"obfuscating" poems
The dust of confusion hangs heavy in the air
Obfuscating the vision with thick veil
Until strong wind comes to clear it away
Sep 2, 2014
Sep 2, 2014 at 10:12 AM UTC
resuming vogon poetry
altering website logos
pretending everyone cares
playing "east hastings"
asphyxiating well-nigh denouement
depicting twitter status
obfuscating coincident deletions
translating from Sḵwx̱wú7mesh
assuring Sḵwx̱wú7mesh exists
painting skwiḵw's mother?
decrying micropolitical maelstrom
imbibing fireball fountain
inundating lexical foofaraw
crafting poetic wonders
desiring other mediums
remaining practically invisible
ending internet-only depression
drafting noetic blunders
requesting astute clique
blazing perilous trail
aging ominous grisaille
depicting kmart realism
seeking darker groups
increasing pre-weekend laughter
appropriating communist symbols
making lone chuckle
offending worldwide communists
colonizing hello poetry
colonizing parallel universe
relaxing e-migration policies
пить чистую водку
photographing abduction scene
¿losing consistent format?
increasing bluebird insignia
avoiding frivolous legalities
striking astraphobic comments
assuming near-universal automation
lowering latent inhibition
traversing oneiric plane
laxwadding afebrile loodies
wallscaping pitchsourced chthonicities
closing one-star conveniences
sharing alien-looking alphabet
writing system downtimes
Sep 13, 2015
Sep 13, 2015 at 7:42 PM UTC
We have a small sculpture of Henry James on our terrace in New York City.
Nothing would surprise him.
The beast in the jungle was what he saw--
Edith Wharton's obfuscating older brother. . .
He fled the demons
of Manhattan
for fear they would devour
his inner ones
(the ones who wrote the books)
& silence the stifled screams
of his protagonists.
To Europe
like a wandering Jew--
WASP that he was--
but with the Jew's
outsider's hunger. . .
face pressed up
to the glass of ***
refusing every passion
but the passion to write
the words grew
more & more complex
& convoluted
until they utterly imprisoned him
in their fairytale brambles.
Language for me
is meant to be
a transparency,
clear water gleaming
under a covered bridge. . .
I love his spiritual sister
because she snatched clarity
from her murky history.
Tormented New Yorkers both,
but she journeyed
to the heart of light--
did he?
She took her friends on one last voyage,
through the isles of Greece
on a yacht chartered with her royalties--
a rich girl proud to be making her own money.
The light of the Middle Sea
was what she sought.
All denizens
of this demonic city caught
between pitch and black
long for the light.
But she found it
in a few of her books. . .
while Henry James
discovered
what he had probably
started with:
that beast, that jungle,
that solipsistic scream.
He did not join her
on that final cruise.
(He was on his own final cruise).
Did he want to?
I would wager yes.
I look back with love and sorrow
at them both--
dear teachers--
but she shines like Miss Liberty
to Emma Lazarus' hordes,
while he gazes within,
always, at his own
impenetrable jungle.
3.2k
You were draped across a girlfriend's bedroom wall
where a cross would be,
your arms held out loosely like an ambiguous invitation,
shielding your countenance from extraneous intrusions
under which she would sleep soundly
in the shroud of your incantation.
Your fallen angel wings beating back bad dreams
slain mercilessly
and falling at your feet.
Your lips slightly pouting, eyes dark,
obfuscating the madness and sex-crazed hallucinations
they harbor.
Hair purposefully unkempt,
disheveled sensuously atop your head,
tufts of hair brushed across your broad chest--
Bare muscles taut and taunting,
placed topographically on the poised temple--
those ready to worship bow their heads
in reverence to the sonic alchemist.
The modern adonis,
sculpted out of the Mississippi Delta Blues
and Dionysian wet dreams--
brought to life with the electric current pulsating through the microphone and its stand upon which you straddle with skin-tight leather pants--
Your left hand around its waist,
your right cupped over the phallus--
your lips part and your cataclysmal eyes
envelop the darkness before you--
Your image,
tormented and tantalizing
in an open invitation
to prostrate ourselves before you
and succumb to your hypnotic stare.
The door opens.
