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howard brace Feb 2012
Inconspicuous, his presence noted only by the obscurity and the ever growing number of spent cigarette stubs that littered the ground.  It had been a long day and the rain, relentless in its tenacity had little intention of stopping, baleful clouds still  hung heavy, dominating the lateness of the afternoon sky, a rain laden skyline broken only by smoke filled chimney pots and the tangled snarl of corroded television aerials.

     The once busy street was fast emptying now, the lure of shop windows no longer enticed the casual browser as local traders closed their premises to the oncoming night, solitary lampposts curved hazily into the distance, casting little more than insipid pools mirrored in the gutter below, only the occasional stranger scurrying home on a bleak, rain swept afternoon, the hurried slap of wet leather soles on the pavement, the sightless umbrellas, the infrequent rumble of a half filled bus, hell-bent on its way to oblivion.

     In the near distance as the working day ended, a sudden emergence of factory workers told Beamish it was 5-o'clock, most would be hurrying home to a hot meal, while others, for a quick drink perhaps before making the same old sorry excuse... for Jack, the greasy spoon would be closing about now, denying him the comfort of a badly needed cuppa' and stale cheese sandwich.  A subtle legacy of lunchtime fish and chips still lingered in the air, Jack's stomach rumbled, there was little chance of a fish supper for Beamish tonight, it protested again... louder.

     From beneath the eaves of the building opposite several pigeons broke cover, startled by the rattle as a shopkeeper struggled to close the canvas awning above his shop window.  Narrowly missing Beamish they flew anxiously over the rooftops, memories of the blitz sprang to mind as Jack stepped smartly to one side, he stamped his feet... it dashed a little of the weather from his raincoat, just as the rain dashed a little of the pigeons' anxiety from the pavement... the day couldn't get much worse if it tried.  Shielding his face, Jack struck the Ronson one more time and cupped the freshly lit cigarette between his hands, it was the only source of heat to be had that day... and still it rained.

     'By Appointment to Certain Personages...' the letter heading rang out loudly... 'Jack Beamish ~ Private Investigator...' a throat choking mouthful by any stretch of the imagination, thought Jack and shot every vestige of credulity plummeting straight through the office window and amidst a fanfare of trumpet voluntary, nominate itself for a prodigious award in the New Year Honours list.   Having formally served in a professional capacity for a well known purveyor of pickled condiments, who  incidentally, brandished the same patronage emblazoned upon their extensive range of relish as the one Jack had more recently purloined from them... a paid commission no less, which by Jack's certain understanding had made him, albeit fleeting in nature, a professional consultant of said company... and consequently, if they could flaunt the auspicious emblem, then according to Jack's infallible logic, so could Jack.  

     The recently appropriated letterhead possessed certain distinction... in much the same way, Jack reasoned, that a blank piece of paper did not... and whereas correspondence bearing the heading 'By Appointment' may not exactly strike terror into the hearts of man... unlike a really strong pickled onion, it nevertheless made people think twice before playing him for the fool, which sadly, Jack had to concede, they still invariably did... and he would often catch them wagging an accusing finger or two in his direction with such platitudes as... "watch where you put your foot", they'd whisper, "that Jack's a right Shamus...", and when you'd misplaced your footing as many times as Jack had, then he reasoned, that by default the celebrated Shamus must have landed himself in more piles of indiscretion than he would readily care to admit, but that wouldn't be quite accurate either, in Jack's line of work it was the malefactor that actually dropped him in them more often than not.

     A cold shiver suddenly ran down his spine, another quickly followed as a spurt of icy water from a broken rain spout spattered across the back of his neck, he grimaced... Jack's expression spoke volumes as he took one final pull from his half soaked cigarette and flicked it, amid an eruption of sparks against the adjacent brick wall.  Sinking further into the shadow he tipped his fedora against the oncoming rain, then, digging both hands deep within his pockets, he huddled behind the upturned collar of his gabardine... watching.

     It was times such as these when Jack's mind would slip back, in much the same way you might slip back on a discarded banana peel, when a matter of some consequence, or in particular this case the pavement, would suddenly leap up from behind and give the back of Jack's head a resoundingly good slapping and tell him to "stop loafing around in office hours... or else", then drag him, albeit kicking and screaming back into the 20th century.  This intellectual assault and battery re-focused Jack's mind wonderfully as he whiled away the long weary hours until his next cigarette; cup of tea, or the last bus home, his capacity to endure such mind boggling tedium called for nothing less than sheer ******-mindedness and very little else... Beamish had long suspected that he possessed all the necessary qualifications.  

     Jack had come a long way since the early days, it had been a long haul but he'd finally arrived there in the end... and managed to pick up quite a few ***** looks along the way.  Whilst he was with the Police Constabulary... and it was only fair to stress the word 'with', as opposed to the word 'in'... although the more Jack considered, he had been 'with' the arresting officer, held 'in' the local Bridewell... detained at Her Majesties pleasure while assisting the boys in blue with their enquiries over a minor infringement of some local by-law that currently had quite slipped his mind at that moment.  Throughout this enforced leisure period he'd managed to read the entire abridged editions of Kilroy and other expansive works of graffiti exhibited in what passed locally as the next best thing to the Tate Gallery, whereupon it hadn't taken Jack very long to realise that it was always a good place to start if you wanted free breakfast, in fact the weeks bill of fare was tastefully displayed in vivid, polychromatic colour on the wall opposite... you just had to be au-fait with braille.
                            
     No matter how industrious Beamish laboured to rake the dirt there always appeared to be a dire shortage of gullible clients for Jack to squeeze, what would roughly translate as an honest crust out of, and although his financial retainer was highly competitive he understood that potential clients found it bewildering when grappling with the unplumbed depths of his monthly expense account, which would tend to fluctuate with the same unpredictability as the British weather, the rest of Jack's agenda revolved around a little shady moonlighting... in fact he'd happily consider anything to offset the remotest possibility of financial delinquency... short of extortion... which by the strangest twist was the very word prospective clients would cry while Jack beavered around the office with dust-pan and brush sweeping any concerns they may have had frantically under the carpet regarding all culpability of his extra-curricular monthly stipend... and they should remain assured at all times... as they dug deep and fished for their cheque books, and simply look upon it as kneading dough, which eerily enough was exactly the thick wedge of buttered granary that Jack had every intention of carving.

     Were there ever the slightest possibility that a day could be so utterly wretched, then today was that day, Jack felt a certain empathy as he merged with his surroundings... at one with nature as it were.  The rain, a timpani on the metal dustbin lids, by the side of which Beamish had taken up vigil, also taking up vigil and in search of a morsel was the stray mongrel, this was the third time now that he'd returned, the same apprehensive wag, yet still the same hopeful look of expectation in his eyes, a brief but friendly companion who paid more attention to Jack's left trouser leg than anything that could be had from nosing around the dustbins that day... some days you're the dog, scowled Beamish as he shook his trouser leg... and some days the lamppost, Jack's foot swung out playfully, keeping his new friend's incontinence at a safe distance, feigning indignance  the scruffy mongrel shook himself defiantly from nose to tail, a distinct odour of wet dog filled the air as an abundance of spent rainwater flew in all directions.   Pricking one ear he looked accusingly at Jack before turning and snuffled off, his nose resolutely to the pavement and diligently, picking out the few diluted scents still remaining, the poor little stalwart renewed its search for scraps, or making his way perhaps to some dry seclusion known only to itself.
  
     Two hours later and... SPLOSH, a puddle poured itself through the front door of the nearest Public House... SPLOSH, the puddle squelched over to the payphone... SPLOSH, then, fumbling for small change dialled and pressed button 'A'..., then button 'B'... then started all over again amid a flurry of precipitation... SPLASH.  The puddle floundered to the bar and ordered itself a drink, then ebbed back to the payphone again... the local taxi company doggedly refused to answer... finally, wallowing over to the window the puddle drifted up against a warm radiator amidst a cloud of humidity and came to rest... flotsam, cast upon the shore of contentment, the puddle sighed contentedly... the Landlady watched this anomaly... suspiciously.

     The puddle's finely tuned perception soon got to grips with the unhurried banter and muffled gossip drifting along the bar, having little else to loose, other than what could still be wrung from his clothing... Beamish, working on the principle that a little eavesdropping was his stock-in-trade engaged instinct into overdrive and casually rippled in their general direction...  They were clearly regulars by the way one of them belched in a well rehearsed, taken-a-back sort of way as Jack took stock of the situation and was now at some pains to ingratiate himself into their exclusive midst and attempt several friendly, yet relevant questions pertinent to his enquiries... all of which were skillfully deflected with more than friendly, yet totally irrelevant answers pertinent to theirs'... and would Jack care for a game of dominoes', they enquired... if so, would he be good enough to pay the refundable deposit, as by common consent it just so happened to be his turn...  Jack graciously declined this generous offer, as the obliging Landlady, just as graciously, cancelled the one shilling returnable deposit from the cash register, such was the flow of light conversation that evening... they didn't call him Lucky Jack for nothing... discouraged, Beamish turned back to the bar and reached for his glass... to which one of his recent companions, and yet again just as graciously, had taken the trouble to drink for him... the Landlady gave Jack a knowing look, Beamish returned the heartfelt sentiment and ordered one more pint.

     From the licenced premises opposite, a myriad of jostling customers plied through the door, business was picking up... the sudden influx of punters rapidly persuaded Beamish to retire from the bar and find a vacant table.  Sitting, he removed several discarded crisp packets from the centre of the table only to discover a freshly vacated ashtray below... by sleight of hand Jack's Ronson appeared... as he lit the cigarette the fragile smoke curled blue as it rose... influenced by subtle caprice, it joined others and formed a horizontal curtain dividing the room, a delicate, undulating layer held between two conflicting forces.

     The possibility of a free drink soon attracted the attention of a local bar fly, who, hovering in the near vicinity promptly landed in Jack's beer, Beamish declined this generous offer as being far too nutritious and with the corner of yesterdays beer mat, flipped the offending organism from the top of his glass, carefully inspecting his drink for debris as he did so.

     A sudden draught and clip of stiletto heels as the side door opened caused Beamish to turn as a double shadow slipped discreetly into the friendly Snug... a little adulterous intimacy on an otherwise cheerless evening.  The faceless man, concealed beneath a fedora and the upturned collar of his overcoat, the surreptitious lady friend, decked out in damp cony, cheap perfume and a surfeit of bling proclaimed a not too infrequent assignation, he'd seen it all before... the over attentive manner and the band of white, Sun-starved skin recently hidden behind a now absent wedding token, ordinarily it was the sort of assignment Jack didn't much care for... the discreet tail, the candid snapshot through half drawn curtains... and the all too familiar steak tartare... for the all too familiar black eye.

     To the untrained eye, the prospect of Jack's long anticipated supper was rapidly dwindling, when it suddenly focused with renewed vigour upon the contents of a pickled egg jar he'd observed earlier that evening, lurking on the back counter, his enthusiasm swiftly diminished however as the belching customer procured the final two specimens from the jar and proceeded to demolish them.  Who, Jack reflected, after being stood out in the rain all day, had egg all over his face now... and who, he reflected deeper, still had an empty stomach.  Disillusioned, Jack tipped back his glass and considered a further sortie with the taxicab company.

     "FIVE-BOB"!!! Jack screamed... you could have shredded the air with a cheese grater... hurtling into the kerb like a fairground attraction came flying past the chequered flag at a record breaking 99 in Jack's top 100 most not wanted list of things to do that day... and that the cabby should think himself fortunate they weren't both stretched flat on a marble slab, "exploding tyres" Jack spluttered, dribbling down his chin, were enough to give anyone a coronary... further broadsides of neurotic ambiance filled the cab as the driver, miffed at the prospect of missing snooker night out with the lads, considered charging extra for the additional space Jack's profanity was taking...

     And what part of 'Drive-Carefully', fumed Beamish, did the cabby simply not understand, that pavements were there to be bypassed, 'Nay Circumvented', preferably on the left... and not veered into, wildly on the front axle... an eerie premonition of 'jemais-vu' perched and ready to strike like a disembodied Jiminy Cricket on Jack's left shoulder, looking to stick its own two-penny worth in at the 'Standing-Room-Only' arrangements in the overcrowded cab... and at what further point, Jack shrieked, eyes leaping from his head as he lurched forward, shaking his fist through the sliding glass partition, had the cabbie failed to grasp the importance of the word 'Steering-Wheel...' someone wanted horse whipping, and as far as Beamish was concerned the sole contender was the cab driver...

     In having a somewhat sedate and unruffled disposition it had fallen to Beamish... as befalls all great leaders in times of adversity, to single handedly take the bull by the horns, so to speak and at great personal cost, alert the unwary passing motorist...  Waving his arms about like a man possessed whilst performing acrobatic evolutions in the centre of the road as the cabby changed the wheel came whizzing around the corner at a back breaking 98 on Jack's ever growing list... and why, Jack puzzled, why had they all lowered their side windows and gestured back at him in semaphore..?  Rallying to its aid, Jack's head and shoulders now joined his shaking fist through the sliding glass partition and into the cabby's face, "Who" Beamish screeched with renewed vigour ,"Who Was The Man", Jack wanted to know... *"a
Julian Mar 2019
Tantalized by the fractious limerence of a vestigial habiliment of the old order, we conclude that hypertrophy leads to a limbo where random permutations alloyed by the rickety limits of concatenation subsume concepts that are equivocal but populate the imaginations of newfangled art forms that jostle the midwives of rumination to lead to unique pastures that are intuitively calibrated to correspond to definitive unitary events in conceptual space that sprawl unexpectedly towards the desultory but determinative conclusion of a meandering ludic sphere of rambunctious sentiments cobbled together to either rivet the captive audience or annoy the peevish criticaster when they dare to inseminate the canvassed and corrugated tract of intellectual territory created ad hoc to swelter the imagination with audacious ingenuity that is an inevitable byproduct of lexical hypertrophy. In this séance with the immaterial realm of concept rather than the predictable clockwork reductivism of a perceptual welter that is limited by the concretism circumscribed by spatiotemporal stricture we find that an extravagant twinge of even the smallest tocsin in the interstitial carousel of conscientious subroutines compounding recursively to pinprick the cossetted smolder of potentiality rather than extravagate into the vacancy of untenanted nullibiety can spawn a progeny of utilities and vehicles for dexterous abstraction that poach the exotic concepts we fathom by degrees of sapience malingering in lifeless bricolages of erratic abstraction in manners useful to transcend the repose of abeyance and heave awakening into the slumberous caverns of still-life to make them dynamically animated to capture ephemeral events that defy the demarcations of wistful indelicacy of the encumbered bulk of insufficient precision.

Today we embark on a quest to defile the anoegenetic recapitulation of canon that litters the dilapidated avenues of miserly contemplation that has a histeriological certainty and feeds the engines that enable novelty but ultimately remain rancid with the stench of the idiosyncratic shibboleths of synoptic alloyed impoverishment that leads to the vast wasteland of cremated entropy that is a stained foible of misappropriated context interpolated usefully as botched triage for daunting problems that require a nimble legerdemain of facile versatility that we easily adduce to conquer the present with the botched memorial of a defunct salience. Despite the travail of scholars to retreat from the frontier into the hypostatized hegemony of recycled credentialed information, we often are ensnared by the solemn attrition of decay as we traverse the conceptual underpinnings of all bedrock thought only to dangle precariously near the void of lapsed sentience because of transitory incontinence that is contiguous to the doldrums of crudity but nevertheless with mustered mettle we purport that the very self-serious awakening to our hobbling limitations is akin to a prosthetic enhancement of ratiocination capable of feats that stagger beneath the lowest level of subtext to elevate the highest superordinate categorization into heightened scrutiny that burgeons metacognitive limber. Marooned in the equipoise of specifiable enlightenment countermanded by the strictures of working memory we can orchestrate transverse pathways between the elemental quiddity of impetuous meaning and the dignified tropes of transitivity that bequeaths entire universes with feral progeny that modulate their ecosystems with both a taste of approximated symmetry and a cohesive enterprise for productivity that rests on the granular concordance of the highest plane to the indivisible parcels of atomic meaning that solder together to exist as intelligible if strained by the primordial frictions guaranteed by the brunt of motion incipient because of the metaphorical inertia created within insular universes to inform sprawling conurbations of mobilized thoughts designed to reckon with the breakneck pace of the corresponding reality to which they explicitly and precisely refer to.

