"refineries" poems
We bomb
hospitals
schools
police stations
sleeping children
and people
who we call
"collateral damage"
while chasing elusive
"high value targets"
while missing stationary
protected non-targets
oil fields
refineries
banks
arms dealers
and others who profit
from the insanity
they fuel
Nov 19, 2015
Nov 19, 2015 at 9:33 AM UTC
On Sunday, my S.O. and I
Drove to see Chorus Line
At the Stratford Festival.
A matinee. Beautiful day.
We left the Refineries of Sarnia
For fine entertainment.
The Avon flows gently
Buoying white swans gracefully.
Blah... blah... blah.
All very real.
You can see why it's called, Stratford;
There could be no other name.
A good choice.
Best Shakespearean Festival in N.A.
She explained all this to me on the drive.
If contrary people suffer
From low self-esteem, I didn't help
The situation.
As we drove through rich, green farmland,
Grazing cattle.
She asked why some barns
Have ramps leading to the barn doors.
Well, says I,
*The farmers, because of the economy,
Have to sell their livestock in parts,
So the ramps give easy access for the animals
Back to their stalls.*
Huh, said S.O.
That's so thoughtful!
Timing is everything.
Sincerity in voice, critical.
Hurry on to a new topic.
Someday, for sure, she'll tell someone, somewhere
About the considerate farmer.
She will.
Timing.
Like the kick line.
Like a punch line.
Jun 20, 2016
Jun 20, 2016 at 6:47 AM UTC
Vengeful souls demand recognition
as the blood fills the cracks in our foundations
and our genetic code is the biggest cop out ever known
As the media sells out and buys into the latest solution
Predicament home grown
When the problems run deeper than the sewage
they run deeper than the refineries and plastic seas
Tho they all serve as an example of the lacking
The lack of a proficent economy
and if someone is capable of defaecating where they eat
Whose to say they care for whats on your plate?
More and more we see the collaspe socially in our race
So what I dont understand is the shock when a man
brings a pipe bomb with intent to displace
Everyone is afraid of the yellow flag of terrorism
yet neglect the true issues when it turns red
Neglecting the many motives of an internal suspicion
So next time you go to stomp your former man
To dehumanise and overwork him
Remember your local postal hand
and how even the sanest can be pushed over the edge
Jan 23, 2013
Jan 23, 2013 at 11:25 AM UTC
*for Patrick,
if he can still hear me*
Rise, every neighbor!
Hear the cacophony of dragon fire
BANG, BANG
and the pitter patter rain fall of disease
T T T T
pouring over your households this evening.
Catch that butterfly, there, boy!
And know that in your future you will be begging
to look as hideous as a moth
banging your skull against the roof of my trunk
as I drive away with your body.
You beg me
give me reason!
and I try, but it's so difficult
I don't want to live!
and what am I supposed to do to help
when you don't want the help I give?
And we plead to gaze at stars over the Causeway
going seventy in the sunroof as off in Norco
the refineries let go a blaze jealous of the sun.
The moon doesn't shine as brightly as I remember.
Maybe I was too young to understand light pollution
or maybe it's the gnawing away of the ozone
as my skin tightens and ages over my teeth.
Do you understand how permanent
death
is?
Let me show you, this:
the vision you are trying to make me live through;
I will not let you force me into folding
your hands over your chest
while the embalming fluid grows stiff
beneath your cold hands.
I will not cry for you, if you bleed out your sorrows on a tile floor
or over a dark carpet
or crushed against the wall in your blue Mustang.
I will not cry for you,
but for the life you left behind,
the life you took, the life you stole
from me.
ME.
I have faced death with weakening knees;
I have knelt before the toilet whispering
please someone anyone
when it was too early in the morning for anyone to hear.
I have emptied the medicine cabinet of its promising contents
to find that nothing but
nothing
waited for me on the other side of ignorance.
Pain;
and it rains lightly on Tuesday evenings.
Somewhere behind the doorjamb is a flute
being played by a breeze
through the window you left open.
The note you will never write is tickled by the wind
and a thousand sunsets later--
I do not forget you.
Aug 23, 2012
Aug 23, 2012 at 2:22 AM UTC
I am a poor boy - A Capricorn
Perpetually saddened by my surroundings
Eight cats have sought me out for sanity's sake
But none of us seem able to escape on our own
All voices silenced for the sake of the rude,
the drunkard has-been, and so many varieties
of dream abandoned lives.