Oct 13, 2016
Oct 13, 2016 at 12:14 AM UTC
submerged in a life with no todays
a submarine dive in dank water
a muck and a murk that can’t be shaken
awakening to a déjà vu
unviewed in an era or two or ten or when or
then but not now and never next
electrical fences building themselves
unyielding as we scale
flailingly failingly toward
a date and time and place indeterminable
subliminal signposts spray-painted by
anarchists railing against awareness
obscuring and obfuscating
translating into languages undocumented
concocted from alien metals and foreign shrieks
weaknesses in the armor show like
rusting bruises on the intangible
cruising through an imaginable maze
while memory like a rabid wolf bays
submerged in a life with no todays
May 30, 2012
May 30, 2012 at 4:53 PM UTC
The barren landscape sends me shivers
Further enhanced by the total obliteration
The presence of ghosts still lingers
So many years after the detonation
All this desolation pictures
Like a scene from the apocalypse scriptures
A pale nuclear shadow projected eternally
The perpetual loss of harmony
A remnant showing us our absurdity
Was vaporised by the obfuscating bright
The ashen picture is the last goodbye
Relic of the tremendous light
My moods darken I want to cry
This is the last trace of a human being
a son of someone
prevented from further ageing
That from fate couldn’t run
Like a permanent echo of the disaster
a visual silent scream
like a photograph of a dreadful dream
a shout that sends a warning to us all
As we wish to forget how the balance is frail
It’s easy to disregard the detail
and be united by the same fate
that destruction at an even greater scale
it’s yet a threat not out of date
Apr 8, 2019
Apr 8, 2019 at 5:24 AM UTC
I should have skeletons in my closet,
but they've yet been stripped of their flesh,
and I've let them loose in this small town
for a game of hide 'n' seek.
She returned a set of my pajamas, unwashed,
her intoxicating scent lingering on hooks in my closet
where her aroma constructs an illusion.
I bury my face in them,
feeling my damp cheeks pressed into her *******
reaching down below where my hand grasps her posterior
where it takes a firm shape in the loose garments.
I dig into the scent until I go crazy;
I tell myself I'll wash them next week.
I should have skeletons in my closet,
but she's taken it on the road,
in a small town parading it down empty streets
where I can see it clearly,
her oblong sunglasses darkly obfuscating
what I perceive to be her pejorative gaze,
over a narrow ivory face,
sandy blonde hair flowing in the wind.
(I still feel, yes, that smooth pale face cupped within my trembling hands, that sandy hair tangled around my fingers reaching up the back of her neck, pressing her face more towards mine)
I look for the shallow dent
in her ubiquitous red minute two-door seater
on the passenger side, where she was gently T-boned
by a student driver practicing their three-point turn,
and the smiley-face lemon-scented air freshener
dangling from her rear-view mirror,
having lost its freshness years ago.
(I still see, yes, us in that hardware store parking lot,
in the closed evening hour,
sitting cramped in the passenger seat,
her knees on either side of me,
our shirts off and skin warm and sweaty, nervous,
trembling, trembling, lips aching and souls yearning--
where were we headed to again?)
I look for it so intensely,
I forgot my goal was to never see it again.
Young love looking for little things in a small town.
For years I play this game of hide 'n' seek,
and part of me should realize
that at some point she got up from her hiding spot
and moved on with her life.
(and no, I won't look at her engagement photos,
nor the photos of her newborn child,
nor the Happy Anniversaries and the congratulatory sentiments--
I can see them without social media's derision)
I still scan the streets
like a vulture over roadkill,
yet I thought I was the one
engraved into the grainy streets
where she commutes over my remains.
I should have skeletons in my closet,
but I let them walk out of my life
so I can chase them all over town.
May 22, 2016
May 22, 2016 at 11:02 PM UTC
All day
He stands at the tree
Doesn't touch
And does not speak
Stains linger
That way all the onlookers
Know:
"This is his tree"
"This is where they"
"This is"
So while for the
Neighbors, friends,
There may as well still be
A body
Spinning up there
He comes again
And again
And again
To stand
Where the stool stood,
Looks up to the obfuscating canopy,
As He must have done,
Again
And again
As He twisted and twisted
For three spectator-days
At the rope-hugged branch up yonder
Before they cut him down
Before the crowd.
Both touch the grass heavily
Both are mute
And they don't touch.
Feb 7, 2010
Feb 7, 2010 at 2:58 PM UTC
An alien desire takes over
Never felt before
New awareness of existence
When I obliterate the visible
Fortify the mind from distractions
So many structures
Creating an ugly landscape
Obfuscating the horizon
Take control of the imagination
To expunge the unnecessary
Extravagant paraphernalia
Overt exhibition of the trivial
Making a jest of this rich life
Veer away from the mindless journey
Let the alien desire take over
None but you can salvage yourself
From the onslaught of false conformations
Nothing of this will last
Take refuge in the truth of nothingness
Be aware of new existence
In perfect ecstasy and coherence
With the harmonious waves of universe
Apr 22, 2015
Apr 22, 2015 at 8:26 AM UTC
The Dummocraps and RepubLIE-CONs
Are engaged in a devastating war.
