks out commands on cue,
just to remind everyone that they own you.
skip
The desperation for dollars
are the shackles that keep me here.
I often welcome sleepwalking:
I think of Emerson
On repeat-
Skip-
I think I feel like his transparent eyeball
repeat-
His eyeball-
I begin to understand
I begin to feel like I'm one with everything
skip-
everyone is love
repeat
love
every-Everyone is me
and you
skip-skip
-the impending coma
In the few instances the machines malfunction
I curse being awakened.
At least as a zombie, I don't feel
my mind rotting
repeat
the rotting constellation of dirt,
chipped paint and cobwebs:
Ursa Somniculosa
No matter where I am on the floor,
I can see him hanging there in his hammock
on the weekends I love life.
I shed the identity the uniform has forced upon me
and my true self emerges--
repeat
my finite fuel
In the back of the factory
where I sell my free time
repeat
the desperation for dollars
I truly only live two days a week
repeat
my finite time
I'm dying the other five
skip-skip
I think of Ursa Somniculosa -
In the back of the factory
where I sell my free time
enjoying his perpetual vacation
maybe sipping on a nice tall beer
soaking up the sun -
NOT being a trapped monkey
like all of us down here
on repeat
Dec 26, 2015
Dec 26, 2015 at 10:17 PM UTC
in ft.lauderdale there is a tunnel. the Henry E. Kinney tunnel. it is dusty and loud.
ghosts pass through there and beg me for change. little do they kno that i have the morphine.
less fiends. all fiends.
if you sit in there long enough youll gather waves of grey on your skin.
like sand on the shore can become such pretty patterns.
why am i writing this? the sun is shining.
if god was my soulmate id cheat with the devil,
and id have a very vivid imagination.
pop-corn on sale. 50cents.
broke tooth on kernel. cant afford the visit.
dry mouth to ****
dryers empty.
loose change.
loose cannon.
a monster.
is on the loose.
you wake up and the doctor starts to say something but you eat him.
quick! hand me a sqrew-driver.
i want to **** a bird on my way down.
if anyone ever loved and were loved by both parents then i am happy for you. you are:
happy person.
i have talked to many people.
and they talk and they talk and they pass time with words..like gas.
waste the breath and the small bones in my ear.
and always remember: try to listen every once in a while.
talk too much is rude. especially about nothing.
please shut up.
everyone.
2.
3.
forever.
5.
sick
psychopaths.
Jan 8, 2013
Jan 8, 2013 at 10:53 PM UTC
Soul Blind Pt. 2
by Ryan P. Kinney
"Dad, Why do you look like you're crying?"
"Oh, you know. Sad things."
"Don't be sad, be happy."
"Both of those are always about you."
"Why?"
"Because when you are not here, I'm sad."
"When you are, I'm happy."
Aug 28, 2021
Aug 28, 2021 at 11:47 PM UTC
Our lot was not to stay all night;
In kneeling praise by bathroom stalls.
Alcohol numbed your honesty's bite,
wrote her destiny on the divider walls.
And we weren't the kind to cheat, don't believe,
All the loose lips half-cross town,
Last call patrons who watch me leave,
And shut this ****** down...
Like Zane and Beckett, so convinced,
Their **** would last forever,
Bad enough to make you wince,
If they spend one more second together.
Or Jane and Kinney, young, driven, and full,
Of lust or something similar.
Don't be surprised, you've seen this fire,
The end? ...all too familiar.
And pretty Syd had all the gall,
and Pony Boy thought he knew the score...
but he's just a **** like so much Pyrex,
Stuffed inside his paper *****
But Ashtray Woman with ***** Mouth,
And monster's blood on toilet tissue,
Is just another frightened girl,
With real and dangerous daddy issues.
Now, here, at the close (I'm still glad to say),
You deserve almost everything, that you've won,
Our karma arose ( and, in time, took the day ).
Now I ponder regrets in the hours before dawn,
It wasn't the when, or with whom we may lay,
or the time in the morning before I should be gone,
It's more about how we desired to stay...