We must singe surgically the filigrees that amount to the perceptible realities that transmute temperaments into the liturgy of routine conflated with the rigmarole of neural dragnets of reiterative quips in an elegant game of raillery with our supernal contumacy against the rigid authority of aleatory vagaries mandated by a dually arbitrary universe in a probabilistic terpsichorean dance with the depth of our dredge for subliminal acuity or the shallow bellicosity of common modes of glib contemplation characteristic of the basic nobility of improvisation. This basic interface with the world can either be mercurial or tranquil based on the interactionism of the enfeebled trudge of surface senses or blunt intuitions and the smoldering impact of the vestigial cloaks that deal gingerly with the poignant subtext evoked in the cauldron of immediacy rather than pondered with the portentous weight of imperative singularities of uniqueness derived from the plunge into the arcane citadel of microscopic introspection so refined that the ineffable drives we seek to fathom become amenable to the traipse of transcendental time that rarefies itself by defying the brunt of compartmentalized bureaucracies administered by the fulcrum of stereotypical notions of acquired gravitas imputed to mundane pedestrian quidnunc concerns that defile humanity rather than embolden the subaudition of gritty punctilios that show the supernal powers of the axiomatic divinity of sharpened sentience to reign with supremacy over the baser ignoble components of bletcherous nescience that leads to knee-**** platitudes that provoke folksy peevish divisions. We should rather orchestrate our activity by heeding the admonishment about the primogeniture of poignant sabotage buffered by the remonstration of innate tranquility and finding a whipsawed compromise of rationalization with true visceral encounters with the fulgurant quips of brisk emotions that grind industriously into amorphous retinues of the trenchant human imagination to either equip or hobble the leapfrogged interrogation of veracity and more consequently our notions of truth and fact.

When we see the hackneyed results of default ecological dynamics, we find ourselves aloof from purported transcendence because the whimpered bleats and cavils of the importunate masses result in a deafening din of cacophony because we strive throbbing with sprightliness towards the galloped chase of tantalization without the luxury of a terminus for satiation. Obviously a growth mindset is the galvanic ****** that spawns the imaginative swank of the pliable modulations of our perceived reality that, when protean, showcase the limitless verve of our primordial cacoethes for epigenetic evolution rather than the stolid and staid foreclosure of impervious sloth that memorializes the gluttony of speculation about fixed entities rather than imperative jostling urbanity that dignifies the brackish dance with dearth and the exuberant savory taste of momentary excess because it engages the animated pursuit of limerence rather than the exhumed corpse of wistful regret. Nature is a cyclical clockwork system of predatory instinct met with the clemency of the prosperous providence enacted by the travailing ingenuity of successive cumulative generativities that compounded unevenly and unpredictably to predicate a fundamental zeitgeist calculated to engorge the fattened resources of the resourceful and temper the etiolated dreams of the fringed acquiescence of a hulking prejudiced population of dutiful servants that balk at the diminutive prospects of a lopsided distribution of talent and means but slumber in irenic resolve created by the merciful hands of defensive designs that configure consciousness to relish comparative touchstones rather than absolute outcomes that straggle beyond a point of enviable reference to shield the world of the barbarism of botched laments clamoring for an uncertain grave from the gravity of the orbiting satellites of apportioned wealth both sunblind and boorish but simultaneously inextricable from the acclimated fortune of heaped nepotism and herculean opportunism. The intransigence of the weighted destiny of inequity is a squalid enterprise of primeval abrasive and combative tendencies within the bailiwick of the indignant compass inherent to the system that fathoms its deficiencies with crabwise and gingerly pause but airs a sheepish grievance like a bleat of self-exculpation but simultaneously an arraignment of fundamental attribution erroneously indicted without the selfsame reflexiveness characteristic of a transcendent being with other recourses to clamber an avenue to Broadway without malingering in the slums of opprobrious ineffectual remonstration against the arrangement of a blinkered metropolis of uneven gentrification.

We flicker sometimes between the strategic drivel of appeasement and the candor of audacious imprecation of the culprits of indignity or considerate nutritive encomium of the beacons of ameliorated enlightenment because we often masquerade a half-witted glib consciousness lazily sketched by the welters of verve alloyed with the rancid distaste of squalor and slumber on the faculty of conscientious swivels of prudential expeditions with an avarice for bountiful considered thought and wily contortions of demeanor that issue the affirmative traction of adaptive endeavor to cheat a warped system for a reconciled peace and a refined self-mastery. We need to traduce the urchins that sting the system with pangs of opprobrious ballyhoo and the effluvia of foofaraw that contaminate with pettifoggery and small-minded blather the arenas better suited for the gladiatorial combat of cockalorums tinged with a dose of intellectual effrontery beyond the span of dogmatism rather than the hackneyed platitudes that infest the news cycle with folksy backwardation catered to the fascism of a checkered established press that urges insurrection while tranquilizing dissent against the furtive actions of consequence hidden behind the draped verdure of pretense whose byproduct is only a self-referential sophistry that swarms like an intractable itch to devolve the spectator into a pasquinaded spectacle of profound human obtuseness that pervades malignantly the system of debate until the reductionists outwit themselves with the empty prevarication of circular logic that deliberately misfires to miss the target of true importance because of the pandered black hole easily evaded by creatures of high sentience but inevitably ensnaring the special kind of dupe into a cycle of bellicose ferocity of internecine balkanization. The vainglory of the omphalos of entertainment is also another reckoning because it festers a cultural mythos of glorified crapulence parading a philandered promiscuity with half-baked antics that gravitate attention and the lecheries of gaudy tenses of recycled tinsel alloyed by debased aberrations of seedy grapholagnia that magnetize as they percolate because of the insidious catchphrases embedded in pedestrian syncopation that ignite retention and acclimate to mediocrity the sounds of generations discolored by faint pasty rainbows rather than ennobled by majestic landscapes of ignipotent mellifluous sound that stands a supernal amusement still for the resourceful trainspotter.

Despite the contumely aimed in the direction of contrarians for deviating from the lockstep clockwork hustle of stooped pandered manipulation that peddles the wares of an entirely counterfeit reality, I stand obstinately against the melliferous stupefaction of entire genres of myth and subcultures huddled around the sentimental tug of factitious sophistries regaled by thick amorphous apostates that cherish the vacuous sidetracked spotlight with fervor rather than pausing on the enigmatic querulous inquisition about the penumbras that lurk with strained effort beneath or above the categorical nescience of the shadowy unknown that often coruscates with elegance even in obscurity. I fight with labored words to spawn a psychological discipline that invokes the incisive subaudition of the pluckily pricked exorcism of true insight from the husk of buzzwords that constellate auxiliary tangential distractions from the art form of psychological discernment that predicates itself on the concept that the rarefaction of rumination by degrees of microscopic precision enables the introspective hindsight of conscious events that can be parsed without the acrimony of cluttered conflations of the granular prowess of triumphant ratiocination that earns a panoramic perch with the added luxury of perspicacious insight into the atomic structure of the rudiments of our phenomenological field and the abstractions that linger beyond perceptual categorization. When we analyze the gradients of anger, for example, we can either be ****** into a brooded twinge of wistful resentment or we can decipher that through heuristics designed to cloister the provenance of subconscious repose with ignorance there exists a regimented array of tangential accessories embedded deep within the cavernous repository of memory that designates a cumulative trace of compounded symmetries of concordant experience immediately perceptible because of the tangible provocateur of our gripes and the largely subliminal tusk that protrudes because of primal instinct that squirms with peevishness because of the momentary context preceded by the desultory churn of smoldering associations swimming with either complete intangible sputtered mobility through the tract of subconscious hyperspace or rigidly fixated by an arraignment of circumstances with propinquity to the deep unfathomed flicker of bygones receding or protruding because of the warped and largely unpredictable rigmarole of constellated spreading activation.  
When we examine the largesse of the swift recourse of convenience we forget by degrees the travail that once bridged the span of experience from patient abeyance in provident pursuit to now the importunate glare of inflated expectations for immediacy that stings the whole enterprise of societal dynamics because it vitiates us with a complacency for the filigrees of momentary tinsel of a virtualized reality divorced from the concretism that used to undergird interaction and now stands outmoded as a wisp beyond outstretched hands straggling beyond the black mirror of a newfangled narcissistic clannishness that shepherds the ostentation of conceit to a predominant position that swaddles us with fretful diversion that operates on a warped logic of lurid squalor and pasty trends becoming the mainstays of a hypercritical linguistic system of entrapment based on the apostasy of candor for the propitiation of fringed aberration because of the majoritarian uproar about touchy butthurt pedantic criticasters with a penchant for persnickety structuralism. With the infestation of entertainment with the ubiquitous political cavils engineered by the ruling class to have a common arena of waggish irreverence we forget that sometimes the impetuous ****** of propaganda is cloaked by the fashionable implements of a rootless time writhing in a purported identity crisis only to gawk at the ungainly reflection of modernity in the mirror and remain blissfully unaware about the transmogrified cultural psyche that feeds the lunacy of endless spectacle based on the premise that one singular whipping post can unite an entire generation of miscegenated misfits looking for commonality to team up against the aging generations that cling to the sanctity of cherished jingoism against the intentionality of a revamped system that malingers with empty promises using exigency and legerdemain to obscure the mooncalves among their ranks that march on with quixotic dreams that tolerate only the idea of absolute tolerance and moderate only when feasibly permitted by the anchored negotiation of the fulcrum of totemic governmental responsibility between factions that wage volleys of invective at each other to promote a binary choice of vitiated compromises of mendaciloquence that ultimately endanger the republic with either the perils of hidebound conventionalism and nativist fervor or the boondoggles of fiscally irresponsible insanity cloaked with rainbows and participation trophies. Reproach can be distributed to both sides of the aisle because ironically in a world where gender is non-binary the most important reproductive ***** in the free world is a binary-by-default despotism that polarizes extremely ludic fantasies on the left met with the acrimony of the traditionalisms on the right that staunchly resist the fatuous confusions of delegated order only to the sharp rebuke of the revamped political vogue that owes its sustenance to a manufactured diplomacy of saccharine lies and ubiquitous lampoons that are lopsided in the direction of a globalist neoliberal bricolage of moderately popular buzzwords and the trojan horse of insubordinate flippant feminism that seeks to subvert through backhanded manipulation the patriarchy so many resent using lowbrow tactics and poignant case studies rather than legislating the egalitarian system into law using the proper channels. I myself am a political independent who sides with fiscal conservatism but libertarianism in most other affairs because the pettifoggery of law-and-order politics is a diatribe overused by sheltered suburbanites and red meat is often just as fatuous as blue tinsel and sadly in a majoritarian society the ushers of conformity demand corporate divestiture in favor of an ecological system of predictability rather than an opinionated welter of legitimate challenges to a broken system of backwards partisanship and wangled consent. Ultimately, I remain mostly apolitical, but I am a fervent champion of the mobilization of education to a statelier standard that demands rigor and responsibility rather than the chafe of rigmarole that understates the common objectives of humanity and rewards conventional thinking and nominal participation to earn credentialed pedigree when the bulk of talent resides elsewhere.
jake aller Aug 2019
I don't get it
I don’t Get It 
Mr. Speaker
I admit I don’t get it

How does prayer
Stop gun violence?
Prayer did not work in Texas.

26 people were murdered
 while praying.

God if he exists
Obviously does not care
About the poor people
Who died in his church
Because a mad man

Got a gun
And no they were not praying
To be delivered from death
No one deserves to die like this

So my prayer to you
Is simply this

Get off your rear end
Rally the country
And do something

About gun violence

That’s a prayer
I hope works

Dear Speaker Ryan
I want to tell you something

The dead don’t want your prayers
The dead don’t care that you pray for them
They are dead after all

And you and your so-called Christians
Are to blame
You refuse to do anything
Anything at all

to stop the carnage
In our streets

The U.S. is flooded with guns
And more are sold every day
Millions of people don’t have health coverage
Millions are barely surviving

And your answer
Our dear great compassionate Speaker
Your answer 
Is Prayer works
Government action does not
You act as if the gun violence
Plaguing our country

Was like the weather
Beyond our control
So here’s my prayer for you

And your colleagues
When you die
I pray that God
Will send you

And your friends
Straight to hell
Where Satan and his demons
Will use you for target practice

That’s my prayer to you
And as you know
Prayer works
 
Mr. President
You are wrong once again

You said that the tragic events 
in Texas
And Las Vegas were not “gun situations”

But rather were mental health problems
And that in Texas
if there had been no gun controls
Perhaps fewer people would have died

Mr. President

I know you a smart man

The smartest man in the world


According to you
So please contemplate this fact

According to the latest findings

It is a gun situation

In fact, the reason the U.S.

Has so many gun deaths 

Is because we have so many guns

45% of the worlds guns in fact
And 33 percent of the world’s shooters

Are Americans killing other Americans
And most of them 

the majority of them

Are White men killing other people
Not Islamic terrorists


Most are in fact

Self-proclaimed Christians
So Mr. President

When will you come to your senses
And do what 90 percent of the public wants


Enact nation wide effective gun controls?
And tell the NRA
 
they can take their blood money elsewhere

When Mr. President

When will you act

When will you take charge
And become a President of the people
Instead of the President of the NRA?
 Like (0)  0   


← Previous1 2 345…75Next →
Virginia Beach Massacre Never Again
Virgina Beach 

In a night of horrific scumbagery violence

Rarely seen in this jaded age of ours

Gone in one hour
In a spasm of horrific scumbagery violence
I
In just a few short minutes


Nothing more than that
 
In just a few moments

All 12 victims were murdered
By a disgruntled employee


Every one he knew was shot

And killed for no reason
Caused by the demons

His soul was so infected

Murderous demonic voices

All in his head

Screaming **** them all 
**** them all


Screaming none stop violence in his head

All the time
Causing him to start shooting 
everyone he saw


Regardless of who they were 
or where they were

Everyone must die 
screamed the demonic voices in his head
No one can be left alive


Everyone must die

Virtually all must die 
in his internal video game

Everyone must die


Regardless of who they were 
or where they were
Again just another day

Gone horribly wrong


All across America
In
every town

No where is safe anymore
Virgina Beach massacre

Virgina Beach massacre

Just another
Average night in America

An Active Shooter
scumbagery violence

Rarely seen

in this jaded wild world
Gone in one hour
In a spasm of horrific
scumbagery
In just a less than 30 short minutes

Nothing more than
In just a few short 30 moments

All the victims
were murdered while at their daily 
work
wrong place wrong time

act of a demotic deranged madman
voices screaming ****
The voices scream
death to all humans


All must be killed
The voices scream over and over
All must die now

Just another night in America
Land of the Brave
Home of the free
More Guns for Everyone in the World

The NRA has decided

That the best solution to global problem

Of rampant violence and crime everywhere
Is for the rest of the world


To become like the U.S.