The RepubLIE-CONs hate everyone
The Dummocraps hate decisions more.
While the RepubLIE-CONs are engaged
In selling away the public’s rights,
The Dummocraps fight among themselves
And bring confusion to the fight.
So, the RepubLIE-CONs don’t need
To bother tearing Dummocraps down,
They just stand back and watch while
Dummocraps knock each other around.
Any effort the Dummocraps try to make
Ends on a pathetically useless note
Because over half the Dummocraps
Don’t even bother to go and vote.
The RepubLIE-CONs, on the other hand
Have an insane, but vocal minority
That are paid very well to do as told
By an even smaller, rich minority.
So, a country that is mentally lazy
And generally stupid in the bargain,
Lets itself get tangled up in lies
Propaganda and obfuscating jargon.
It’s all really that easy, it seems
When you look at what is true.
The voters in this country feel
That voting is too hard a thing to do.
So, they sit on their ***** and then
Complain at every law they pass
That robs them of their place in life
And destroys all but the upper class.
Mar 27, 2016
Mar 27, 2016 at 9:21 PM UTC
They salute the setting sun-
The invocation of eternity in a dark glass bottle
Colored in by the furious scribbling of a black marker
Always on the verge
Of empty;
To the dull cacophonous squeak that erupts from the tip of that thing,
Irate in its placid path towards obscurity,
Censoring the callous morning light from refracting
Into the chasms of some finitely empty infinitum
Otherwise dedicated as the blunder of nomenclature:
Reality.
But to the muted and forlorn residue of the aforementioned,
The fiery chill blazing down upon fair human hearts,
Only meek eyes and ears perceive You in Your squandered state,
Your quiet quintessence,
Your opaque perfection.
Shine on, though I beg!
For even this obfuscating cherubim
Is depraved,
And wicked,
And lacking substance
To combat they who stand aside from the narrow mouth of that empty bottle
Where emptiness becomes palpable while beauty has no form;
Shine!
Luxuriate the few and linger not on the fearful and ignorant,
Scintillate and commiserate with us,
With them,
With those you find and who find you--
Do not confuse yourself with
God!
For God is in the bottle
And God is the marker!
Confess your presence in our souls--give a name to what we cannot
So that when we wake we find no compartment for our passions, no boundaries of love-
Roaming freer than the dancing light made pale by that blasphemous credence of philosophy awry.
Jan 16, 2012
Jan 16, 2012 at 8:30 PM UTC
What he knows to be her lamp,
Exhaled bronze light.
Obsessively unflinching mid-range stare,
Front teeth pushed forward, from the placement of his tongue over the years.
A vague un-answer,
Obfuscating, leftward facing eyes complete with matching set of lips,
In an unusually high voice mentioning predictables
Dragging behind the boat.
Purple refracted nylon extra tensile-strength line.
Half mesh half polyester, with a carefully closed-door shave.
Couch ridden drone strike 3 floors due north.
Considering the symbolism of when I got my coat back from her room. Saved her the trouble of throwing it off her bed.
Forward through brick, laid algorithmically and FedExed in, he could have an answer but would have significantly less automobile.
Both first and last name lower case tonight and many others.
Silent E Novocained.
An on-again off again lightbulb. Colander as lamp-shade.
Nov 16, 2013
Nov 16, 2013 at 10:42 PM UTC
It's already hard enough to say anything accurately
without further obfuscating and camouflaging the soul.
The faces in the funeral pews are impassive, impatient
and the dead woman cares not what's said, isn't even present.
The poet gets innumerable do-overs, it's one of man's wonders,
revises his vision of his mother and plays her piano, posthumously.
Why not say it simply? Hers was a comity and a tragedy.
As are ours. And perform the history that surrounds us.
Are caskets boats? The ship of death rides Charon's waves
or perhaps on that solitary day you happily kayak to the huckleberries.
Is the deeper sadness incomplete achievement or never to have tried?
Any attempt to decide this question for others is to badly behave.
The pablum of Christianity, esp. the Catholics, re the after life
must be rejected. It's necessary. To be replaced by community,
perfection of the human project, nature's intelligent partner.
Dusty, sadly habitable houses along the funeral route, shapeless
people crossing themselves when ambulances or hearses pass.