I fail to see any exit, reasoning, or plan.
These are the trials of a wisdom seeker
trapped in a pretty shell - conjuring Hell.
The west side of this city is falling apart and
my house is definitely no exception.
Any wealth left is gained from trading in
talent, hope, and aspiration for meager work
in refineries and plants that pollute
the bloodstream. Causing Decatur
to purposely decay into Lethe and
remove itself from memory and history - suicidal city.
I am just another generation in a long line
of poor romantics who close their eyes to the world.
I must have been born with the wrong last name
and composed of the wrong ingredients.
I may have insight, but no one dares or cares to hear it.
These people have given up on beauty and
have begun the worship of agriculture, but Artemis is no where to be seen.
My world has abandoned appreciation or art
because they have stripped it down to a profitable formula.
This may be a hopeless venture.
They have infected me with their grief.
Let the slumber of the soy city wash over me.
Aug 26, 2013
Aug 26, 2013 at 10:36 AM UTC
I live in Chemical Valley.
It sounds horrible:
Better you than me.
Perhaps.
I grew up here,
Where the southern sky burns
Bloodstone red,
Mixing colours with the evening suns.
The St. Clair carries Huron's ghostly horns
Past the flaring refineries,
To Detroit's waters.
We have stop signs
And other amenities
Small cities are proud to maintain.
I heard the housing market
Is sustained on the divorce rate,
And not the petro-chemical industry;
We're closing another high school next year;
And there was a gruesome woodlot-rape/murder
Last week on the Reserve.
Maniacs living out some sick web-site.
But the soccer pitches are full,
And our Mayor is the longest serving one in Canada.
Just around the corner
(everything is just around the corner),
Our flag flies over the bones of our second Prime Minister,
(he's from Edinburgh, Scotland);
I've walked a good stretch of the fifty miles
Of beach we have running north,
Past cottages, parks, camps, etc.
We've way too many pot-holes;
And for many years,
We were featured on the ten dollar bill.
But the new houses!
Who is buying them as we move eastward,
Away from the lake and river?
Newly minted single moms;
Rejected men.
We lived in one house,
Once,
One house.
We now occupy five.
Two of which
Are too far away
From Chemical Valley.
Apr 26, 2016
Apr 26, 2016 at 10:22 PM UTC
~
*It feels like the anesthetic is wearing off
This circus of machines
From coin-operated hostility
To wholesale apathy refineries
They tell us it's winter down in the subdermal
They tell us the foundation has grown weak
Dislocation is an incoming storm
Mirrors are distorted screens
Placeholders really
In a city without children
Even the statues weep
Snow upon the ground that was once blood
Now an empire without heirs
Even the trees hate us*
~
Apr 15, 2024
Apr 15, 2024 at 10:44 AM UTC
The world is a bleak,
devoid of pity,
desolate peaks,
and broken cities.
The landscape is torn,
refineries come to collect,
but hidden from the storm,
hides secret places that need remain hid.
The skyline is littered with ravaged beauty,
towering structures of glass and steel,
and betwixt titans lay many an oasis,
a bulwark of barbs,
a poignant seal.
Titan towers are trivial in comparison,
colossal peaks and monolithic expanses,
war torn deserts,
Eastern jungles echoing with the cries of forgotten children.
It is not nature that will destroy man,
man will destroy man,
and nature will reclaim its own,
this Earth we mistakenly call our home,
this life is but temporary.
Nov 15, 2013
Nov 15, 2013 at 6:35 PM UTC
Like a hypnotic beacon in darkness
guiding oily ships,
like this same rhythm,
I sing to myself
so much the same beat,
the song of
apathetic thoughts
of ignorant tranquility While
smokestack clouds
loosen tears of acid rain
that rust metal on boots
will this prevail?