Where anyone can buy a gun

As an armed society is a polite society’

And so the President i
s about to announce

A global campaign against gun control restrictions


As these restrictions
are an undue burden

On the rights of the US arms manufactures
To sell their guns 
everywhere in the world


As everyone wants what we have to sell

The best weapons in the world
Instead of trying to limit the damage


That unrestricted gun sales

Have done to the U.S.
Our President, our great leader

Wants to sell more guns

Everywhere in the world

And there are eager buyers

Lining up around the world

Eager to buy the best guns

The world has ever seen

We want to export

The gun madness

That has infected our society


Leaving behind so many dead bodies
The dead were not consulted

For they remain dead


They do not vote
They have no voice
For the guns silenced them

For good
 just as the guns intended

Just doing their gun thing after all

Humanity has evolved
From stones to arrows
To guns
T o nuclear, biological weapons

And the U.S.
 While proclaiming itself
A champion of Human Rights

Remains nothing 
but a country 
Of gun runners
 Merchants of death
And destruction
NRA Please Stop Talking

Another day
Another mass shooting

Another incident
of domestic terrorism


another gun man
killing people
because just because
 he can
and he wants to **** people

The NRA 
And their stooges

Come out

Flood the airways
With their noxious
Poisonous weasel words


The NRA says
Mass shootings

Are like the weather

You can’t control them
You can’t predict them

And you can’t prevent them

Just have to accept

It is all god’s will

Guns don’t **** people
IF guns were outlawed

Only outlaws
 would have guns

Only solution 
Is more guns

For everyone

An armed society
they say 
Is a polite society


Support for gun control
I is
socialist/communist/fascist/anti-Am  erican/anti-Christian nonsense
The beginning of tyranny


If only the Jews had guns

The holocaust would not have happened

Jesus would want us all
 
to be armed 
with machine guns
To protect us against the evil doers

It is the Christian thing to do


To blow away evil doers
With heavy arms


In America
Land of the free

Home of the brave
We can’t do anything


At all
About the mass carnage

Unleashed by madmen with guns

Who walk among us

Searching for their next victims
Any restriction of the right


To bear arms

Is tyranny at its worst
The nanny state run amuck

Talking about gun control

After a tragic event
Is

just not the appropriate time

We only need prayers

and meaningless thoughts

Universal background checks

Too onerous
Registering guns

Too burdensome

Researching gun violence

waste of tax payer money
banning military style assault weapons
r

Restricts my right 
to blow 
away

Bambi the deer
with a M16

the NRA will keep talking

talking and talking

preventing anything

from being done

and we will have another

Mass shooting event

Before the day is out

So my plead

This day
To the NRA
A
and their stoogies

Talk is cheap

Your comments
Are not helping

If you can’t

Be a part of the solution
Just stop talking

Please stop talking


And let the rest
Of us  figure out

How to stop

The madness in the streets
And stop the carnage


So NRA

Please
 just
 stop
 talking
 Now

military assault weapons 
are locked up

yet in America

the land of the free

home of the brave
 
everyone and his cousin

must have their gun

guns for everyone

cries the NRA

that’s the solution

The president
a 
and his supporters

deny the obvious
guns **** people
That’s all they do


it is a gun thing

you would not understand
Guns just do
what guns gonna do
**** people

Mr. President

You can take your words

your empty platitudes
Your empty promises
Your prayers 

straight to hell

and back

where with any luck

Satan will use you

as target practice
Chief of Staff You are Absurd

the President’s chief of staff
said the other day

it was absurd

to suggest that the president’s words

had anything to do

with recent mass shootings

yet is it absurd

to see the lengths

to which the President’s supporters
will twist and turn

spinning awa
y
the inconvenient truth
President Trump 
is a racist bigot con man

who some how
 conned his way

to become President
he call immigrants criminals, vermin, animals

invaders infesting the country
the El Paseo shooter 

said that he went to the border

to shoot the invaders

and said
 that he was a big Trump fan
it is not absurd
 to connect these two huge dots
The President’s words
 
have real world consequences

Yes Mr. Trump is a racist pig
a
and his supporters
 are being absurd

to suggest otherwise

 
36
 Jake Aller


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Jake Aller
239 followers     893 following     333 
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https://theworldaccordingtocosmos.com

John (Jake) Cosmos Aller

Novelist, Poet, Foreign Service Officer 

Tel: 703-436-1402
Email: authorjakecosmosaller@gmail.com

John (“Jake” ) Cosmos Aller is a novelist, poet and former Foreign Service officer having served 27 years with the U.S. State Department in ten countries - Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada,  Korea, India, St Kitts, St Lucia,  St Vincent, Spain and Thailand. and traveled to 45 countries during his career.  Jake has been an aspiring novelist for several years and has completed two novels, (Giant **** Spiders, and the Great Divorce) and is pursuing publication.  He has been writing poetry all his life and has published his poetry in electronic poetry forums, including All Poetry, Moon Café and Duane’s Poetree. (under the name Jake Lee).  He is looking forward to transitioning to his third career – full-time novelist and poet after completing his second career as a Foreign Service officer, and his first career as an educator overseas for six years upon completion of his Peace Corps service in South Korea. 



He served in a wide variety of positions running from Consular management, Fraud investigation and managing the consular overseas computer support desk, to economic and political reporting positions, international labor diplomacy, commercial diplomacy - promoting American business overseas- international organization diplomacy serving as the deputy permanent representative to the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, to management positions including program management, evaluation and contracting management, and environmental and science diplomacy including promoting renewable energy solutions.  He taught courses at the Foreign Service Institute and overseas in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Kathmandu on consular fraud and consular Systems issues.

Senior program evaluator overseeing the implementation of the Department's evaluation program enabling the Department to develop a robust program evaluation system.
Coordinated training program training over 200 people in three years
Launched community of practice (CoP) web page (word press) with over 300 participants, greatly expanding the ability of State program evaluators to conduct program evaluations.  
Conducted meta-evaluation of completed foreign assistance evaluations insuring that the Department’s evaluations provided critical program improvement data.

Deputy Political Economic chief, - Bridgetown, Barbados 

Served as the deputy political economic chief covering political, economic, labor , environment and science and commercial diplomacy efforts in the Eastern Caribbean. 
Received labor officer of the year award for work in setting up regional training programs in occupational safety issues, and meeting with labor leaders in all seven countries greatly expanding our labor diplomacy outreach; 
Initiated two American Chambers of Commerce organizations, 
Conducted fund raising in support of  Embassy’s July fourth celebrations, the first time held in multiple countries, raising $100,000 over a three year period; 
Conducted training programs in all seven countries demonstrating to hundreds of locals on how to access U.S. Government  export financing programs . 

CA/FPP Deputy Training Team Coordinator – Washington, DC,
Taught consular fraud prevention courses at the Foreign Service Institute, and in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, greatly increasing knowledge and skills in fraud detection. 
Launched Lexus Nexus public record database access for consular officers worldwide, therefore dramatically improving consular fraud prevention efforts, 
Initiated first interagency Fraud Working Group coordinating fraud efforts among Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Labor.  
Received Cash Award.
Deputy Consular Chief, - Mumbai, India
Oversaw American citizen services, immigration visas in fifth largest operation in the world and fraud prevention programs greatly improving management of each.  
Supervised and mentored 15 junior officers and 50 local staff resulting in each unit receiving group cash awards. 
Received two cash Meritorious Honor awards for my work helping American citizens facing crises including helping American citizens whose family members died in India, or were arrested. 
Organized task force that dealt with aftermath of worst earthquake in 50 years.  

Read more →
8 stories • 1 lists • 1 lists • 5 groups

My Poems (224)AutorankLinks
I don't get it
I don’t Get It
 

Mr. Speaker

I admit I don’t get it

How does praye

Stop gun violence?

Prayer did not work in Texas.

26 people were murdered
 while praying.
God if he exists

Obviously does not care

About the poor people

Who died in his church

Because a mad man

Got a gun
And no they were not praying

To be delivered from death

No one deserves to die like this

So my prayer to you

Is simply this
Get off your rear end

Rally the country
And do something


About gun violence
That’s a prayer
I hope works
© 2 hours ago, john Cosmos Aller      
Read more →
 Like (0)  0   

Dear Speaker Ryan

Dear Speaker Ryan
I want to tell you something

The dead don’t want your prayers

The dead don’t care that you pray for them

They are dead after all


And you and your so-called Christians

Are to blame

You refuse to do anything

Anything at all
to stop the carnage
In our streets

The U.S. is flooded with guns

And more are sold every day
Millions of people don’t have health coverage

Millions are barely surviving
And your answer


Our dear great compassionate Speaker
Your answer
 
Is Prayer works

Government action does not

You act as if the gun violence

Plaguing our country

Was like the weather

Beyond our control

So here’s my prayer for you

And your colleagues
When you die

I pray that God

Will send you
And your friends

Straight to hell
Where Satan and his demons

Will use you for target practice

That’s my prayer to you

And as you know
Prayer works
 
another gun poem © 2 hours ago, john Cosmos Aller      
Read more →
 Like (0)  0   

It’s a Gun Situation, Mr. President

Mr. President
You are wrong once again

You said that the tragic events 
in Texas
And Las Vegas were not “gun situations”

But rather were mental health problems
And that in Texas
if there had been no gun controls
Perhaps fewer people would have died

Mr. President

I know you a smart man

The smartest man in the world


According to you
So please contemplate this fact

According to the latest findings

It is a gun situation

In fact, the reason the U.S.

Has so many gun deaths 

Is because we have so many guns

45% of the worlds guns in fact
And 33 percent of the world’s shooters

Are Americans killing other Americans
And most of them 

the majority of them

Are White men killing other people
Not Islamic terrorists


Most are in fact

Self-proclaimed Christians
So Mr. President

When will you come to your senses
And do what 90 percent of the public wants


Enact nation wide effective gun controls?
And tell the NRA
 
they can take their blood money elsewhere

When Mr. President

When will you act

When will you take charge
And become a President of the people
Instead of the President of the NRA?
another gun poem © 2 hours ago, john Cosmos Aller      
 Like (0)  0   


← Previous1 2 345…75Next →
Virginia Beach Massacre Never Again
Virgina Beach 

In a night of horrific scumbagery violence

Rarely seen in this jaded age of ours

Gone in one hour
In a spasm of horrific scumbagery violence
I
In just a few short minutes


Nothing more than that
 
In just a few moments

All 12 victims were murdered
By a disgruntled employee


Every one he knew was shot

And killed for no reason
Caused by the demons

His soul was so infected

Murderous demonic voices

All in his head

Screaming **** them all 
**** them all


Screaming none stop violence in his head

All the time
Causing him to start shooting 
everyone he saw


Regardless of who they were 
or where they were

Everyone must die 
screamed the demonic voices in his head
No one can be left alive


Everyone must die

Virtually all must die 
in his internal video game

Everyone must die


Regardless of who they were 
or where they were
Again just another day

Gone horribly wrong


All across America
In
every town

No where is safe anymore
Virgina Beach massacre

Virgina Beach massacre

Just another
Average night in America

An Active Shooter
scumbagery violence

Rarely seen

in this jaded wild world
Gone in one hour
In a spasm of horrific
scumbagery
In just a less than 30 short minutes

Nothing more than
In just a few short 30 moments

All the victims

were murdered while at their daily 
work
wrong place wrong time
act of a demotic deranged madman

voices screaming ****
The voices scream
death to all humans


All must be killed
The voices scream over and over

All must die now

Just another night in America
Land of the Free

Home of the free
another gun poem © 2 hours ago, john Cosmos Aller      
 Like (0)  0   

More Guns for Everyone

More Guns for Everyone in the World

The NRA has decided

That the best solution to global problem

Of rampant violence and crime everywhere
Is for the rest of the world


To become like the U.S.

Where anyone can buy a gun

As an armed society is a polite society’

And so the President i
s about to announce

A global campaign against gun control restrictions


As these restrictions
are an undue burden

On the rights of the US arms manufactures
To sell their guns 
everywhere in the world


As everyone wants what we have to sell

The best weapons in the world
Instead of trying to limit the damage


That unrestricted gun sales

Have done to the U.S.
Our President, our great leader

Wants to sell more guns

Everywhere in the world

And there are eager buyers

Lining up around the world

Eager to buy the best guns

The world has ever seen

We want to export

The gun madness

That has infected our society


Leaving behind so many dead bodies
The dead were not consulted

For they remain dead


They do not vote
T
hey have no voice
For the guns silenced 
them
For good
 just as the guns intended


Just doing their gun thing after all
Humanity has evolved

From stones to arrows

To guns
T o nuclear, biological weapons

And the U.S.
 While proclaiming itself

A champion of Human Rights
Remains nothing 

but a country
 
Of gun runners
 Merchants of death

And destruction
another gun poem © 2 hours ago, john Cosmos Aller      
 Like (0)  0   

NRA Quit Talking

NRA Please Stop Talking

Another day
Another mass shooting

Another incident
of domestic terrorism


another gun man
killing people
because just because
 he can
and he wants to **** people

The NRA 
And their stooges

Come out

Flood the airways
With their noxious
Poisonous weasel words


The NRA says
Mass shootings

Are like the weather

You can’t control them
You can’t predict them

And you can’t prevent them

Just have to accept

It is all god’s will

Guns don’t **** people
IF guns were outlawed

Only outlaws
 would have guns

Only solution 
Is more guns

For everyone

An armed society
they say 
Is a polite society


Support for gun control
I is
socialist/communist/fascist/anti-Am  erican/anti-Christian nonsense
The beginning of tyranny


If only the Jews had guns

The holocaust would not have happened

Jesus would want us all
 
to be armed 
with machine guns
To protect us against the evil doers

It is the Christian thing to do


To blow away evil doers
With heavy arms


In America
Land of the free

Home of the brave
We can’t do anything


At all
About the mass carnage

Unleashed by madmen with guns

Who walk among us

Searching for their next victims
Any restriction of the right


To bear arms

Is tyranny at its worst
The nanny state run amuck

Talking about gun control

After a tragic event
Is

just not the appropriate time

We only need prayers

and meaningless thoughts

Universal background checks

Too onerous
Registering guns

Too burdensome

Researching gun violence

waste of tax payer money
banning military style assault weapons
r

Restricts my right 
to blow 
away

Bambi the deer
with a M16

the NRA will keep talking

talking and talking

preventing anything

from being done

and we will have another

Mass shooting event

Before the day is out

So my plead

This day
To the NRA
A
and their stoogies

Talk is cheap

Your comments
Are not helping

If you can’t

Be a part of the solution
Just stop talking

Please stop talking


And let the rest
Of us  figure out

How to stop

The madness in the streets
And stop the carnage


So NRA

Please
 just
 stop
 talking
 Now
another gun stop © 2 hours ago, john Cosmos Aller      
 Like (0)  0   


← Previous12 3 456…75Next →
guns **** People
Guns **** people
g
Guns do **** people
it is not mental illness

it is not video games
it is not a million other things

it is simply this
a gun is a weapon

a weapon designed to **** people

That is what guns do
guns don’t care

they do as they are told
If you pull the trigger
t
They will **** the victim

that is what guns do

that is why 
in a civilized society

military assault weapons 
are locked up

yet in America

the land of the free

home of the brave
 
everyone and his cousin

must have their gun

guns for everyone

cries the NRA

that’s the solution

The president
a 
and his supporters

deny the obvious
guns **** people
That’s all they do


it is a gun thing

you would not understand
Guns just do
what guns gonna do
**** people

Mr. President

You can take your words

your empty platitudes
Your empty promises
Your prayers 

straight to hell

and back

where with any luck

Satan will use you

as target practice
another gun poem © 2 hours ago, john Cosmos Aller      
 Like (0)  0   

Chief of Staff You are Absurd

the President’s chief of staff
said the other day

it was absurd

to suggest that the president’s words

had anything to do

with recent mass shootings

yet is it absurd

to see the lengths

to which the President’s supporters
will twist and turn

spinning awa
y
the inconvenient truth
President Trump 
is a racist bigot con man

who some how
 conned his way

to become President
he call immigrants criminals, vermin, animals

invaders infesting the country
the El Paseo shooter 

said that he went to the border

to shoot the invaders

and said
 that he was a big Trump fan
it is not absurd
 to connect these two huge dots
The President’s words
 
have real world consequences

Yes Mr. Trump is a racist pig
a
and his supporters
 are being absurd

to suggest otherwise
another gun poem © 2 hours ago, john Cosmos Aller      
 Like (1)  1   