I wanted to describe the sweetness of her life, how she was part
of the problem and part of the solution. How love and evolution
are passed like loaves from person to person down the generations.
Find the humor in the cholera. When my father died
he waved like a surfer riding a wave or a clown riding
an elephant out the circus tent. Mom follows the same law.
The many ways a spear can pierce a brave warrior's jawbone or armor.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 4:44 PM UTC
About past there are regrets
With the present we are entangled
Past is yet to arrive, yet, doubtful
Seeds of unharmonious thoughts
Deeply entrenched in our mind
Now, they have grown and flourish
Becoming weak in the constant shade
Obfuscating the light of awareness
Life, we interpret in darkness
Until we cut the branches of uncertainties
Uproot the negative thoughts
Embrace the light of truth and grace
To live and grow stronger with every step
Nurture the harmonious thoughts
May 9, 2015
May 9, 2015 at 9:21 AM UTC
Whispers of death
crawl through the protective cloud of smoke,
and pierce the worn armor
built to protect all dreams and hope.
They funnel in their doubts,
silencing the crow.
Whirlwind round and round,
while obfuscating home
A quiet voice at first,
like a stranger shouting fields away.
Yet still it steals the focus
and turns the sharpest hues to gray.
There seems to be no plan.
Crowned chaos rules each day.
One by one they come and go,
but still the voices stay
They are masters of volume,
calculating for the optimal strike,
like when they scream during sleep,
keeping the children up through the night,
or softly during work time,
counting all that isn’t right.
They reach out their hand,
but it’s nothing more than a vice.
Now laughter’s no cure,
but it sure can help the pain.
And if no one’s telling jokes,
three tall bourbons will do the same,
No one ever wins this war,
but they can be kept at bay.
Oh the fight to cling to sanity
is enough to drive a man insane.
Feb 26, 2013
Feb 26, 2013 at 8:30 PM UTC
Smalt sky smelted over running sky: swoop
down for me and switch (very lightly!) your blues.
(No dizzying aches, please, because of too much
hurled change, speeding spirant through my loops.
It would tunnel me, with its head, even more
abhorrently
in two.)
Okay, I’m—great!—upside down now, float splashing
with finned wings in cloud falls and snowy rapids!
Up above, before now I guess, was just a bedlam
like below, and below: just reflection of its head spun.
The running was glinting, mirrored tails shimmering
of wind fish. Believing them, I fed them, then laughed
under wet sun.
I am lying, truthfully. I am inside my house. There was
no sky or sea. Maybe somewhere, but not here. I think
of my love when I sit down. (I don’t really think
much anymore.) And the blues is a saying.
The dizzying aches I do have (It was a joke.)
and the hurled change I am is inside me making
me this.
My loops, me tunneled—that is no joke, that’s the
timelessly wrought result of extruding what hurts
from my sockets and chambers and lobes and pockets
and the given gifts to me I hated, never used, only
wished I could—I can’t—because I can never
pin me down. So they can’t be really
for me.
I am furiously disappearing in obfuscating, invisible,
paralyzed paradoxical paroxysms.
Such as: I am not here I am just here. Lying down
sometime. Today I think. On my bed. Napped or slept
or just wrapped. Barely awoken. And more gone.
Each day awake. Going.
More gone.
Mar 27, 2012
Mar 27, 2012 at 6:14 PM UTC
I go to sleep again, eventually
After hours of fitful tossing,
Unwilling to surrender
To the nightly unknowing.
Some nights bring forgetting of everything;
Self, days, events, time, life itself.
Others fill themselves up
With a sort of coin, of wavering moonlight
Seen through the haze of obfuscating dewfall.
Reflections broken free from the sea of self
Raise unobstructed to float,
Hanging in the cooling ether of dreamscapes
Where in the fog nameless dogs bark
And dark landscapes prevaricate.
Where clocks do not follow rules,
Where gravity sometimes suspends
Or history rewrites itself.
Judgments come down and are executed
Beyond the dignity of reason.
Nights pass slowly through a watery realm
Where nothing is concrete,
As we wade clumsily through clumps of time,
Skip through a children's maze of nonsense riddles.
And when the knowledge of being in a dream
Pierces sporadically, through the body's paralysis
We awaken, amazed to find
That we are simply ourselves again,
Then we stretch back out, into the other dimension,
Ready to dream some more lines;
Sample some more realities
Till morning awakens us with hands
Of impatient brightness.
And abstraction slinks away
To wait for the next evenings
Entertainment of amnesia.
Jul 26, 2010
Jul 26, 2010 at 7:37 AM UTC
Evicting ideas must be done in earnest
For the vultures of radio-static thought will feast on anything
So purge! Purge your consciousness!