Dried poisoned earth beneath my feet
Yawning gaps and cracks
frown their crooked gruesome frowns
upon the dust crumbling ground
Micro-macro things float in the air
in which we inhale
Farts from smokestack gases
carbon emissions from cars
forever excrete poisoned
cougher's body-coffin-clouds
of black and blue
Trees as if on bending knees smothered
by accidental fluoride
little and feathered bodies
plummet and land
on polluted blackened ground below
Smokestack refineries
make fishy lakes
into crummy toilet lakes Oily
ships clumsily spill oil contents upon
the sea to oily sea
Yet so crazy a world
so crazy a song
of easy tranquility
I sing sheepishly,
among TV commercial smokestack wolves
of sitcom ***** darkness,
who gleefully watch all the lambs go by
in **** TUBE" harmony
Sep 22, 2014
Sep 22, 2014 at 6:46 PM UTC
The town I live in is not glamorous.
It is for the oil refinery workers, the fuck-ups, and the hopeless.
You come here if you don't make it in the real world.
The cost of living is cheap and the value of life here is even cheaper.
The town smells of chemicals.
The refineries pump them out of the tall metal tubes that you see from the roof of your house.
Smoke fills your lungs and soon enough you get used to your cough.
You can't see the stars when you look up at night, the pollution took them away long ago.
The town is not safe.
Drugs flood the streets and the veins of the adolescents.
Families lock their doors at 5:30 P.M. and dare not come out until the sun rises.
The sound of screeching police sirens rock you to sleep.
But the town is beautiful.
On your nightly trips home you'll come over the bridge and you'll see the town in it's entirety.
You'll see how the smoke makes clouds above your head.
You'll see that the refineries light the city with their bulbs turned yellow from pollution.
Dec 1, 2013
Dec 1, 2013 at 9:55 PM UTC
Everything--
except you,
represented in the emptiness
of a nighttime landscape.
The suburbs glittering
and in the distance the refineries
I found one day with--
Why does the half-darkness
remind me of you?
If we never spent a night together,
never saw the lights suspended within
steel structures and burning fires,
why is it that I regret you now,
beneath the glare of buzzing light pollution
on the top floor of a garage?
Sep 6, 2010
Sep 6, 2010 at 6:25 PM UTC
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.
— Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie, 1944
A single atom, the god particle, matter or anti matter it is a micro exponential point of every cell within us. We, people are in fact a galactic micro system by design.
The infinite mind, the all seeing eye, the matrix of cross over systems our human anatomy is structured with valves, ventricles, veins, arteries, pumps, liken to refineries, distilleries, depositories, disposal centers, we are a micro-engineered inner-planetary system. Bio chemically producing everything our physical world needs to exist.
Intricately if not divinely flowing in mass with an even greater gargantuan outer limit system of heavens and universes.
We play our part in a much grander idealism then mere earthly beings. We are gods and goddesses. Heavenly tribal guardians of infinite space and time. Triggers like cogs in a finely balanced spiral of life and death on a symbiotic evolution. All without giving our bodies much thought it moves forwards onward to that new place in times continuum.
We devote ourselves to gain understanding. To learn new disciplines. To live long and prosper. To co exist with nature or have you our organic materialism. This paradox is the enigma of fantasy and spiritualism.
Feb 2, 2015
Feb 2, 2015 at 10:41 PM UTC
When tanks sit empty
Outside refineries,
Every drop of blood and oil
Spilled and spent
When the world is plunged
Into pre-digital chaos,
Knowledge trapped forever
In e-books and emails
When civilization collapses,
Falling on empty bellies
To the desperate cries
For help in the darkness
There will still be fools
Running down abandoned streets,
Struggling beneath the weight
Of large-screen flat panel TVs
Sep 2, 2014
Sep 2, 2014 at 4:19 AM UTC
Today I shed some tired eyes
Under leaves, leaves with corners
and sharp edges
Today I shed some weary legs
Upward over the mountain
down into the streams
The fragrant and decaying
The cloying and the stagnant
Odd how a man can look over miles of open country
& see nothing but subdivisions
Odd how a man can look at another
& **** for a belief
Odd how a man can smile into the empty bottle
& see no light through the glass
Bones buried under sand a time, bulldozed another foot deeper
Someones kid hidden behind a picture in a wallet
We hid somewhere, in those bushes in the field
Hid from ourselves
Listened to the creek and tried to decipher language
The tea your brewed sits cold in my hands
And the smiles you shared sit cold in my lips