When we gazed into stars lying flat on your lawn.
I once craved your poison but, now, in my way,
I'm actually glad
to see you gone.
Mar 24, 2017
Mar 24, 2017 at 11:26 PM UTC
Tanka-ka
Or Not Tanka
American tanka: Japanese influenced poetry that ignores rigid syllable guidelines; typified by an individualist, nonconformist sentiment.
1.
You step so cautiously
That sometimes you forget
To take a step
And I am left waiting,
Running far ahead
2.
You don’t realize
That your body
Might just save this one
This body might,
Just **** me
3.
What does all this stuff mean?
What does this world mean?
Long after I am gone
This **** will still be here,
Forgotten by everyone
4.
Internet ****
Seduces mens’ hearts
And objectifies their desires
5.
The destruction of the self is intolerable,
Everyone tells me
To destroy myself is unacceptable,
Little round pills
- Kinney Ryan
May 26, 2015
May 26, 2015 at 9:32 PM UTC
Hammer
by Ryan P. Kinney
**Picks up Hammer
**Swings Hammer
This one’s for every woman who didn’t love me
And for every one that ever did
This one’s for every person who has ever doubted and underestimated me
For those who ever thought my life should be a mirror of their journey
‘Cause theirs worked out SO well for them
*SMASH
This one’s for my Father,
Mother,
Brothers
My brother’s keeper,
Sins of the Father,
And inheritance of Mother’s malice
This one’s for every time I’ve had to prove I’m the GOOD son
*SMASH
This one’s for the bigots,
Racists,
Hate-spewing monsters
For the ************* morons
This one’s for those who assume I’m gay
‘Cause that’s SUPPOSSED to matter
*SMASH
This one’s for those who have passed their petty judgments
Based on the surface of my face
Or my visible scars
Or my hidden ones
This one’s for those who have called me freak
For those who judge me on who I was
Not who I AM
*SMASH
This one’s for those who lack the ability to see in color and shades
Locked in their boring black and white senseless absolutes
There aren’t just gray areas
There are tints of every shade we a capable of perceiving
This one’s for the LITTLE people
*SMASH
This one’s for those who patronize my intelligence
But yet are so easily fooled into acceptance
With a pair of plastic black frames
This one’s for IRONY
*SMASH
This one’s for those who have let me down
Disappointed me, failed me
Failed to live to their potential
This one’s for EVERYONE
*SMASH
This one’s for me
For not living up to my own potential
This one’s for who I AM
*SMASH
And this one...
These tears...
**Drops Hammer
**Looks to the sky...
This one’s for my son
Jul 7, 2015
Jul 7, 2015 at 7:40 PM UTC
Half Life
by Ryan P. Kinney
Welcome to the digital age.
Where man’s best friend is Internet ****
And a woman’s only friend is her ********
We’ve traded a heartbeat for an electronic pulse.
Blips and bleeps in an imagined humanity.
Forgetting that living means leaving the house.
And that sandals and boxer shorts are not formal wear.
We live in the information age
Full disclosure is no longer optional
We are sharing information.
We are contributing to the death of the self.
Or are we finally mastering intelligence?
There is an epidemic of inaction
Entropied Progress
The mobius sloth slides down into its own gluttony
And I just want to have *** with someone who is still alive
Have you seen the latest episode of Walking Dead or Breaking Bad?
Have you looked in the mirror?
Reality shows?
Who’s reality?
We are social creatures
And social control is how you keep the pigs in their pen
Until it’s time to offer us up as sacrifice at the altar of decadence
We willingly give them our intelligence
Our spirit
For another video game
Another TV show
That promises a better reality
See it all in HD
While we dubstep to our doom
Up Jacob’s Ladder
Built out of the 15 minute prophets
Sell me another artificially derived addiction
Masquerading as sustenance
Trading them like baseball cards
Tell me how much I need it
Need you
Preach it with the fear of the unorthodox on Fox News
While everyone’s getting high on your life
Televangelist CEOs
Sell us the next salvation
The anarchists are screaming,
“Legalize it.”