The tempest nears! brace yourselves
or be thrown into a sea of cognitive confusion!
vacuum up those pesky anxious fears
the dust-mites of uncertainty, crumbs of confusion
but never, ever open up that "Pandora's box" of a vacuum bag
the dust gets everywhere
–– I'm allergic
shove them in a bulletproof aquarium
maybe fog up the glass a little
obfuscating them behind a breath or two
they'll slither around in there
you can just make out their silhouettes if you tap the glass
careful
it makes them angry
trapped within their own misfortune
With or without them, time ticks to a new era
our darkness shall not cover laughter. hope.
overlap? possibly
like a kaleidoscope
simply deconstructing beautiful into a tsunami of color
making monotonous moments unique
a peculiar blend of all this world has to offer
Sep 8, 2018
Sep 8, 2018 at 1:09 PM UTC
Wasteful wallowing in a crumbling hollow dwelling
Obfuscating the obvious problems, scared from telling
A distracted dubious damnation,
I have craved temptation into
cramped every solitary sensation
and turned them to them sins, too.
So I fantasise, and rampantly
Agonise the logic in my mind
I dream of worlds without proportion
and engagements of moral absorption.
Til' I saturate my soul with images
of endless time and space.
In a stale solitary dimension
I weave tales of honorary mention
but forget their ascensions.
Broken wishes of impossible ambitions
With uncultural and isolated renditions
Of self-indulgent ordeals.
Brought upon by uncontrollable feels
and reeled beyond sense into the light
where my mind cannot be healed.
Nov 4, 2013
Nov 4, 2013 at 3:00 PM UTC
A slow eating evening
of a supine day,
obfuscating the vaulting dome
of the sky,
inviting the crickets
to take over the night.
Nov 19, 2014
Nov 19, 2014 at 4:57 AM UTC
I had a dream about the world
a barren of dust, a shattered reality
an affliction had spread, a curse too strong
like cobwebs woven across ancient trees.
Curious, I went to touch the soil
I felt the despair of each grain
the scent, nauseating, obfuscating
each breath chokes me, makes me insane.
I found a cliff with no end in sight
I steeled my heart, I stifled my cry
to abandon misery, I knew what I had to do
eyes shut, I flew towards my dive.
The pit in my stomach grew free from the bonds
pulling me, killing me, slowly from the inside
my courage and all my haughty demeanor crushed
falling like the one who couldn't glide.
I awoke with a startle, a hand on my chest
my heart beating pumps of despair in my veins
I saw the cracks of the world exist on my skin
I know what they are, they are my shame.
Rub! Scratch! Tear them off
I try to shed the layers I hate
Cover? Hide? No, Burn it all
I cannot escape the cages I create.
I wait for time to cover my wounds
gently hiding them in innumerable scabs
then slowly I peel them off and bleed
I dissect myself on a desolate slab.
Jan 29, 2018
Jan 29, 2018 at 11:53 PM UTC
“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
-Malcolm X
I once read “*The history of the world
is but the biography of great men.*”
I read those words slowly, then paused
so I could take them all in
Show me a great man
and I'll show you a history of lies
historians cleansing blood from hand
muting the truth, no matter how loud it cries
The biographies of the "great" are almost always
inked in the blood of martyrs and greater men
scarring temporal lobes, and obfuscating memory
the sword, falling prey to pen
"*Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings
where we had shoulders smooth as ravens claws*"
-Jim Morrison
Aug 3, 2014
Aug 3, 2014 at 8:50 PM UTC
you are a poem
you are of few
words, visible emotion
yet you are sweet
poignant
direct with your thoughts
you are a poem
in all of its
obfuscating metaphors
and timid lines
meandering through
whimsical dreams
of imperfection
you are a poem
soft, abrasive
holding my poisoned
veins in an eternal
embrace
Nov 29, 2014
Nov 29, 2014 at 2:54 AM UTC
moving always gather dust,
swirling plumes
stuck in tiny granules of sweat,
and tears. secreting pores
cl0gged with detritus
of past life stirred
in passage to a short
sharp future.
a shocking c0llection
of earth, keratin, and
electron sheen on me,
confusing
or submerging
or subverting
0r diverting,
obfuscating or
simply schmooing
in a l0osely trailing
tendril connecting fragment,
piece, & sticky speck.
i join more fl0aters
hidden off in forgotten
co0l corners of history.
Jan 5, 2015
Jan 5, 2015 at 11:40 PM UTC