Mr. President Words Matter

Mr. President Words Matter

Mr President

Words matter

your words matter

your words of hate

your words of division
your words 
calling fellow human beings 
****, vermin,

invaders, animals 
matter

they matter a lot

and is it little wonder

that people listen 

to the hate you sprew forth

and some deranged people

take action 
on your call 
for action
against the invaders 

on the border


they march to the border

to **** the invaders
your words matter

Mr. President


and your false words
of regret
fool no one

the damage has been done

the hate has been spread

just as you intended

and you 
have the gall 

to call yourself
A Christian
you are the anti-Christ

you are not a Christian

so please quite pretending

to be what you are not

please man up

accept your responsibility

set things right

apologize

the dead though

don’t need your prayers

they need action

they need leadership

and you are the president

so please start acting

like you give a ****

and if you do so

perhaps 
you will find

people will follow you
but please
 quite the words 
of hate


the words that hurt
and quit calling immigrants
 invaders 
and vermin
 

they are human beings

they are deserving of respect
this I ask of you 
In Jesus’s name
even though I am not a Christian
another day, another shooting

Another Day Another Shooting
another day in paradise
just another day in Americal
Land of the free
Home of the brave

and gunshots,
lots of gunshots
more guns for all
cries the NRA

yes another day
another gun battle
another white man
who just wants to ****

the President sends his condolences
Thanks the law enforcement 
for an incredible job well done
It was horrible

Hate has no place
in our country
and we will take of it 

and do what ever we can do
condolences 
nothing but false words
empty words 

lots of things to do
it is mental illness problem

but he fails to mention
the words gun at al
not at all
and tomorrow and tomorrow

but he at least finally 
said 
hate has no role in country
nothing but prime BS
in my humble opinion

he did not mention 
white supremacy
his rhetoric had nothing
nothing to do 
about this at all

and so tomorrow
I will turn on the TV
and we see
nothing at all

and the dead
will remain dead
the guns will fire again

nothing will be done
welcome to America
land of the free
home of the brave
poems about gun violence
Julian Jul 2016
Hip Service
By Julian Malek

The zeal of cobblestone tolerance arrayed in fashionable hues masquerading as crimson secrecy, elevates the tide of man but some boats leak in their foundations. Therefore a cork to every exuberance and a triumphant torch for every sorrow lives onward in collective time. Larks that abound because prescience and PUGET sound, that brown has become the new orange which in turn prowls as a concealed swarthy black. To antagonize the willful and frenetic pace, a prodrome of lasting but memorialized disgrace. Should I move to a state by first or last name, or is the final appellation worthy of much more lasting fame. I scurry down the aisles, bemused by shimmering tiles and the beguiled audiences who see much in my limitation but doubt little about my debited elation. Ringmaster Barnum, how much horticulture is needed for assured superstardom, how many cloisters must we evacuate from the incendiary plumes of a metaphorical Harlem..  But know that no virtual reality can supplant the reality that does truly exist, or at least our time is too infernal and purblind to resist. Carrey the tops of mountains in the humor of wellsprings and fountains, we engage a menagerie of egos lilting of an etiolated pragmatic concern. Evicted from paradise, littered with say-cheese demise ensnaring three blind mice eaten alive by snake-eyed vice. To feel good without incorporated tyranny, we must see blue and red as alternatives to the same destiny. A world that reckons with the futilitarianism of pacified malcontent and astroturf monikers that lead the impressionable into a slaughter shed. Established or not, any enchantment under the sea must include fishes once a pastiche of me, but to them I avoid their courtesy flush and never even faintly blush as my egalitarian statements are lavish thrush.

Five TO Won baby one in 99, everyone here aboard the titanic stays alive, you got your boat baby and I got mine, gonna make it with babies numbered in surreal primes. Halt the slots game the nines, a stitch in time is going to turn out to be Mine. Flanger goals, girded piles, liminal like an aborted Harry Styles, we climb mountains we issue tithes, and the turmoil is etched into 45-notched bludgeons and two-tucked knives. Excuse you, where have you been all day, have you been sauntering in a gentle rain or a genteel pain, have you wallowed beyond the mires of doubt and ranked above David Blaine. I hope you tell me of your magic tricks, rather than your other flicks endeared I stand to fight an ineradicable itch. But if not, you placid pond dented by so many rocks and so many ripples give your heart over to me, before I clinch the special Olympics *******, we ran, we span the homespun garments of your left and right hand, but death is a specter that ghoulishly carouses along the carousel terminal disease we call life. I beseech your deepest affection and want to console you for your deepest struggle, to be there every time wed with time rather than a throttled scuttle. Moons make you guarded but maroons leave me desiccated, don’t ever let that wilted flower die, always water it with a rich but gentle ties and widened deck for all to at once marvel and pry.  Monsters of Mars Attacks once flanked my bed, as though the **** brain scared every gooseflesh and restrained every frisson of mystery. I lampoon myself for those cold Dark Knights and the protection ended by the plight of the poor mattering nothing to the deliberately internecine rich. I struck gold in a valley somewhere, an oxymoron of paradox that now you have the privilege to dock, to stay aboard to be a vessel of peace less widely deplored. Even if we don’t sprout wings, we garner the exactitude of measured things and our glass elevator though easily shattered by the glower of enslavement is actually our vista to heaven or listening to brethren tingles for rich mans trinkets and other things. For humanity deserves a legend and a princess, a regimented desuetude and a flanged lust but in our mistakes wildly flouted in momentary moments we become purified by the temptations of an alabaster palace.

***** the left-field wisdom of a pragmatic paragon ellipsis in prison, slip between the cracks and let my suburban muse become your urban ruse. To enchant a caged world beyond a reality delicately and deliberately unfurled. Squirming toads on highways enchanted but dead, are graves for the blue becoming purple in every dignified red. Gainsay assaults me with platitude, a repeated hitter quit on the first bunted ball into foul-line territory. Those gripes are swiped right in all circumstance no matter the plight. The pronged hearing of a trident sensitive to ambient collection, and suddenly we are all in the mad house even though the house of profaned pain is much worse. Glimpses of gambits that gambol for nickels in transit as occult grenades and known dice waddle through without artifice or device, and the laughter and slaughter that trains collegiate minds, differs no more than the tropes of a glamorous violence articled in sordid rhymes. This surfing movie means so much more than Surf Wax America pristine in limited but sacrilege nirvana. Teen spirits smell muskier than 90s pop dreams, the grasp and grunge of gouged eyes becomes a mummified staid, a scarecrow to those who disobey. Childhood flashes with blinding light, and new sight illuminates darkening blight, A blight eradicated only by two magazines and including one that houses the bullets that ***** themselves between death and comatose dreams both within astral sight. Littoral harbor on a seaside town, a shanty with a brackish gown that glides the gourmand to the cosmopolitan eatery on the outskirts of lost & found. But forever lost in embonpoint and forever gained in chavish that exonerates the gaunt, the etiolated prince in heart becomes irrefutable marrow in minded souls.

If I am a spy you are an ESPY, and if I cry than you are a baby,but since neither are the case my wiseacres will cultivate lava lamp dreams for a new generation and suddenly Boston bets on Harvard, but who knows of this piped blather squirming for relevance rather than voguish but temporary chatter. My regatta knows how to swim, my life now knows how to cringe and yet still win and in stilted plays of bungled sincerity the God of peace reminds us of our transcendent personalities. That we in sincerity top the barnacles of invention a novelty but a rarity. But the guillotine quill of emboldened unscripted parvenus ruthless in their eager dues, outdate and outlive the sued swayed blues that indemnify Clinton and make the atomic dog an amazing Winston hill a church often in sheltered disuse. Imps and urchins sting the sentiment, cloy the alimony of repentant betterment, but neither touches the gilded skies of pleonasm striving for raspy disguise as to dissuade further diatribe investigation. Lurking in those scared days of youth, the gore of unalloyed horror scourged me with a limp, that compassion itself could ever become a gimp. Now years later athletics better and scoring goals making the mildew sweat and the years wetter, not a global warming that can be alarmed by global mourning. Take peace at heart if distanced spears of separation make Idiocracy as a pastiche look exceedingly smart. And spar only with the true antagonists bridging malevolence with expedience. Killjoys sure, will joy even more sure, but still boys fluttered heart stopping dead at a stop-watched alarm the worst tragedy of our sordid sort. Give an African Child a real home rather than a spatial roam, a palatial desiccation of momentary Jonas Brothers snapping back at captives with sexualized foam.

Narrative blinds shuttered in an Island among mountains hardly ever wiser to sanitize the sanitarium among the wasps of stung power. Police crumple their uniforms as they prowl down the avenues, looking for misfits and widened platitudes. Somehow that the vigilance of those corrupted by their very career choice, look even worse when megalomania of private is the limelight of public, to their defense few turrets I can muster but castles in the sky will be the apartheid judge. Those that cling to virtue to eradicate Porsche-driven faked or real deaths at the most breakneck speed, that Fast & Furious operation if disclosed completely would turn the Shire of the ring into the hatred curtailed by a song in Sing-Sing. Immunity must not Yoda implore, that livery Liverpool marooned on islands can also to deplore the R.E.D. and still whet the sharpened stead and the fly-by-night Manchester United alights like militant peer pressure for wranglers in tights. But beating the Beatles at a game of Walruses and egg-shelled eyeful towers likely impedes rinkside hockey from anything over bellicose ballyhoo…it exists as a transient fixated glower. But who knows about soccer speculation when love is the transcendent temptation, when nest-egg hens rather than neglecting rig Bens of clockwork and clocked words designed arise better for their token ken. Do I must repeat the subtext of submarines, yellowed as though ugly unused as though unseen, as though the quixotic earthquakes of tintinnabulations Avatar dreams. Wafted souls console the disheartened thoughts of a dashed dream that Berlin hates more than a Furor’s unbridled and useless scream.
Demotic clips slinging from the bedridden silence of a token moon and its token friends, swimming in a shore of ambiguity whether history mellows or whether its furor melts away momentary doubts. I want to avoid the sting rays exorcised by due providence and become the amalgamated talents gentry and of course the upstart swagger of Jack Dawson. But with the psy-op going on, the people manipulated on all sides of a gray picket fence will the relationship bloom without muttered dissent or pretended smiles. Will we take upon the shuffled shuttle and dig with shovels deep-rooted Christmas trees and toast our lives to Dos Equis. We may never go out of style, but the treacle of illuminated imagery when divorced from sentiment bristle shows a swagger that prioritizes rather than amalgamates all love. I love being brash and brazen and honest because when she finally ditches the grandstand of delayed frenemies fandoms of other tinsel decorations without any substance beyond meretricious thrill. You want a roller coaster on some days, but most often you want the nutcracker to elope to secret hiding places. Swim with adventure not just in love, not just in affection with the starlight now matter how luminous, sixpence all the richer is no centuries any poorer and we could be that gilded couple of star and screen and if we ever have to scream, let our screams unite us in passion, rather than a milquetoast deference to pedestaled beauty. but of course the end times don’t laugh at your crumpled wizened relapse. Not out of convenience wed by a discriminating genetic harvest moon but a deeper engagement that flatters when stylish and bristles when romantic but never defiled, never riled of specious pretense. Promise me that you will always remember me in my flaws and my faults, in my scause factory destructions and the penults of PEN-ULTIMATE wisdom that comes before the grace of God in the annihilation of passion for eroded omission. If your goal is to be remembered, check that out…but the most admirable goal is as the propinquities of souls dusted in the wind returning to a spring equinox of passion and if you find in yourselves reservations do not depart from sacred land, and never jilt me because of a boisterous and menacing friend. You are everything to me right now, and I Hope this persists despite the vicissitudes of star-favored afflictions mixed with utter benediction without the pontification of stilted Benedictines  or rather the hyped ludic effrontery of termagants being made of younger and younger women. Leave it at this ,32 leaves the royal secret in royal hands and the Knights Templar and us we altogether hold hands, if only a prelude for a masquerade ball. But the stilted embarrassment of crestfallen time, let that be relegated and emphatically lets embrace what is like to not ever need a real white horse to get back into your favor, because we never go out of style we can brandish the best elements and reject the sentiments of the too newfangled and the too stodgy. We in our crenellated pleonasm can eager ride the lightning to another tomorrow and another yesterday and if even not that, we virtually make an indelible impression of embroidered love not too distant in ivory towers and not to vulgary( catering to popular sentiments) to become a trash glam movement. We soar, others deplore but let their purblind doubts render them blind to our burgeoning love.

Forget the brisk trees dangled in the wind on winding paths through haunted forest or remember them because of ghoulish fortress but with our apotropaic lamp we can avert most evil and call the rest fun and gains and shun but fames never profaned, never inalterable a destiny to magical to be some whimpered catcall. Or we could linger beneath lambent street lights disguised as though wilted garb, attrition of circumstance waiting patiently for the matinee and the vintner to escort us beyond the garb of pretense in a city so abundant with it that it deserves castigation. But I digress, a beachside cliff overlooking tepid waters tumultuous in their power but august in their noises, the cadence of love will sing a half-moon bay on full-moon nights and we will frisk each other like grasping at straws of permanent tracks trammeled of the elite and a sidetracked basque bet. Trim those antlers and instead grow metaphorical wings, to us we all sing but few can match your elegance and everyone would be crazy not to see your ennobled age and together thrilling songs to emulate thriller in sales we will collaboratively sing.
Haughty sneers from lifeless lycanthropy straggling furtively along the pastiched sidewalks of grime, livid because they can’t share the lingering limelight, with as many guarded perks of privacy clambering like a hive of snarky sharks. Lets ditch the big town dreams in terms of posh and stature if only for a caressed moment beneath the unadulterated stars and if you find spars **** to the extent they are amiable than I say guess what my name is Lars! Or wait a second, paused in the big city spotlight our stenciled hearts will guide whatever progeny is yours or mine or ours together we will sing the most comforting lullaby, and caves no longer must we abide. Yearn and earn every inch, as I gripe with my delicate saddened pinch but I think the innuendo speaks . Ripen with our trips to Napa, long afternoon sunsets swim in our hearts as we taste the vanguard’s toast on elegant wine.I console with entreaty to disavow the omen of that San Franciscan church October 2008, the doom implied by Einstein, the raillery of a world grinding down the endless decadence of a railed future inalterable in destiny or partialy amenable to widespread coquetry.

Forget those rumbles in your past that made you feel partial to insecurity and learning the ropes you transcended all and live in all eternity. Thimble and brook, tolerant of all those tokes I took your rebellious side flattens the yeast of Exodus raspy in its begrudged clapping. But the Pharaoh of the modern world sheltered me under his prickly thorns, shielded me from the sickly things that life adorns. We have the numbers on our side, the weight of destiny on our shoulders, dedicate yourself to yourself and I will preen the most vibrant wisdom and love will leap like Apollo across all borders not for camel-****** hoarders. We are culminated destiny in the wings of the best daydream
Life, Love and No Mathematics to God and Gain
The Wicca Man May 2013
I am dead,
but do not weep for me.

Save your false tears and shallow platitudes for these:

the dispossessed that walk your streets
homeless and lost
hands held out for some morsel of change
or maybe just a kindly word
or a glance of recognition.

Save your false tears and shallow platitudes for these:

emaciated waifs
clinging to the tattered robes
of their mother
flies buzzing round the fetid sores
that pock their melancholy faces

Save your false tears and shallow platitudes for these:

pathetic souls that huddle
in the rubble of their homes
scratching at the ruins in vain hope
of finding those lost in the onslaught of
Nature's wrath

Save your false tears and shallow platitudes for these:

the lost children
who will search in vain
for those nurturing hands
and soothing words
gone in a hail of lead
scattered in a blast of revenge
to splatter the faces of these innocent ones

Save your false tears and shallow platitudes for these:

your regrets
your mistakes
your knowledge
that you stood by and allowed
these assaults on humanity to continue
day upon day
life upon life

I am dead
so will you be
and ask yourself now
who will weep for you?