And the stoners aren’t helping
The half-life of modernization guarantees that if enough of our individuality decays
There ceases to be anything worth calling human
Dec 16, 2015
Dec 16, 2015 at 11:28 PM UTC
Jigsaw
by J.M. Romig, Amanda Whitlock, and Ryan P. Kinney
The first time I watched a man die
It wasn’t a man anymore, they told me
Just like my mother wasn’t my mother anymore
I will never forget the wrong answer
And the empty hours
When the minute hand was always longer
I often welcome sleepwalking through most of the week
In the few instances the machines malfunction
I curse being awakened
I don’t see how anyone
Can smoke at a time like this
When the air is so heavy
It’s like breathing cement
I’m in stressed and panicked misery
And I’m vomiting
Lots and lots of stuff
That stretches vast
And expands to eat up everything
The guilt of my sin
The heft of your innocence
Weighs heavily on my soul
As i drag you down with me
Her lit cigarette burns
So brightly from the porch
Against the darkness
It reminds me of a lighthouse
Or a bug zapper
And what is that moth doing there anyways?
People are trying to sleep
Feb 19, 2015
Feb 19, 2015 at 1:24 PM UTC
Free Kittens
by Ryan P. Kinney
Whenever I see one of those signs
Advertising cheap, easy love
I am reminded of my darkest hours
When I fed my addiction to affection
To a love, a life I could control.
To something that needed me.
Surely they’ll love me
And quell the devouring loneliness and disconnection
Like little furry ******
Without the ***
Wrong kinda *****
Wrong kinda love
When I had a full harem
I discovered, there is such a thing as too many
They were infested with parasites and ailments
Without constant attention
They’d **** on and defile
My every possession
My childish and selfish delight
Turned into an overwhelming nightmare
I didn’t know how to handle them
I never did
Never her
Never myself
Each time I put one down
I’d see their scared faces
Pleading “Why don’t you love me?”
“Because,” I’d say, “She didn’t love me.”
“None of them do.”
“They won’t keep me.”
“I can’t keep you.”
Unable to understand why
As I snuffed the life out of each little creature
Pushed to the brink
They became souvenirs of desperation
If this horrifies you,
Then you are right.
It horrifies me too
I cared more for those cats than my grandmother that year
At her funeral, I said prayers for them
Her entire 77 years more worthless than several weeks with each cat
Grandma- Dead in my heart by her own callousness
The kittens-By my own hand for their innocence
Apr 7, 2015
Apr 7, 2015 at 11:06 PM UTC
The Blue Collar Lament
by Ryan Kinney
I spend most of my week in a semi-conscience trance watching multi-million dollar machines work. They are more alive than I am. Monday at 3 PM I click off my brain, switch on automatic, and begin the countdown-T-minus 40 hours. Each minute that ticks by in the dull monotony slowly steals my sanity, bit by bit. The vampire conglomerate that signs my check robs me of my youth, intelligence, and vitality until I am just another mindless automaton.
These walls are masters of time. Each minute closer to Friday gets slower and slower, until on Friday they seem to tick backwards. Then on Monday, the entirety of the previous week repeats. Each day blurs into the other making them indistinguishable.
The dictator they put in charge of the asylum barks out commands on cue, just to remind everyone that they own you. All the while he never realizes that he's just another puppet dancing for them, only his strings are shorter. When they inevitably cut them he has further to fall.
I often welcome sleepwalking through most of the week. In the few instances the machines malfunction I curse being awakened. At least as a zombie I don't feel my mind rotting.
I live on the weekends. I shed the identity the uniform has forced upon me and my true self emerges. On the weekends I love life, I achieve the goals I value, not the hazy path set before me by the corporation that owns my soul. For two days the dungeon master gives me reprieve from my incarceration. Upon clocking out each Friday I suddenly feel rejuvenated, while Sunday night I begin dreading the impending coma.