Not these.
Andre Baez Mar 2014
The seductress on my mind
Lives in full on expression
Laced in the free confines
And platitudes of direction

The sequential confessions
A private march of signs
Lead aggressive regression
A spinal tap of times

Timid forms of prose
Do not impose, much
In the way of speech
Or the ways of preach

A dandelion blossoms
Fully under direction
Of gunfire and hellfire
Made in mans *****

A milk which is colored
A dark, rusting, crimson
For this is the gift adorned
An antiquated prison

A dream once flowed upon
The rivers that line my arms
Texts of pharaohs charmed
With distant songs sung  

Yet, not distant enough
Into a further realm of
Steak, salmon, wine, and
Pontification, a type sublime

Cardiac and stop and frisk arrests
Psychedelics and prophylactics
Insomniacs and chipper morn birds
Courage and numbing fear tactics

Topics are churned forward
As thoughts are yearned for
But are seldom rewarded
Without snide comments

Even if contorted to fit
Daily textbook definitions
A raindrop is precipitation
Not tears from eyes of perdition

Said a jeering member of an alley
A gatekeeper for all of Hades
A living reminder of what shape
Controls societies minions a plenty

I believe you are a queen lost in time
You are the seductress on my mind
The boom-bap of 90s street art hop
A collection of lives birthed caught

You are the desire of my epicenter
The freezing of my two lips together
A culture of desire and of fortune
A soft room with croons in tunes

I believe you are not pink matter
You are the color scheme in the sun
A serpent slithering within disaster
A tale of victory and woe as one

Tears sting the edges of my eyes
As shadows are cast upon my soul
A tree in mourning for it's seeds
As oil desecrates, dry, shallow soil

When did this become a love poem?
Atop the raft my dreams have flowed
Wordsmiths fashion sturdy homes  
To heal the word and to help growth

Inside one of these I fled and bled
In it I found fish, water, and bread
Self-hate and despair had spread
Until it was fully excreted in death

The seductress on my mind brought:
Dandelions with smoke from gunfire
Milk which was crimson in color
Pharaohs songs of golden charm
A conversation in full, and open arms
Arms that held my dreams with calm

Constructs of love and poetic meals
Heal the surface of darkness scorn
Feeding the soul of it's sullen needs
A return to an innocence unborn
Daniel Quigley Aug 2013
A sigh in the dark.
Past my jaded lips it rises
like a ghost, and I the host
of thoughts enamoured but unwanted,
unresolved.
Night takes my sight and unleashes vision
I watch (not my decision) the memories bloom to life.
Ethereal and hazy, those lazy summer days
Of hasty plans, promises, platitudes made;
childish to dream it could have stayed
the same.

Polite and awkward we shuffle in the light of day,
you think before you act and mind what you say
and if lucky enough you might get away
without blurting a thought from your head gone astray.

Why do eyes so bright bring such dark thoughts?
Why do we fear to take what we want?

A sigh in the dark.
Across chilled skin it spreads
like fire, this unspoken desire
between whispering sheets. Fingers grasp and twine,
I feel hers, she feels mine, as we search in the dark
together.
This night air we’ll share;
it's vice, and with vigour,
seeking the trigger
to release.
To resolve.
Every muscle in my body
Begs me to run
To chase your car
But then your taillights crest the hill
And disappear beyond

My mind lingers on you

Are you wearing your seatbelt?
Are you alert and emotionally sound?
After all
A distracted driver is just as dangerous
As a drunk driver

And no
I am not ok right now
Fear and feelings and Hydrocodone
Cloud my mind
Every time I watch you leave
Hurts more than the last

But this weekend was amazing
I had so much fun
Felt so loved
So safe

This weekend was not wasted
On painkillers and platitudes
This weekend was real
Tactile and truthful

My love is relentless
And I will pursue you
To the end of the earth.
Jack P Apr 2018
teacher sent me to the doctor's office
teacher sent me home
teacher sent me to the place
where all the foul things roam

teacher gave me tic-tacs
to swallow when i'm sad
teacher said the chemicals
will make me sorta mad

teacher dries my eyes up
with platitudes enough
to even console all the kids who
are made of smarter stuff

teacher says confusion
is not a cause for shame
i'm not quite sure what teacher means
but i listen all the same

teacher treading tip-toed
lowering the tone:
"i'll help you with the theory here
but you'll practice on your own."
if you are sad, get people to help you not be sad, thanks
Cedric McClester Oct 2015
By: Cedric McClester

Thanks for never giving up on me
You always kept your cool
Even when it was plain to see
I was acting like a fool
You’re the one who believed in me
When there was no one else
And your encouragement was the key
To making me believe in myself

Thanks for all your time and energy
And everything that you invest in me
Thanks for your words of encouragement
Especially when my head is bent

How can I ever thank you enough
For all you do and have done
For being there when it gets rough
I’m just so proud to be your son
At times you even were my crutch
That’s what everybody said
They even thought you were too much
From what I’ve heard and read

Thanks for all your time and energy
And everything that you invest in me
Thanks for your words of encouragement
Especially when my head is bent

I never would have come this far
Had it not been for you
So you deserve these accolades
And every word is true
It’s little more than the gratitude
That you’re deserving of
These are heart-felt platitudes
That are used to express my lov

Thanks for all your time and energy
And everything that you invest in me
Thanks for your words of encouragement
Especially when my head is bent

You brought me closer to the goal
That I had set for  myself
Right from the start you were sold
Long before anyone else
You’re the rock that gives me strength
Because of you I persevere
And I would go to any length
To thank you I’m sincere

I never would have come this far
Had it not been for you
So you deserve these accolades
And every word is true
It’s little more than the gratitude
That you’re deserving of
These are heart-felt platitudes
That are used to express my love

Thanks for never giving up on me
You always kept your cool
Even when it was plain to see
I was acting like a fool
You’re the one who believed in me
When there was no one else
And your encouragement was the key
To making me believe in myself






Cedric McClester,Copyright © 2015.  All Rights Reserved.
Criss Jami May 2014
Lately
What I do is a vacancy with
A disposition made just for me and it's
In a position that they can't see, you see
In deep blue seas
There's the place where a vacation is free for me

And then you dream in peace

So call me maybe the ghost protocol where most of those photos of all the things I do
Are used as prototypes, baby so-called clues of my new call to move where-
In everywhere and wherever and with whomever and whenever which
Is whosoever or whoever's whichever of whatever, for all of you
Whether the weather's a typhoon in-
Cluding the SoCal blues but
This isn't all I do
It's just that it's my call of duty
On a mission for all of what's true
But without bailing, balling or brawling in her suit
And then failing, falling, bawling and calling and then crawling in pursuit

Like some other subliminal, minimal flukes
'Cause it's done much better than those "lyrical, miracle, spiritual, individual and criminal" dudes
Or bitter, fritter critiques with the use of twitters
In order to refute the fullest of all hippo-critical fools and critters sitting and fitting
Itching to switch to snitching about this glitch
Which is hitched to renewing, stitching and gluing our fitches to truth and
And yes without twitching to their witch's magical, musical flute

Then in lieu of the altitude of the attitude rude of my pirate-like crew's mood
Whether longitude or latitude and more than impractical platitudes
I'm not as irate as I seem al-
Though it ensues that right on cue in due
Time with an aptitude of gratitude and exactitude in
Solitude throughout fortitude or servitude, to allude what you elude and dude
To intrude what you conclude with certitude in an interview interlude and now
Then out of you, under coveralls to view the overall outerlude
I rate the magnitudes of the habitudes it seems you take for granted in dreams and all types of things

And though my soul is a hologram
Hollow weight and zero grams
Hero traits with a villain glam I'm
The man of love and that of
One of the toughest clams above
Or below, I should say
Like Poseidon
Oh baby we ride on
Or sail on, should I say
The ghost of Poseidon

Then in lieu of the attitude of my pirate-like crew
I'm not as irate as I seem or
Even irritated as they deem nor
Norse, Thor or a heart of granite
I rate the things we take for granted, granted far asleep
Stereo-hyped in dreams with all heights of wings and

Although my soul is a hologram
Hollow weight and zero grams
Hero traits with the chill of a villain vibe or glam I'm
The anti-hero, champion of love and that of
One of the toughest clams clamping it above
Or below, I should say
Like Poseidon
Oh baby we're riding
Or sailing, I should say and it's

It's the ghost of Poseidon that's
That's trailed night and day
The ghost of Poseidon that's
That's trailed night and day 'cause
They say, I did it my way then they're
On my tail right away
On my tail right away
zebra Jul 2018
come sit on my words
dear reader
like outdoor furniture
for thin hips

while spooky poets peer up under gaudy umbrellas
nervous about making a good impression

all of your hosts
snuffed candles burning-out
for metaphors and alliterations

begging
one poem at a time
for a light
that we will never see

go ahead
antagonize me
you, who live in an idealized passed
fear the future
and ignore the present
while i hide like a little girl  
behind the bare legs of poetry

that will show you!

my head a hanging web
that feels words like cosmic storms
tumbling stone heads
onto boulders of terracotta shards

my ink smells like stinky saliva
a dragging wet tongue of ambiguity
a kabuki fight to the death
unwinding paper machete viscera
and plucking out make-believe hearts
while gobbling fortune cookies containing  
jokes, platitudes, and fortunes
that never come true
in a dreamland of *******'s

i'm trying to break something in you!
The curtain on the
CPAC convocation rolls back,

as the revolution
in Tahrir Square boils.

America’s theater
of deadly political

absurdity commences;
to witness demagogues

recite holy scripture to
evangelize a religion of war.

A heavily invested
audience marvels

at the marionettes
pirouetting on strings

jigged along by hands
of invisible puppet-masters

donning dark masks of
clever 503C llcs

disguised in self serving
hues of red, white and blue.

This grand folly of masquers
conceals a fatal pantomime,

a cast of reactionary characters,
Neo-Conmen auditioning for

the leading role in a lurid play
of a deadly nation projecting
a dying imperial preeminence.

The martinets engage zero
sum games where the victor
belongs to the despoilers,

and the merchants of death
richly confer multimillion dollar
reasons for being, underwriting
the gilded egos of candidates

and their infatuation with the
vanity of feigned power.

These master rhetoricians
skillfully lather up the crowd

by pandering to basest
xenophobic nationalist
instincts and fantasies
of laissez-faire proclivities.  

Slathering on the partisan
pretense in layers so thick

a master chef, armed
with the sharpest Ginsu Knife

couldn't slice a hock tip
of blood red meat

hurled into the crowd of
gobbling Republicons

howling and yodeling
it’s derisive acclaim.

The rankled party line,
gibberish talking points

are hammer blows of
incessant propaganda,

so cocksure that any room for
doubt is crowded out by the

phantasmagorical McMansions
of hyperbole they ***** in

the pliant minds of their
gibbering minions.

The candidates preening for
president show off their

falangist affectations
in eager duels of oratorical

one upmanship; constantly
jockeying to outflank their

other Neo-Conmen opponents,
always concluding their brutish

diatribes with a solemn
denouement of a Republicon

psalm ending with a
Holy Hosanna Hallelujah

to the Ronald Reagan
Heavenly Buddha.

Punchline of the holy Amen
“what would Reagan do?”

to remind the faithful
to remain the faithful

bearers to the fiction
of dead Reaganism.

Evoking anything
Ron and Nancy

induces sanctioned
comportment of a

slow simmering
******* eubellence

providing a welcomed
relief of repressed
libidinal energy.

The mention of Goldwater
sends GOP acolytes to

pause in reverence,
envisioning Barry and

Ronnie looking down
from heaven upon the gathered,

inciting immediate ruminations
of falling dominos and

the viability of a
tactical nuke strike

against Ayatollah’s
underground
uranium factories.

The host of Neo-Conmen,
new age Falangist pitchmen

belch from the dais,
in ever increasing alacrity,

the stirring drum beats
and slick videos,

of glorious warriors
winning the battlefield

with the rippling glory
of the Stars and Stripes

flowing in a continual
loop behind them.

Romney,
Bachmann

Gingrich
take center stage,

goose stepping
to the roll of piercing timpanis.

Words slither
out of their mouths
like poisonous snakes.

Lies, hiss through
their teeth.

Open mouths
expose Black Mamba
fangs, dripping with venom.

Eyes squint
as their reptilian brains

implore the besieged
to flee from the
light of truth.

Seeking refuge in fear;
yet on the ready

to coil and strike;
while trembling

in ignorance,
exalting loathsomeness

worshiping violence;
they remain

poised to unleash
first strike armies;

boastfully evoking moral
platitudes of Bush Doctrine
prerogatives.

Trembling in ignorance
worshiping violence

exalting fear,
these dogs of war bay

to unleash armies
against the

Godless apostates
that threaten

to expose the
stasis of their

Capitalismo-Judeo-Christian
view of the world.

They have hijacked
the great faith traditions

to serve a narrow
political aim

and relish any
opportunity to

demonize Islam
in service to their lies.

Watch as they
they crouch down

on the dais to
open the nest

of vipers welling
deep within the
bowels of their souls.

They find relief
by excreting their

spawn of deadly asps
into the veins of

cable news networks;
scoring political points

with the terrorized
children of Faux News

capturing battalions
of straw men villains

to rise atop meaningless
straw polls.

They agitate for a second
American revolution

by injecting the venom
of fear and lies

into the body
politic.

Ron Paul
stands alone,

perplexed why
American's love

war as much as
they hate civil liberties?

Cheney and
Rumsfeld brood.

The people of
Iraq and Afghanistan

fail to embrace their armies
of liberation that run up

unfortunate collateral damage
body counts required to sustain
the American way of life.

Ever the defender of
democracy and liberty,

Gingrich slams Obama's
condemnation of Suleiman

"hes an able diplomat."
Gingrich  forgot to add

that Suleiman is a
skilled torturer and

an able tyrant any self
serving democracy would
be proud to call ally and friend.

Cheney and Rumsfeld
remain flummoxed.

Their armies of liberation bogged
down in the marshy Blackwaters

of intractability;  trying to solve
the conundrum of the diminished

equity returns of asymmetrical
warfare.  Spinning the math

to justify building aircraft carriers
to **** a gnat.

The families of dead soldiers
surround them and wave dime

store flags hoping the plastic
eagle remains fixed atop the pole.

Perpetually smiling
Michele Bachmann
raises the specter
of Muslim Brotherhoods
taking over Egypt.

The persecution of Christians
and the escalating war on

Christianity have the Crusaders
up on their seats waving Excalibur
once again.

Gingrich pink cheeks
flush with the cash

of a Zionist casino
entrepreneur

doubles down, stacks
his chips high.

“The Israeli Embassy
in Cairo was overrun
by angry mobs.”  

“Is this a precursor of
cancelling the peace treaty
signed with Sadat?”

“The pullout in Iraq hands the country to
radical Shiites effectively handing our
hard won victory to Iran.”

“Israel is threatened and will not
permit Iran to acquire nuclear

weapons. A nuclear empowered Iran
will not stand!”

“We mustn't let do nothing Obama
threaten the safety of our good ally
Israel.”

CPAC willingly holds the deadly asp
to the breast of a proud nation.

Urging, coaxing it to gently sink
its teeth into the sacred heart
of our dear republic...

John Lee ******
Crawlin King Snake

CPAC 2011

Matthew 23
Brood of Vipers


jbm
Oakland
2/10/11
Ma Cherie Sep 2016
I don't know why
you say these platitudes of goodness

Simply repeating the same thing
over and over
broken, scratching records
skipping needles
and hearts

You're not coming from a place of a pure soul and a beautiful spirit
I don't know what it is
if it's indifference,
jealousy, envy...
wishful thinking?

Well our boat is sinking
A perfect cliche
"say what you mean and mean what you say"
I can't do ambiguous

I hope you find peace with your demons
angry, gutteral enemies
dragging you to hell
at night
not kicking and screaming
you cannot find the light
from a place of selfish
egotistical narcissism and intentions to only help yourself
Good luck Chuck.

Cherie Nolan© 2016
Life and people are confusing.it
Tom Leveille Jan 2014
i imagine pulling over at a canyon
seeing the day they took all the pictures
off the wall when she died
i stop for a picnic on a scar
from getting too close to the junk
but you made it and making it is all that matters
i see the ends of your hands
as 15th century cartography talks to the hierarch
a promise of platitudes
flat and lacking grandeur
how on that plane it knows
when you turn them over
like pages of a book
and secrets pour out
they don't tremble like they used to
haven't had an earthquake in years
not even a tremor
not even happenstance could stop me
from gawking at the pile up on 64
how outwardly looking
in you don't look like a "wreck"
your hands remind me more
of a car crash without the quotation marks
Shlomo Oct 2018
Emerging economies.

What they’re emerging from I don’t know.

My guess, the depths of hell.

From the frying pan, right into the fire, or worse; a well.

A deep hole stronger than gravity, the force.

To be forever under the thumb of remorse.



A modern era of endless acts, policies and bla bla bla.

Shut up with all your platitudes.

I see what’s really going on. Aha!

You speak of sustainable development.

Nice to know that you’ve led by example.

Carried the mantle for all these years.



Centuries of ruthlessness, now veiled in sheep’s clothing.

But you won’t shut up. Because you don’t speak.

You never have. You just do.

Each day that goes by, you carry on anew.

Behind all the talk of hope, equality and more progress,

it seems the wolves are lurking.



Cooking up the next tool to subdue countless.

This time, not behind closed doors. But in plain sight.

It’s scary to imagine such spite.

Each year that goes by it becomes clearer that you never cared.

You sold guns, drugs and all kinds of war.

And each time, you kept coming back for more.



You’ve built up antibodies that ensure your survival.

But sometimes I wonder if you’re alive at all.

But what do I know?

Maybe you’re more alive than ever.

Doing what you do best but always more clever.

That not even the most stable of geniuses can evade your pressure.



A strong enough foundation that each break makes you stronger,

So strong that not even the Gremlin can take you under.  

Against this dreary background, foregrounded is nothing short of magical.

Beyond hope, prayers or a thoughtless radical.

Or maybe this is all just fake outrage.

An attempt to evade the boredom of this endless monotony and baggage.



Or maybe, the term is out of date.

Like every other, that makes me increasingly more irate.

In which case, this poem is at least ten years late.

Or maybe there are too many maybes’.

And I’m perfectly suited for this time of vague uneasiness and indifference.

In which case, my imagination probably needs more sociology and less a lesson in rhymes.
Piano backed narration @ https://anchor.fm/shlomotion/episodes/Emerging-Economies-e1s1a6
Butch Decatoria Dec 2015
Umbridging the gap

and the platitudes of word-******

     as well as the Encyclopedic pimps of posh

spiced with lingual ice...



          Because I am a simpleton

with a thirst for the Beloved

             and its discriptive meanings, I am

                       scholarly lacking

    Juxtaposing my script to refer

to references Grecian or urn,

                     enflagrante artisan

                            spurts with superlatives and

personified iambics of rhetorical lines

       limned with deep shagrin

              because my verbs are linear

even when my chicken scratch

                          struck midnight a match stick

flame to illuminate

         my poetic fluffer's formulae

              schisms from my own mind's magician hat...

Not to be-little or slight those hands walking

        that yellow the pages

                     with slothly seeking rote

              for meandering bibliographies

a librarian's histology fingers for Captain

Cook / exploration's verbose

           exploitation if at most

                   connecting dots treasured maps

of purposeful / placement for imagery

                         in the textiles

              of poetry's destined and enlightening

       cloak & dagger or a Throw

                        or a goose-down warmth

of Love / to blanket the night away

                           just as would a mother's / tucking in

                from the day's overwhelming

lack of reverances, referenced

             oh how to closely listen   / or live

                        beyond the history

to be in the moment

              comparing and sharing

     our joys and the power of now . . . keep it simple

because I am a simpleton with a thirst

                         with a thirst for the Beloved,

        the Truth of a promise / endowed Tao of Us. . .
Chris Slade May 2019
The Avro Vulcan, a majestic big old iron bird, sublime,
was to do a flyby for just one memorable last time.
Maybe with a jet fighter or a Spitfire on each wing, who knew?…
Unthinkable to miss it… almost a crime.
Thousands turned up every year, always a great day out -
but this year would be special, there'd be no doubt.
The last flight of such a legendary plane made it essential…
So, after the flyers’ break for lunch, the crowd filled out.

The entry fee to occupy the field was heinous. 25 quid!
That was for adults - and a fiver for each kid.
So, many more than those that paid, sat happily outside pubs.
Others found shelter in the perimeter’s trees and... kinda hid.
Now, to see a Vulcan fly anytime, anywhere, was magic…
She was a Leviathan of the Cold War,
that held players in the planet’s power games in awe.
And this would be her last time doing the rounds on the air show circuit -
Seeing this locally was hard to ignore.

Mark (a nephew) was a window cleaner by trade.
A regular, down to earth, happy go lucky guy.
…Saturday comes and the kids all voted "McDonalds"…
“A Happy Meal!” they’d cry.
He said that was fine - they’d all go after he’d nipped over
to the airshow to watch the Vulcan fly.
No idea whatsoever, of course, that just by going to Shoreham
just 5 miles away, for half an hour or so… that he might die.

He told his fiancé he’d only be an hour or so…
be back in time to take the kids for a burger and, "NO!"...
He wouldn’t stay. He was the only one in the family
who was bothered anyway…so he wouldn’t ****** up their day.
So, in haste, because apparently Chicken Nuggets & Fries
was much better for the kids than a load of old planes,
he cranked the best out of his bike along the 27 and,
once at the lights by the Sussex Pad,
he pulled over to the kerb to watch from the bushes.
Good view? Well not bad!

Andy Hill was a flyer of many years. His weekday job,
flying for BA.Taking holiday makers, business folk, transatlantic in Seven Four Sevens...
A flight deck maestro, soaring up, just under the heavens.
He’d done Shoreham loads of times… it was exciting, exhilarating... almost sport, his game!
He was off the hook,  became an ace. It gave him that 15 minutes of fame!
Free to thrill - a hero! Standing out from the crowd with every daring step. His aim!

He wasn’t just a petrol head… this bloke had aviation fuel in his blood.
Adrenalin on tick-over. Nought to 60 in 2.7 seconds with 22,000 Horsepower under the hood.
He left Epping full of fuel, just 90 miles away, so in two ticks he was with us, fully loaded and, the weather? It was good.
First up after lunch at half past one… he streaked across the crowded field.
Over and out and up, up, up… Little did the spectators know that Andy had forgotten he was flying a Hunter…
He thought it was last year’s aborted routine in a Jet Provost… The one they'd stopped part way through being, too risky.

"He’s not gonna make it… I can’t look!" There was a hush… a nanosecond’s silence and then the rush,
the whoomph that said it all… that hush! The ground shook!
And the eleven - plus others injured - went up in Andy Hill’s very own fireball!
No, of course, Mark wasn’t the only one to die that day.
Ten other ‘innocents’ left us in pretty much the same way…
Maurice, Dylan, Tony, Matthew, Matt, Graham, Mark R, Daniele, Richard & Jacob.
Mark T, our Mark, had the distinction of having two funerals, not just the one…
More remains were discovered, analysed and found to be his!
Even after he’d…already well... ‘gone’.

The injustice that eleven spectators or just passers by should die
when the survivor, the off target driver, who sped too low from the sky, should, after a suitable pause in this ghoulish game, be exonerated and not take any blame.
Well it’s all sort of things… It's ridiculous, pathetic, obtuse, a joke… who do they think we are?

But the great and the good deliberated, scratched their heads and worked hard to make everything look ’right’…
Tolerance for the bereaved to grieve, platitudes, condescending attitudes, a memorial service.
Thanks - genuinely - to the emergency services… Not just a little buck-passing… But the public often judged them. Arsing about - to cover their corporate backside.
They can’t insult me (or us)… intelligent people have tried…

Andy Hill was judged to be not guilty of 11 counts of manslaughter by gross negligence.
But he claimed he blacked out in the air, having experienced ‘cognitive impairment’ brought on by hypoxia … possibly due to the effects of G-force…. Of course!
The 11 were either hit by the plane or roasted in a fireball caused when the jet flew too low and too slow. But if it wasn’t Andy’s fault then whose was it?

Surely this can’t be the end of this travesty of justice!!

BUT, there IS a new memorial to the dead. And, trust this...it’s a good one too…  The best that money can buy - and that anyone can do.

But there's is also a very bitter taste, still today…
that somehow... just won’t go away!
This is a bit of a saga... But I think it's worth it...On August 22nd 2015 there was a disaster at Shoreham Air Show, West Sussex... on the south coast of England and eleven people died. A loop the loop, too low and too slow. The pilot lived and recovered from his injuries and was found not guilty of eleven counts of manslaughter by gross negligence.
Julian Apr 2019
The inaugural bang swiveled with the vacant expressions of a muted feral crowd indignant about ethnic identity and swift in the recourse of tyrannical thugs pandering withered abuse

I solemnly abided in a chirpy itinerant glower against the exclusive system for stranding the disintegration of lyrical integrity for the Potemkin cheers of the culmination of too many jeers

Withered words for the abeyance of silence I incurred with wistful pleas for resurgent clarity beyond   sheepish fears

So I loitered in the evanescence of words..

Watching with alacrity as the strident ignorance of grafted wretchedness writhed its last mustered exsibilation at the sound of windbags bloviating beyond prodigal extravagance without a visible tweeted word

I measured my pause…..as I considered the heft of poignant exposures to a dismal serenade of miscegenated politics and garbled breaths of wheezy mendicants seeking participation in the trophy of smothered compliance

But I marveled simultaneously at the extinction of the shriveled crowds as they sized up the minutiae of wastrels glamorously inviting a frozen recapitulation of sorrows borrowed and wasted on minced platitudes that swindle still the votive confidence of regimented sympathy pretending empathy for soured hearts professedly defiant at their bereaved will

My pulse I clocked at 120 as I wondered where on earth the 140s and 150s have frittered their patience on with such brazen alacrity for the garish snarl of a sojourn into the ineffable effrontery of aureate mutiny against the tyrant of deaf spoon-fed indignation without the luxury of shared ignominy of memorable cadence for frippery in sparse blurbs registered in braille rather than brawn

Then I remembered my vociferous persnickety temperament and the curdled hatred of procrustean swan songs to an etiolating standard of ethical entanglement in aloof issues delivered with a decisive swoon too swift in earnestness to outfox with a quipped rebuff or a calculus of classical spoof

Then I wondered with a problematic but inherent prolixity…..
I too could adorn the adoring moon with a lyrical lampoon geared for a clockwork punchline or a winsome rebarbative tune….OR…. enchant with an incisive acerbic rant about how pasquinades outstay their welcome because of the clambered insistence of happenstance years ago in a blinkered mirror but never rehashed too soon

But where would affection heap its laurels if I dared to swindle the spotlight away from frisky poetasters who proved a renegade inspiration for fluttered triumph in a seaside tragedy only the crestfallen waves of pestilent Idiocracy could steal from my outstretched tenacity in verse and verve

Boom went a fulmination of hatred at my labored words! And then I swerved to avoid potholes of tenuous gainsay…. and other miscreants littering the world with misappropriated labels for laments belabored with publicity for displaced enmity distilled from a cauldron of mismatched ignorance….tethered to the vagrancy of gripe plucked at the ripe time for a twenty-dollar prize give or take a dime

But that dime separating 1990 from 2010 meant more than anything to a life littered with hallowed word crimes…. against the sanctimony of syncopation with cheap bleats too arrogant to be sheepish at the lavish indulgence of the marginalized wines…. brewed in a castle flickering on fiat worth rather than the simplicities of minutes of warbled time

So I currently warp minds with the proctor of a gamble too garish to finesse the quicksand of attrition but jaunty enough to bypass the limitations of a linear self-referential memorial about the circular nature of irony espoused by divorced rhymes

Now I stand ascendant….waiting for the retinues of retinas to absorb the wavy rigmarole of the serpentine pathways carved beneath the buzzwords of race and division and towards soldered unity with a human race beyond racism…. and a class divorced from socioeconomic crass division

Just then I arrived at serenity…. as I realized that the BAR exams that encage so many aspirant hearts are counterfeit in the court of the highest judiciary art that believes that insidious artifice is an embezzled venture of frolicsome guttersnipes wallowing in division can never revive a lifeless heart…. even if quick-witted credentialism rattles the slaves to vapid artforms that any humanism would never deem smart

Ditch the agitprop as a human frailty indentured to endure the curated disease without a cure to make the snollygosters in Washington ever so cocksure with their cockalorum disregard of the palatable consensus to make news real again….Finally for the fraternity of an enlightened human race in a benighted world of trendy fatuousness that infests the planet with the debauchery of glorified urchins jerking the levers with severed brevity to promote infectious foofaraw with cultural indemnity

I leave you with this

What is ornate complexity without the luxury of concerted beatific bliss that the parsecs that flummox your minds throb vehemently with cohesiveness in my internal design are not remiss

And remember the benighted standards of kitsch for the kitchens of penury bewitched don’t stand a chance against the overriding itch to vanquish mountains one after another to cross them off the list
Ellen Joyce Apr 2014
This poem casts a line from insomnia to morning
On the wind of a prayer that whatever bites, holds on.

See I have counted eleven score and ten,
with rainbow like curves of my neck -
contemptuous beasts leaping in formation
each bleating out a preach of vague platitudes;
A narrative for the night sky.

My hands clamour at keys for escape
until I tumble headfirst into a web so vast
it has ensnared the whole world wide -
millennials are living in-ter-net over in-the-world;
a new ultraviolence against humanity.

I beat my words into the screen until it breaks;
shattering scarlet emoticons like confetti
pouring over language as if it were a compliment.
My mind massages shapeless polypous thoughts
like tight constricted muscles aching for release.

3am casts these philosophies into horses,
whipping them into shape and speed
before the eyes of this statuesque ******.
This anxious wakefulness begs my manic self to dance;
suggestively ******* tickets to ride like cleavage.

Sleep is fast becoming a neglected former engagement;
as my mind trips over fallen heroes
wades through my favourite mistakes
in a wonderland unfolding faster than I can fall
while the world beyond my window remains dark.
This poem was written in response to prompts by a friend of mine who is throwing a competition offering a signed first edition copy of her poetry book as a prize.  Visit her facebook page for details of the twenty word prompts and details on how to submit.
https://www.facebook.com/Siajanewords?fref=ts
mark john junor Aug 2014
whom do you trust
solider, sailor, tinker, tailor....
what eyes see the meaning of the blind
what tongues listen...which lies
in the picturesque morning
beauty spins its deceptions with golden hued sunlight
weaves its hand puppet theatricals made of
fleeting wisps of smiles
kissing gestures weakly delivered
    solider,  sailor,  tinker,  tailor...
    they gather round the dead man
    some come to mourn the lost
    some come to rifle through his pockets
    some come to silently wait for their own fate
he sits in his worn chair
in a pool of lamplight
with a small hammer in hand
his spectacles on bridge of his nose
tapping tapping ever so gently the thin metal mask
tinker...tailor...sailor...solider
the uniform of his mind shifts according to his lie
his tool is always the deceptions and misdirections
a sly smile...firm handshake...a signature style
'to whom do you trust' is a phrase that troubles him
her perfume lingers in the air
years have buried the cold war
but not its warriors
not their handiwork
     they dress the dead man for his burial
     with his decorations and platitudes
     with his shiny sword and neat uniform
     with honors they lay him
     with truths his secret they bury him
     why did he do thus....to whom did he answer
     to the tomb with his truths and lies
     to the tomb
he gathers the long coat
and the umbrella
walks out in london's chill spring night
to a bridge
and throws a small box into the river
long years after the cold war died
these men of shadows still play
these keepers of the gate still watch for hannibal and his horde
solider,  sailor,  tinker,  tailor
whom do you trust
(reference to John Le Carre's novel)
A small kindness can’t sustain
A screaming, starving child.
One step at a time
Won’t bridge the distance
Between salvation and despair.

I click that button.
I like that you are running to beat cancer,
But you won’t.