The desperation for dollars are the shackles that keep me here. I am only truly living two days a week and dying the other five. I've made a pact with the devil, 5/7th of my life for a weekly pittance. Until the decay of my body matches that of my brain I return weekly to mind numbing tedium, the memory of my weekend existence fading into the background.
Written 1/28/08 while on the "job"
Edited and organized into sensibility on a weekend.
Feb 17, 2015
Feb 17, 2015 at 11:51 PM UTC
Analog Man
by Ryan P. Kinney
I am the analog man
Do not give me your zeros and ones
Black and whites
I'll take a red two any day
Old fashioned old school
All chivalry and filth
That mars the scars
Customized dirt
Nothing is written in stone yet
(or in the dirt)
I wear these glasses,
This fraud,
As armor,
A filter
Against that which I am forced to see
I am not in or out
Black or white
I am live in TECHNICOLOR
Excited electrons
Ebbing and flowing
From the extremes of existence
I do not fit the pattern
Nor am I a predictable algorithm
Put your garbage in me
You will not get garbage out
I will turn and twist
Create while destroying
And shine your **** into my gold
I will thrive off of what is wrong with this world
And make your leavings better than you ever were
Dec 16, 2015
Dec 16, 2015 at 11:25 PM UTC
Somebody Take Me
by Ryan P. Kinney and J.M. Romig
You shook me up
And poured out my mind
Cooked me ‘til I crystallized
Crushed me up and smoked me
You got high on my experiences
Took my stories into your body
You loved it
Then the bad trip came crashing in
The heartbreaks, the beatings,
The suicidal thoughts
I made you paranoid, cynical, and distrusting
Every loss peppered with a smile
Each warm, glowing moment
Tainted with the debauchery of the act
You’ll pay for all this in rehab
Blood and tears diluted with stale coffee and ****** cigarettes
(They all taste the same)
Go ahead, Detoxify.
Spit me out
No matter how you try to purge
You’ll never be rid of this poison
Dec 16, 2015
Dec 16, 2015 at 11:51 PM UTC
"Six humans trapped by happenstance
In bleak and bitter cold
Each one possessed a stick of wood,
Or so the story's told.
Their dying fire in need of logs,
The first woman held hers back.
For of the faces round the fire,
She noticed one was black.
The next man looking cross the way,
Saw one not of his church,
And couldn't bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.
The third one sat in tattered clothes,
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use,
To warm the idle rich?
The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store.
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy, shiftless poor.
The black man's face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from sight,
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.
"The last man of this forlorn group
Did naught except for gain
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.
The logs held tight in death's still hands
Was proof of human sin.
They didn't die from the cold without,
They died from ---THE COLD WITHIN." - james patrick kinney
May 14, 2014
May 14, 2014 at 11:48 PM UTC
by Ryan P. Kinney and J.M. Romig
I am shards and reflections
Machinations and reactions
I am translucent pieces and parts
Assembled and disheveled
Spitting.
Clicking
Fingertips stumbling ever so awkwardly
Across the keyboard
Slightly stale leftover love
Making memories
Drift in...
My conscious lacks a separation between the human and the inert
Most sociopaths have a certain charm
Dec 20, 2015
Dec 20, 2015 at 7:49 AM UTC
The (Only) Story
(A Friend Pt. 2)
by Ryan P. Kinney
"So, this is it then?"
"THE END..."
"No, only yours"
"Well, only this part of your story."
"So, What happens now?"
"Where do I go?"
"That's up to you."
"Where do you think you'll go?"
"I guess I hadn't really thought of it."
"It's time to start now."
"We've got places to go."
"Whatever you think, is right somewhere, someplace."
"You write your own story."
"I was too busy living to think about it ending."
"That's the point of it, isn't it."
"So, who are you?
"Oh, you know..."
I DO.
I know her
I guess we all do.
We've known her all along
from
THE BEGINNING...
Aug 28, 2021
Aug 28, 2021 at 11:42 PM UTC
By Ryan P. Kinney and Dawn Richardson
Assembled from works by Ryan P. Kinney
This one’s for those who have let me down
Disappointed me, failed me
Failed to live to their potential
This one’s for EVERYONE
We will be naked and bare
Ugly and beautiful
Out from under the covers
Out of control
And into the light
There will be no more hiding
Not from the rhetoric
Not from the self-righteousness
Not from the lies we tell ourselves
This one’s for every woman who didn’t love me
And for every one that ever did
This one’s for every person who has ever doubted and underestimated me
For those who ever thought my life should be a mirror of their journey
‘Cause theirs worked out SO well for them
Not from the us that never was
Not from our definitions of family or love
This one’s for me
For not living up to my own potential
This one’s for those who patronize my intelligence
But yet are so easily fooled into acceptance
With a pair of plastic black frames
This one’s for IRONY
Not from the guilt
Not from the pain
Or from the shame
Not from the anger
Or the happiness
This one’s for who I AM
Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions
Jan 2, 2016
Jan 2, 2016 at 9:16 PM UTC
Take me back to LACMA when I knew I had ya
The lights made it feel like happy ever after
Sneaking in to swim in fancy hotels
Making them believe we were staying there ourselves
You would drive miles just to see me smile
Windows down, music loud, worries far behind us
Curled up in your passenger seat
With my head on your shoulder and your hand on my knee
To the lookout in Laguna I found before I knew ya
It never had a better view than dancing there with you
Took me to the Wedge for our very first date
Had a long way to go but we were on our way
Jump the bridge into the water, Via Lido
Then we'll go to the drive in theater
Walk around the island calling houses yours and mine
Park on Cliff Drive if we can ever find it
A thousand steps down to reach that shore
Strolling Abbot Kinney, a thousand things we can't afford
I don't really know what we looking for
But we found love in the Last Bookstore
Valentines Days at Urth Cafes
Cake at Turtle Rock for our best friends' birthdays
Laughing at the things that just didn't make sense
Like how we never, ever felt the Santa Ana winds
Laventina's, In-n-Out, call it controversial
But I'm not going to Del Taco
Inspiration point till early in the morning
Disneyland fireworks had us Soarin'
I've never known another love like this
Someone take me back to Tower 56
Someone take me back to Tower 56
Baby our love is written all over it
Apr 15, 2020
Apr 15, 2020 at 11:45 AM UTC
It was back in 012 did a couple of tapes did a couples of DVDS but I made a couple of mistakes. Didn’t know what I was doing but I put on the cape know it’s which world tour should go on today?
See you told me I would lose but I won I might cop a million Jimmie chews just fun. Because ******* couldn’t take what was in me Australian Kinney might run up to Disney out with in LA with fenny. I got the eye of the tiger the lion of Judah.
Now it me and my time me and just me and my prime everything I tried to teach them they gonna see it in time tell the ******* to get a stick I’m done leading the blind. Got two shows tonight out in Brooklyn and Dallas then a private hand party in the new British tower you can see me in sight it’s my time to shine all the people in line which mean I have fly like a movie no commercial its lil-Tay more money yah I’m universal.
I hear they coming for me because I hear the top is lonely what the **** they gonna x2 say I’m the best doing it x2. I’m the best
I Rember a time they didn’t give me a time of day just spit in my face then walk away couldn’t buy my mother a couch now I’m sitting at the closing board brought my mother a house you can never understand why I grind like I do damaiyah and abri why I cry like I do cause even when my real mother was on crack I was crack now the whole album crack you don’t got to skip a track I don’t have to get a plaque I don’t go to get a reward I just walk out the door
all the girls would applaud All the girls would commend as long as they understand that I’m fighting for the girls that never thought they can never can win but before they can begin you told them it was the end and I’m am here to reverse the curse that they live in. got two bones to pick but Imma only chose one you might get address on the second album which mean you breathe tells my mothufucker to say so tell all my bad ******* I can see your halo.