The world boils and burns.
I won’t share anymore,
Because I don’t care anymore.
Facebook *******.
zebra Mar 2019
I'm writing this poem to be ignored

like many of you
I enjoy being a poet
of keen irrelevance

a literary luminaire
of solitude
a lost writing ghost
a megalomaniac haunting himself
a waiting oracle
waiting
for the occult muse door mouse to tap dance
whispering night  babble
or having a cooked chicken fly into my mouth
while i take searing snapshots
of erratic images
puzzling them into words
from boundless burdens
of heaping intestinal bluesy aftermaths exodus of conscience  
bruising my self like a ******* in heat
on out of control run-on rants
and blood razor drenched mysticism

while real men drive earth movers
drink bruskies
and kick ***
hustling time share Chinese handcuff contracts
and up sell social justice platitudes
fit for pie in the sky levitating hysteria
lives shatter like red ice
in endless cacophonies of skull clobbering effacement

I'm writing this poem to be ignored
and no one lets me down
The symbolism of this Christmas classic
has a second, hidden meaning for the ages.
For this song has an ulterior motive,
contained in verses that seem outrageous.

Christ is the truest fulfillment of Love,
in the primary doctrine of Christianity;
therefore, He is the focus of each refrain,
being the sin offering on Crucifixion’s tree.

The pair of turtle doves represents books,
volumes of both the Old and New Testaments.
The Bible embodies the Spirit of God calling…
for the World to turn to Christ and repent.

The three french hens stand for the trinity
of metaphysical concepts: Faith, Hope and Love.
Despite questionable claims, Love requires action-
and that some of us need a gentle, spiritual shove.

Four calling birds correspond to the Good News,
found in accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke & John.
Together they present a harmonious view of Christ
and the divine message of the Gospel’s Song.

The five golden rings echo the Jewish Torah,
one of the first accounts of God’s spiritual laws.
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy
remind of Redemption’s need to offset human flaws.

Six geese a-laying demonstrate the creativity of God,
regarding His work in the archetype days of creation.
For we are to lift up our eyes and see Him, through
inspiration that fuels our desires and imaginations.

The swans a-swimming represent the seven-fold gifts
from the Holy Spirit: Prophesy, Serving, Exhortation,
Teaching, Contribution, Leadership, and God’s Mercy…
holy promises that complement the substance of Salvation.

The eight maids a-milking reflect the Beatitudes,
a message given by Christ at the Sermon on the Mount.
He taught Heavenly concepts, in which we are blessed,
via inspired platitudes for us- to joyfully recount.

Nine ladies dancing recall the Fruits of the Spirit:
Love, Joy, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Self-Control,
Faithfulness, Peace, and Gentleness - sacred constructs
for soothing the pains, experienced by our weary souls.

The lords a-leaping personify Jehovah’s Ten Commandments:
instructions for worshiping only Him, keeping the Sabbath,
and various prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, ******,
theft, dishonesty, and adultery, which lead us off His path.

The eleven pipers piping constitute the faithful Disciples,
who walked the Earth with Christ, observing Him firsthand.
They were the original, Christian acolytes who were taught-
how to live victoriously under the pressure of Life’s demands.

The drummers drumming symbolize the twelve points of belief,
outlined in the religious doctrine, called the Apostles' Creed.
Now with greater insight, lift your voice and sing this song,
using your faith in God, that you willingly and lovingly concede.
.
.
.

Author Notes:

This my poetic interpretation of the familiar Christmas song. From 1558ad until 1829ad, Roman Catholics in England were not permitted to openly practice their faith. An unknown author, during that era, wrote this carol as a Catechism song for young Catholics. It has two levels of meaning: the surface meaning plus a hidden meaning, originally known only by members of their church. Each element in the carol has a code word, implying a religious tenet, which children could easily remember.

Learn more about me and my poetry at:
http://www.amazon.com/Reaching-Towards-His-Unbounded-Glory/dp/1419650513/ref=sr11?ie=UTF8&qid;=1387452157&sr;=8-1&keywords;=reaching+towards+his+unbounded+glory

By Joseph J. Breunig 3rd, © 2013, All rights reserved.
bleh Dec 2014
'i've only ever really read one poem. i, i have to admit.*  
You know, that, that one poem that everyone’s read, whatsit,
Howl by Ginsberg, 'best-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-madness,-starving-hyste­rical-naked,' , yeah, that one;'
'It's just, I identify with it so strongly.' she says,
'That poem is soo me.'
It's funny how commentary on a generation 60 odd years ago come across as timeless insights..
how we learn that true spirit of rebellion and counterculture three generations ago,
  as it is taught to us by two generation ago countercounterculture academics.
but I guess, inevitably
                                         we
                                                  return,
  to those half drowned pontifications inevitably decried into transcendental truth by the onward spilling ratchet of cultural recognition;
  that sense of universal oneness generated by the unwashed ramblings of beat-generation hipsters dense innuendo in run on sentences running, running from their upper-lower-middle-class New York homes and their privilege of true vacant meaninglessness and despair,
   to those nervous tucked in shirted clean shaven scholars swooning over the same seme drugged, melancholic bearded men profussing the deepest of opaque truths only found up the furthest reaches of their own *****.
  As we push through to our lectures, the mosaic in motion of blazer wearing mac-users and mac-pac wearing blazers,
  As we hysterically interpret the formatting conditions for our reports, which could hang in the balance of whether the dreams we once had will ever be actualised,
  As we felt lost and found and found and lost at those park benches under the stars, where occasional strangers strolled by offering sessions and life-stories,
  As we paid exorbitantly to get out of our parents homes, and into tin-can flats with broken windows, absentee landlords and cracked paint only held together by all the moss, (the empowerment that is wage slavery,) for in our youth, poverty is not an ever-present pejorative, but the rite of passage to show that we are alive,
  As rituals of manhood are defined by two things and two things only; how much insomnia one can accumulate to meet insane and inane deadlines, and how much one can illuminate the walls in ***** from all the beers, spirits, cheap wines and questionable home-brews,
  As the government dismantles the human-rights commission, and we nervously attend the rallies initiated by the radicals, and the man on the megaphone calls on the crowd to chant and we can only mumble and laugh nervously at ourselves,
  And when the next speaker runs onto stage feeling the need to plead to this already nervous, placid mass that this is in-fact a PEACEFUL PROTEST, and that we are all true patriots and they insist everyone start singing the national anthem and we all look down and we again mumble, or pretend somehow not to hear them,
  and when, in this biggest independent rally around a unified cause our generation's ever seen, we have never felt so alone ,
  and isolated,  
                                  we
                                             remember,
                                                                    those earlier days,
  When we'd bleach our hair; we'd poison ourselves white, in the vain mystic hope that this was just the transition period to the time when we'd get true colour into our lives,
  Remember our wonder at the Eurocentric Asiatic television representations of the Abrahamic faiths, given transubstantiated holy revival by the medium of Saturday morning digital pastel pasture; when we were children staring excited and wide eyed into the Metatrons Fire of Sinai 'Random Almighty Mega Damage'; as Dante and the seraph class Tyrant-infused-Michael inevitably made battle with YHWH, -in the one True End,- as we grinded within the monolithic emerald obsidian halls, Mystical wonderment spilling forth from our reddened hollow eyes, at the beautiful unlimited expansive world contained within our console/consoling digital unit discs; conformally mapped and etched into the convex hull of our minds,
  Where we were gods, doing battle with every possible creature in morphospace, filleted into overpriced cards and cartridges, for which our strategies meant so much to us though none of us really understood the game,
  When we could quote verbatim every piece of dialogue in GTA2, and get concerned glances from our parents as we conjured veiled imagery of bukake-ladled innuendo which we didn't really understand until six or seven years later,
  When sexuality was a special secret club our elders and the kids in the years above came across so wise for being a member of, rather than an anti-turing test; a farcical ritual where everyone tries their best to imitate the hyper-reality of MTV while hiding the nervous feelings that this whole thing was really meant for someone other than us,
  When creating a whole new lexicon for our self-hood (be it artistic, ******, political or philosophical) felt like existential emancipation; a transcendental rebellion against the normalising identities and semantics of old, rather than an impenetrable circle-**** taxonomy,
  When one day we'd unveil a new term in some text, and it would completely change our outlook on every corner of our lives,
  Or, the next day, when we'd give up and just sit back on rolling banks, and look out at a veil of stars,
  Or the next day, when we'd wonder desperate and painfully, which of the last two was the real pursuit and which was wasted time? (Or was it this day, the day spent building an illusory dialectic between them?)
  Remember when we were in kindergarden, and you had to pass through the kitchen, -the adults zone,- to get to the toilet, and you'd feel both shame and wonderment listening in of the snippets of conversation muttered by these titanic figures; discussing abstruse issues from the newspaper in foreign yet noble tongues?
  Remember when we were teens, and every form-checking observation and question from these same adults was so painstakingly pedantically banal and asinine, that one could only respond with monosyllabic grunts and silent hysterics?
  And remember as 'young adults', when we'd inevitably entered this same dull Aristotelian world of forms, how we'd ask the same adults for advice on filling these paperworks, at once still asemic gibberish, and at once the fine-print that contained and predicted our lives?
  Remember when our dreams for the future were not bounded by the economy of our grade point averages and just how much debt we were willing to incur
                                …
I've seen the best minds of my generation climb into pre-packaged little boxes; and pay through the teeth for the privilege of doing so.  
  Akin to a 'Howl' they call it? Our cry for selfhood? What a scream.
It's not even a cry. Barely a whimper.
More of a zombified groan, completely aware our intrepid Journey of Self is just a pricey guided tour. (Tv Ad's static commodified existential emancipatory platitudes; 'your place in the world' / 'well it's my place and it's my time' urgh.)
And so we march asleep; all lame all blind.
  Trudging through the mind-fields; arguing, unravelling the semantic distinctions between the empty boundaries and the boundaries of emptiness.
  Transcribed down for essay deadlines,  /  assessing our lives trajectory as dead lines,
Becoming increasingly aware,
  We are not the living beings, the dasein, the Übermenschen being actualised; we are the machinery through which the institutions, the factories, the markets and education facilities actualise themselves.
  (While the only acceptable language we can breathe in opposition to these ratcheting pedagogical machines is the lexicon they provide us..
  ('oh, you hate systemic neoliberal alienation; the deestablishment of ontological anthropocentrism? Tell me more about the esoteric uselessness of academic culture.') bluh.)

But

       the more we follow those phantom images we built of ourselves,
the more we become aware they are but sirens; hypnotic dreamlike figures luring us to our doom,
  and as this awareness dawns; and the cognitive dissonances and schizophrenia grows,
       We


                                just try to keep calm and carry on regardless.

Can we really claim the arrogance of having a better path?
The conceit that there's a better cliff we should be guiding ourselves to to top ourselves off?
I don't know,
I reaally
really
just don't know.
..i think i started out with a theme here, but it mostly devolved into venting.
      i finished another year of university recently. i'm not really sure to what extent higher education's given me perspective on life, and what extent it's simply annihilated what little i had.
   from my experiences of student culture, i feel our generation views itself as abandoned by the world, but to good for it anyway. We aren't the bohemians or beatniks or hippies or punks; our drinking and drugging ourselves to death isn't a counter-cultural high-minded rebellion. It's more a prideful self destructive egotism, a self derisive narcissism.   or something. i dunno.
  whether it's from cowardice or a more genuine scepticism, i certainly have no idea what i am (or ought to be) doing in/with/about this world.
Steven Fortune Apr 2014
I tried to be cordial with inactivity
washing it with weeping juice like a pardoned effigy
but the diamonds of determination were so wrapped in mind debris
that I threw away a fortune in potential

The smiles of the platitudes are louder than their laughs
An appeasing of their attitudes I warrant with the gaffes
of an undertaker's underling bestowing upon epitaphs
another deadened and deprived credential

Seeing days in ways that never did occur to me
Every end a mending by default, a sour recipe
for compromise eroding in a rusty *** of empathy


The dentist rubbed his fingers when he saw my gritted teeth
No sermon on the mount from me, more a mumble on the heath
My incisor is a tack that would support a giant's wreath
Thorns of novocaine will numb my Christmas wish

For the sake of universal order I will freeze a yawn
Mostly harmless said a hitchhiker of Earth so I can spawn
a batch of clones to live on hold where all the battle lines are drawn
I'll zip up and in the universal order I'll languish

Seeing nights in ways that never did occur to me
Every satellite a telecast of fault, a sour recipe
for sleeping juice to boil over in Big Dipper's empathy


Where's a pound of flesh when needed? I've grown tired of these ribs
On the grill of soggy marrow, hungry haunts will have first dibs
Call on William Blake to send the weepers to their cribs
Wishful thinking I'll preserve beneath the floorboards

With a hand in nothing new and an incisor in the usual
intestine chains surround my motivation's hot pursual
Don't read too much into my implied acceptance of a dual
with a messenger of fact's implicit hoards

Seeing days in ways that never did occur to me
Every end a mending by default, a sour recipe
for compromise eroding in an empty *** of sympathy


Sound the bugle for my bed is made, I'm rested for detention
Solitaire I'll play in my confinement for the crime of sought attention
I revolted the philosophers in plugging my intention
I would not concede that lab rats had it worse

The satellites are full and bright, the shadows walk on lakes tonight
I'll dream of sleep but eyes will play me in my bedroom's voided sight
Lay with me and sigh and the elastic laws of nature might
halt the quivering continuum of fate's forsaken course

Seeing nights in ways that never did occur to me
Every channel plays the same old cooking show's ensoured recipe
Compromise a minor seasoning in liver-flavoured empathy


04 15 14
There may be a couple of spelling errors...the rhyme scheme was inspired by Dylan's Tombstone Blues, and the title was inspired by another Dylan song, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues.  I tried to capture a bit of his rambly style as well.
The glitter of strobe
gratuitous gaiety
platitudes
and sanctimonious guile

******* cocktails
on the menu
an ingratiating mask
a gratified grin

Contorted vocal chords
lots of laughter
no time for irony
look at me.
Noor Sep 2013
In a fit of pique truths were written.
In a moment of reflection all was deleted.
Platitudes were written back instead.
Who am I to speak of the dead?

A wife was ungrateful with truth.
Did a pen pal want
what the sacred vows of marriage
Make unacceptable realities?
For whom would I have written? Who would it have pleased?

Staring at a fresh e-mail in humbled wonderment
that someone would give decent pretense to care
I -safely back from war- now ask: what do you want to know?
Do you really want to know?

Is it my place to tell
of seeing a man's insides
on the outside
of a vehicle who's occupants he unwittingly saved
by stepping on the landmine instead?
The mine splattered the survivors' vehicle in red.

Is it my place to tell
Of listening to the medic's confession?
Hearing him speak of tasting the blood in the air
like pennies on his tongue.
There's a tale I haven't heard sung!

I met my Shadow
I embraced him so deeply that I
As I had existed before
Ceased to be.
The naive child thinking it was Light
The Predatory Survivor others (cowards!) may judge as Dark
Were forged together
Stronger perhaps
Time will tell
As the alloy of two selves is unified by a personal hell

Cheering at outgoing steel rain
Laughing after the whizzing of bullets is a memory
Running, racing to donate more blood
Mourning the fallen while bathed in the dim red glow of chem lights
Watching honored corpses loaded in near darkness for their last helicopter flights

Is this what you wanted to hear?

Perhaps you knew.
Perhaps you imagined you knew.
Regardless
For your consideration
Thank you

For your innocent
Well-intentioned
Beautifully petty
Gloriously naive
And honest letters
Thank you.
Truly
SE Reimer Jul 2016
~

each intersection, a crossroad made,
every answer, a question began;
each wrong, a right opposing,
every song, a note composing,
after darkness, the light again!

angry words won’t heal the pain,
apologies like ointment’s rain;
flood-washed roads a crossing need,
no line in sand, a bridge instead,
points me north, your heart to claim!

i am no island, though often seems,
my pained retreat, a blood trail leaves;
i find my greatest strength of all,
within your heart’s loving embrace,
held firmly in your grip of grace!

there is no strength in platitudes,
cliches are weak, like worn out shoes;
the darkened bank cannot hold sway,
o’er lighted bridge that leads the way,
points me north, and back to you!