I hear they coming for me because the top is lonely what the **** they gonna say x2 I’m the best doing it x4 I’m the best x2 its ok x2 as long you know as long you ************ know I’m the best x5 I’m the best doing it
IM THE BEST...
Nov 18, 2015
Nov 18, 2015 at 11:38 AM UTC
by Dawn Richardson and Tiffany Ann Boyd
Assembled from works by J.M. Romig, Sheena Zilla, and Ryan P. Kinney
My first memory is of dying.
I felt like I’d lived a full life
And now I was gladly fading away.
My first last words were
“Tell Elizabeth I love her”
I don’t remember knowing Elizabeth.
I love her though, or at least I did in that moment.
“These aren’t sad tears I’m crying, I’m just cutting onions my dear.”
It makes me want to rip off my flesh and run down the street as bare muscle and bone screaming ****** ******
It will get better once I leave this purgatory waiting room of stress and self-loathing, but until then my outlook is a bit glum.
I am terrified
Before me is a discolored, screaming, clawing, misshapen alien creature
My son takes his first breathes of real air
We are all exhausted
His mother looks at me with a look that practically screams,
“We did it.”
I plead, “But we’re not done doing it yet…
Are we?”
His gurgles turn into cries
And I know…
For some reason, couldn’t tell you why, I thought about Frankenstein’s Monster.
Some parts are really fuzzy,
I hold it close to me- the fuzzy parts against my skin.
It’s a quilt blanket, stitched together of pieces and parts of found cloth.
My father made it for me.
My very last birthday gift.
I cocoon myself in it like a womb.
I hated him for what he’d done, but I hated myself more for missing him.
I have to fight everyday to be a better person in spite of what I was exposed to.
Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions
Jan 2, 2016
Jan 2, 2016 at 9:18 PM UTC
by Ryan P. Kinney
Assembled from works by J.M. Romig and Ryan P. Kinney
Once you log into The Network, you can't log off.
Once you're plugged in, you can't opt out.
That's the way things are.
Your life becomes your Channel.
Your world becomes your Show.
Have you seen the latest episode of Walking Dead or Breaking Bad?
Have you looked in the mirror?
Reality shows?
Who’s reality?
We live in the information age
Full disclosure is no longer optional
We are sharing information.
We are contributing to the death of the self.
Or are we finally mastering intelligence?
We know how to play the system
how to get followers,
when to drop a hashtag,
when to upsell a sponsor,
We are social creatures
And social control is how you keep the pigs in their pen
Until it’s time to offer us up as sacrifice at the altar of decadence
The Rich are locked up
in their floating wi-fi enabled panic rooms,
High above all of the pollution.
Living vicariously through the shows
broadcast by The Network.
Sell me another artificially derived addiction
Masquerading as sustenance
Tell me how much I need it
Need you
Preach it with the fear of the unorthodox on Fox News
Meanwhile on the ground,
people are caricatures of themselves -
the byproduct of generations
of narcissism as survival mechanism.
Nostalgia, and criticism
as a means to pay the bills.
Unless you choose to never log in.
Choose to ignore the cameras
following everyone everywhere
You can always get a real job -
If you can find one.
Most people don't.
It's the new economy.
In exchange for our data, and privacy,
we get ad-revenue and a chance at stardom.
We willingly give them our intelligence
Our spirit
For another video game
Another TV show
That promises a better reality
See it all in HD
While we dubstep to our doom
Up Jacob’s Ladder
Built out of the 15 minute prophets
We’ve traded a heartbeat for an electronic pulse.
Blips and bleeps in an imagined humanity.
Forgetting that living means leaving the house.
When the feed is quiet -
we take the occasional moment
to breathe – cough -
and look up to where all the stars used to be.
Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions
Jan 2, 2016
Jan 2, 2016 at 9:21 PM UTC
by Ryan P. Kinney and Dawn Richardson
Created from prompts by J.M. Romig, Dawn Richardson, and Ryan P. Kinney
She loves him like a fire,
Enveloping, holding, and caressing the wood,
While slowly consuming every part of him
Shaking off clothes like the leaves in autumn
Their bodies exposed,
Changing from a wan pallor
To a flushed crimson hue
Their bodies burn,
Breathe drifts like smoke into the skyline
The mountains **** their horizons
The dragon flies and dragonflies in the dusking night
The snow blanketed world deadens the sound of his beating heart
Her tide slowly recedes into him
The delicate wax of his heart melts under her fury
She swallows his cries
Babies sleep soundly
Created at the Winter Writing Workshop (Dec. 27, 2015),
HEYMAN! Productions
Jan 2, 2016
Jan 2, 2016 at 9:09 PM UTC
Untitled 2
by Unknown 2
created from cut up poems at the Jigsaw chapbook debut event (May 27, 2017)
Not being able to fit in and be normal, I fought back and choose to accentuate my differences instead. To take away the sting of the humiliation of being different, I choose to beat my recriminators to the punch. Over the years this freakish, differing defense became the mask, the performance. I perform the freak now to fit in. But this is not an insincere masquerade, but rather one of the many costumes I wear, a reflection of slivers of me. I protect the darkest parts of me by shielding it in light. Trying on different identities
So much so, you’d never suspect I am hiding something. The best place to hide is in the open, where no one would think to look.
As he reached into her robe
She giggled, and handed him his lunch.
“Go to work,” she said.
She sits behind me squawking with an adolescent banter that must seem dire
Her intensity of voice speaks the same thing I had secretly wished for years, but been too afraid to say
“Please pay attention to me.”
Speak, I did, for the very first time
This awkward message of youthful adoration is not exactly communicated articulately
Her only response is, “God, I hate you. Please shut up.”
If I am already taking risks with my life, then I will not be silenced
For once, I will not back down
“You love me. You just don’t know it yet.”
Assembled from works by Ryan P. Kinney
Jun 2, 2017
Jun 2, 2017 at 9:35 AM UTC
by Ryan P. Kinney
This is a dream I had the night of May 27, 2013.
The dream opens to me in a booth at a restaurant with an unknown faceless female friend. I begin to notice at other booths across me a single woman sitting in several different booths. I slowly begin to realize that all of these woman look like Lisa, although each unique and different. These very similar women were sitting by themselves, and freaking out people around them with how similar they looked. I instantly rationalize that they are all Lisa’s from alternate realties, different possibilities of what they could be.
I am talking with my friend as I notice these women. My friend gets up to go to the bathroom and I approach these Lisa’s, addressing them all at once. I ask them to join me at my table (there are 3 of them that I can identify, but my mind told me there were 3 more there, a total of 6). They all come to my booth without a word, as though they were expecting this. I bring them to my table and add a chair for my friend at the end. The friend never returns and despite my mind telling me there were 6 Lisa’s, there was only space for 3 of them. They sit down.
One Lisa is very similar to mine, although very thin and pale. Another Lisa is rather chubby. A third Lisa sits down a few minutes after the others. She returned in place of my former friend. She was dressed in cyber goth clothing with black contacts that made her pupils appear to be constricted solid black circles. I exclaimed, “Ooo, there’s a goth Lisa.”
I addressed the Lisa most like mine and began asking her questions to gauge how like mine she was, almost suspecting that she was. The only question I can remember was, “What kind of car do you drive?” She told me a story about her white car, but I cannot remember the details. I told her the story of my breakup with my Lisa. Somewhere in the conversation I grabbed the thin Lisa’s wrist and she asked me, “Do you want to break that wrist?” I asked, “Problems with an eating disorder?” She nodded.
The chair at the end of the booth remained empty.
I awoke…
Maybe I shouldn’t drink before bed.
Dec 21, 2015
Dec 21, 2015 at 9:18 PM UTC