~

*post script.

learning something of
defense mechanisms,
mine in particular;  
sadly, when brokenness
is too acute to hide,
the retreat is not bloodless.
bridges built of simple
three-word sentences
greatly needed ...  not a
crafted flood of well-worded,
defensive responses.

“i am sorry!” and “i love you!”...
two, eight-letter, three-cord ropes,
requiring no word-smithing,
yet are sound-ly engineered
for mending souls and
building hearts-bridges
not easily broken...
each capable of bearing
(baring) great weights.

and yes, there are notes composing here,
for it is said, “a song solidifies
the heart’s passionate decisions!”
Mateuš Conrad Oct 2016
it's understandable, they confused by complex bilingualism as schizophrenia; oh sorry, it's not actually a scary word, before people start to theorise the mono-lingual pre-maturity of a condition that affects older people, they should seriously begin to listen to what a person is saying; there are tales of surgeons leaving surgical equipment in bodies during surgery... well... at least the physicality of such blunders is more pronounced than leaving regression variations of negated ease (disease) in man... (uncouple that compound and you'll find the subtler alternative)... when psychiatrists make mistakes it's not a heart surgeon making a mistake, the mistakes psychiatrists make are far more profound, given the nature of the mistake being seemingly trivial in comparison... yet these mistakes make our mental life worse by disrupting the narrative, psychiatry, being a science, primarily disrupts the (cognitive) narrative; it's hard enough to find yourself in your mind, let alone a worthy narrative that you encompass... it's hard to reemerge with a good enough narrative when you're branded like an ox, a ******* during the height of Christianity, or registering a car for road tax... it's ****** hard.

so they (i've lost the paranoia additive of this pronoun
a long time ago) thought my bilingualism
was worthy the label of schizophrenia...
well... d'uh, isn't bilingualism a split-mind scenario
in itself?
                    bilingualism is more complex than you think,
it reaches to the depths of each language,
it's not a multilingual acquisition, a polymath hooray!
it's bone deep,
                        bone deep, it goes as far into identity
as all conceivable points of psychological architecture;
which is why my bilingualism was so well
established that i became a bit difficult to society:
my upbringing was to match the difficulty -
i was never supposed to utter a single intellectual
disparity, given my stature i was supposed to be
a manual labourer - a position i'd have gladly undertaken
but (see my earlier entries), but...
                                i never really felt a need for
an animosity toward the English -
                                           i loved everything about England
(or at least London) -
                                                 i left my native country
early enough to sponge-up the new culture,
                   but of course when our family was applying
for citizenship we were the obscure minority,
                 after the floodgates opened and the less
creme of the crop entered these shores,
       i was forced into a spiral reinvention, i was no
longer was the British termed "exotic"...
exotica, hmm, funny how i imagine things exotic as
things in sunny places, slaves in the Caribbean,
the platitudes of certain African Savannahs...
something Voltaire might find befitting to write about
like he did in Candide - there's this neurotic passage in there...
                the passage to India... a book i'll
never read: why? can't be bothered, the t.v. series *Indian Summers

does it for me;
                                  plus i do like cooking curry,
so there's the f                        u                            to take-away
curry...           i have an arsenal of spices and i bomb Kashmir
with whiffs of the stuff...
                                    that part of my is what the intended cultural
assimilation was intended for: the rest? n'ah ah.
                               what spurred me to write this poem?
Heidegger's concept of someone moving and integrating
into a different culture: to be honest, the country i was born
in was uniquely pressed to turn its habitants into nomads -
      it was a town primarily based on the steel industry -
now it's a town of pensioners - the steel industry fell to ruin
and people had either the choice of: elsewhere in Poland,
or abroad.
                                    still, things were much nicer
   when the barrier was up... selfishly said? i agree, but then
i had enough air to breathe as a sole artefact of the ethnicity,
and a good enough reputation as a person needing to
persistently learn... had i been a crook? well, now i find
my ethnic background elsewhere, in a near mythical place
in Scandinavia - not that i want to, but i don't actually
have an atypical (a typical) physiognomy of a Slav -
so that's a plus...
                                     but what really spurred me on
was what Heidegger describes as the threshold and indeed
the essence of integration: to learn the language,
to use the language, nothing but language in terms of
being considered a certain noun - in this case, British;
so this is a German perspective from the 20th century...
the British perspective in the 21st century?
                         kinda like **** Germany...
language? forget it... you can speak with a ****** accent
and even ******* grammar... what's at work here
is ethnic cleansing, on a spiritual side of things -
language can rot in hell for the English, what they want
new citizens is to: a. eat fish 'n' chips
                                  b. talk ***** when *******
                         c. lick the **** of Americans
          d. have a sense of moral superiority because of
                    that poncy accent that's becoming a dodo
       e1. forget their mother tongue
         e2. only speak English in private
                            f. respect the Muslim attire but
        to never respect fellow European's concerned
                           about many other things
      g. amongst other things...
so it's not enough to learn the ******* language, that i have to
become a ******* serf? oh wait, i have some spare change
in my pocket (puts hand in a trouser pocket and takes out):
the *******!
                                  or how you find yourself
in an imploded British Empire, go beyond London and you
enter something less resembling a global community
and more a national socialist set of self-evident dicta
wrecking havoc to your senses.
                              and all this from a humble background?
well: freaks and mutations sometimes happen...
                    being born near to the date of Chernobyl doesn't
really help to counter the argument:
           yes, even in Poland, the effects were felt,
my great-grandmother remembers streaks of radiated trees
and un-radiated trees in the park -
        the radiated trees were born... a strange kind of rainbow...
and yes, i do take the **** out of **** Germany
while talking about it and Jewish mysticism -
                                Malachi the arch-heretic (who introduced
a polytheistic concept that does not fit in with monotheism:
reincarnation) -
                            oh look:      something came out of this
conviction that told me to duly apologise to the concept
of the two late monotheistic religions:
                             on your own, can't be bothered -
Christianity was always going to be more image orientated
(after all, the crucifixion is a good enough image)
   and Islam was always going to be more word orientated
(something to shout about, actually, to just shout it) -
the Judaism i found?
                              not being circumcised and what not,
not adhering to the religion as such?
  the lord of the rings and harry potter...
simple... how?
                               please make oaths, swear, use profane
language... maybe that will make your actions less profane
and this isn't 19th century Victorian society event where
people talk polite but play ***** according to the escapades
of Dorian Gray...
                              i'm still adamant that auto-censorship
of a name (the name, i.e. ha-shem) does wonders for your
vocabulary - oath, **** **** ****, words are actually:
                or conjunctions, and this means you can use them
to destroy the barricades of fluidity -
                                 do we really need to say certain names?
Islam says the name all the ****** time,
        Christianity doesn't even know the name of the father:
Jules?                      Jason?                Jeremiah?
                                           can't be Yves...
                   and did 1st century fishermen write?
wasn't that a rebellion against the literate Pharisees etc.?
             so it's pretty much like the harry potter / lord of the rings
rule: Sauron
                       designates the tetragrammaton
   and the necromancer designates ha-shem...
                                                or...
         Voldemort designates (as above)
              and tom-riddle                   blah blah...
oh i have actually washed my hands clean of two most
populous religions in the world -
                            i can't believe that so many people can be
right about something,
                                    would i desire to argue to this
to the grave? not really, i prefer to look at it as a chance fancy,
my real concerns are based upon the question:
   why would bilingualism, ever, be treated as a case
of schizophrenia?
                                           perhaps the language is too
difficult to follow, perhaps i'm reciting a poem by
                           half caste by john agard -
but this **** isn't skin deep, i can't blow the sax in a liberating
transcendence of slavery, or do that other form of
rebellion -
                    &nb
WhyamIaSpoon Jan 2012
My auspicious and audacious assault augments the annoyance of aged accomplices.

My bodacious broadside of boffolas berates and buffaloes bros beneficently.

A classy crusade Clownishly chiseling and criticizing childishness.

A devilish ******* of dillydallying dullards; devoutly denying dimwits the dulcet dream of defiance.

Excessive, exuberant edification, ebulliently eliminating education-evictees.

A fair-weather frolic in flippancy with furious fools floundering in flawed foppishness.

Gregariously grating glum guys gleefully, growing grander garnishes of gripping gallantry gaily.

Heckling hooligans highlights my heavenly humor.

Irreverently irking irritable, iniquitous idiots in inestimably infuriating and incredible instances.

A jolly, jocular **** joking with jerks.

A kreiger kicking kleptomaniacs in the karyotype. (Cut me some slack, this is 'k', after all.)

A ludicrous, laughing lambaste of lollygagging lunatics, loftily loosing luscious lunacy on lucky losers.

A magnificent masterpiece of malfeasance, a monstrous, malevolent mission of massive misfortune for the minor minors missing no malicious missive.

A noxious, narcissistic niggling of nitwits, niftily nixing the noisome naivete of niggardly nobs.

An offhand, off-color outburst of outlandish observations to outclass the obnoxious overtures of obsequious offal.

A pragmatic prediction of possible platitudes or platypi, a placid parley of pyrotechnic pleasantries provoking Pyrrhic protections by prurient prats.

A quixotic quibble quarreling with a queer quarry.

Ribald ribbing, ruining the robust reality of the repreachful, repugnant, and rapacious with risque ridiculousness.

A silly, slighting slander of sluglike slavishness, succinctly sinking sloppy simpletons sourly.

Tracing the titillating talent of towing tyranny to towering terrors to tactless, togless, terrapins of the times.
Sean Hunt Feb 2016
Mother Nature broke her water
But the baby never came
Our inundated world
Will never be the same

We watched slowly
With a growing sense of impotence
As an elemental army
Took our innocence

Some  left their homes and died
In another place
They never did return
To their own space

Politicians waded 'round
In their wellingtons
What nerve they had to even show
Their sorry skeletons

Pontificated platitudes
Filled the element of air
And those who had been flooded
Didn't really care

To hear the sly sermon
Those words were barely heard
Though so well-written
Practised and rehearsed

Mother Nature has retreated now
To her slumber state
One day soon she'll wake again
We do not know the date

Windermere 2016 February 14th
There has been extensive flooding in the district where I live.  My flat is in a two-story block and nearly all the first floor residents had to relocate.  One died shortly after.  Another became ill enough to need specialized care and will never return.  All those flats had to be completely renovated.  I can only imagine the slow torture that they all experienced as the relentless water invaded their homes.  The drama was overdue a poem :)
They say the darkest hour
falls just before the dawn;
they say the dying soul holds on
until the day is born.

It's said the sea lies ebbest
before the highest tide;
at flood, the channel's deepest:
at ebb, rocks cannot hide.

Nature runs in cycles.
This is what they say.
But summer turns to winter.
Night always follows day.
Waverly Mar 2012
*******,
hoes,
crazy,
*****.

Catch me on a friday night,
and I might
say them all.

But what I say
and what I feel
is a different
thing.

Because *******,
hoes,
womps,
don't have vocabularies
like boulders.

They can't destroy.

And with a new mindset,
I can say
a few things.

A ***** is a girl
without hope.

A ***
is a girl
that likes ****
and doesn't
like
love.

A crazy one
is a girl that gets by.

A ****
is a girl
that doesn't know the difference
between the three
and operates
on a thin line;
because *******
have treated her like ****
and no new ******
can make her think
any different.

But a girl,
alas
a
girl.

A girl
is full of love
and platitudes.

A girl
has her hands
on your heart
all the time.

She has a vocabulary
and says **** a Webster's
because she's got a new dictionary
that didn't even exist
before she let it out her mouth.

A girl
makes you re-define
the word
love,
with all its
futile resentment
and
disenchantment,
because she'll keep you coming
back
for more,
even as she says
"no,
you're talking crazy,
you gotta
go."

So trust me when I say this,
I could **** with a girl's head before,
but this girl
she's maneuvered me into thinking
about how ****** up
I
really
am.

And that's as smart
as
I've
ever
been.
Edward Coles Apr 2015
I **** the mood in a sour June,
opulent misery, scorched Earth,
exchanging platitudes with old faces,
full of *******; full of hot air.
Both sides of the fence
at war with themselves,
feigning inner peace and profit
across the beer garden table.

I talk of hangmen and floods,
child brides and dressing gowns,
my hometown under the mythic spell
of collective memory loss.
We have forgotten our place
in the comfort of our urban sprawl;
sirens caterwaul past the high-rise,
past the vacant church with locked doors
and the homeless on the street.

A commonplace emergency,
young male suicides, women *****
in the safety of their homes,
taught a kindness through physical force,
the way the gun drops to civilians
in countries saved through the filter
of television screens; of dust and distance.
I sit and write and think of ****,
of old loves, anxieties-
they call me crazy all the while
for not committing to the scene.

Now Afghanistan is a blueprint,
extended diagram of steady-state destruction,
a conspiracy of white man dreams,
farmlands bruised by machines of war,
by the ******* Boot,
the feeling we have been here before.
All the while, the illusion persists,
car parks filled with smoke, professional escapists
with their 9% lager, bags of tobacco,
and the megalomania of art.

I **** the mood of a whitewashed June,
advertised freedom, a mortgaged Earth,
exchanging currency for a chance of peace,
the zen garden smoker, the looted mind.
Both sides of the fence are collecting bones,
at war with themselves, whilst my eyes are red
and my philosophies, ******.
They call me crazy for dreaming of escape,
whilst never leaving the confines of home.
C
Luke Gagnon Jul 2015
1                                                                ­    4
she offers me,                                             a spot of dust
she raises me                                              under the couch,
on platitudes and warm bread                I know it’s
in return for my devotion                         there

she loves me like the boats                       today, I start spring-cleaning,
she keeps out on the ocean                      (this alone
she loves me to be molded,                      should receive
not to be unfolded                                     more recognition than it will)
                                                           ­           I pull out the couch
she bore me bones                                     the vacuum doesn’t quite
the lacrimal bone                                       reach the dust lying
the breastbone                                            on unused carpet,
all the cervical vertebrae                          the head
I use them to simulate                              keeps hitting the wall
her expectations                                        unproductive
­
                                                                ­     I put the furniture back
2                                                           ­        in place
I have names,                                             no one will see the lack
I wear them like badges                           of progress
inspired by something not quite
earned yet                                                   5
         ­                                                            while­ lucid dreaming
I assigned                                                   conste­llations were on
each name                                                  my skin
a compartment                                          and freckles in
of me                                                           the night sky
If I name them maybe
they will become                                       pollution drowned out
real, not just necessary                             two thirds
                                                          ­           even if most imploded
                                                        ­             before they were seen

3                                                          ­         6
with enough necessity                             were it not for shadows
anyone can tell a lie                                  I would surely learn to
                                                              ­       hate the light
you can read this vertically or horizontally
Bob B Oct 2016
Look at all the parrots--
Parroting the words
Of all the other parrots--
Of all the other birds--

Parroting profusely
All the same refrains--
Parroting the constant patter
In their parrot brains--

Parroting the preaching
From the pulpit to the pews--
Parroting their parents'
And their parents' parents' views--

Parroting their leaders
And their pompous platitudes--
Parroting their peers'
Pretentious attitudes--

Parroting the patriarchs'
Proselytizing that'll
Put your teeth on edge
With their pathetic prattle--

Parroting the poppycock
Of trite pontifications--
Parroting pernicious
And sly manipulations--

Parroting the pretty birds
Whose pageantry and glory
Appeal to their prurient tastes
In each pathetic story--

Parroting the songsters
With parasitic pleasure
And counting out the rhythm
Of every pitiful measure--

Parroting the powerful
Whose ploys are so profuse,
Leaving the powerless
Pummeled with abuse--

Parroting with passion
Presumptuous prophesies
With putative contrition,
"Humbly" on their knees--

Parroting themselves--
Together all in sync--
How they love to parrot
So they don't have to think!

- by Bob B

— The End —