We drank together on the beach, me and these guys
Selling cigarettes to put food on the table
While their sisters sold themselves
And all I could decipher through my drunkness
Was that I wasn't supposed to be there
Never was, never was
I sit with these ugly ballpoint words and think of you
I sit with these grasshopper thoughts and think of nothing
I sit with my feet in still water, my eyes on dead clouds
I think of the broken days
Blackout wine bottle days
Writing on the wall on where to ride trains to
Through New Mexico, to drift
Fall off the face of it for a while
Bootknife nights
We spoke through the cigarette smoke
How we didn't choke I'm not sure
Made me put them down
For good
It was odd, watching those dogs eat those camels
In the sand dunes
The bodies of a car accident lopsided and covered in someones
sheets
Drove for days, small cities, large refineries
An empty ocean that seemed to carry its sand into the horizon
Dune after dune
Somehow we bargained a pack of smokes for two
Saudi riyal
I drank to much and said to little, she always said
Over and gone, pictures on the fridge
Sleeping at 2, waking at 5
Eyes heavy and the first cigarette
A cup of coffee and the slow realization
That the sun remains to rise
Jan 15, 2015
Jan 15, 2015 at 5:03 AM UTC
Firm goose bumps healing me
Cementing my assembled continents after inner war
On ****** refineries, life is flowing
Pushing lifeless cells into ruination
Roots painting a large red carpet
For the train of my inner facets, so as it passes…
Green halos, milky bones, pearly teeth, gentle grass
Above ruins of the burnt ex persona
The glowing, tabula rasa, the heard, and the silent
The sun and his murky reflection rejoined
Riding my coffin as a horse, with a smirk in the backseat
Journeying through the doors of this joke
O lie, O life, you are joking, it is more than comical
It adumbrates every sort of epilogues you are selling
If not, you are just another joker’s spicy laugh
Dancing on ever-morphing layers
Halls and rooms of you; so narrow and spacious at once
Like woods seen from below, by a whirling dervish
Outer worlds adduce extraterrestrial cheer here
It is echoing, vertiginous ping pong for walls
It manufactures a shallow pink view
Covering this old skin, numerous and so colorful, but bruised
It lands with you on this devine shell
Without a greeting, not even an omen leads
Masked, you hypnotise me with a yellow smile
While you rob me with dark; reddish hands
In my mom’s womb, you try to abduct me
Without bowing for the creator and his living planets
Stop! Ruth, O clemency, this mother is a creature
Her signature is Earth, and she has diamonds, thine and mine
She is a quarry of senses; blue and twisted
She is a shy and deadly entity, just like us
Dec 15, 2017
Dec 15, 2017 at 11:08 PM UTC
you have a story to tell
and the world won't be the same
only richer;
for the refineries of your mind
are programmed to combine
thoughts, emotions and experiences
uniquely you,
into a narrative or rhyme
hitherto unseen,
a naturally wrapped gift of your creativity
destined to build a universal platform
that unites and uplifts humanity
one poem
at a time....
you have a story to tell
~ P
(7/12/2013)
Jul 20, 2013
Jul 20, 2013 at 7:28 PM UTC
Seas of swaying green reduced to gray city skylines (the triumphant results of our modern enlightenment)
Slicked oil waters pulse from the refineries, defeated heads held down against the cold winds walk the streets.
Malaise grips the populace,
our attention at every turn deftly averted to the trivial.
Welcome one, welcome all, to the Anthropocene.
Smoke stacks bellowing, pockets full of printed greenbacks thickening,
the overwhelming scents of greed and gluttony bleed into everything.
Throw your trash to the streets, stomp the last embers and smear ash on the wall,
Look around and you will see humanities closing scenes.
Welcome one, welcome all, to the Anthropocene.
It seems in the end truth has left us,
hope has evacuated,
it’s speakers replaced with puppets
That dance and masquerade on taught strings.
Come in my friends, take your seats in the audience,
The show has already begun!
The lights are dimming and the pieces well set,
Welcome one, welcoming all, to the Anthropocene.
Continents ablaze, reduced to decayed black.
The streets of your home flooded,
Mother Nature holding on by a trembling thread,
And in all of our brightest intellect,
We do not reknit the thread.
Instead of reversing our own mistakes, instead of adjusting our sails to the changing winds,
we hold the scissors to that trembling string and begin to cut with a smile.
Manicured life,
Monocultured lawns perfectly maintained through the drought, appearances kept up through the drowning monsoon winds.
Welcome, my dearest friends, to the end of our days, whether you agree to them or not,
Welcome to the first conscious mass extinction, brought to you by the height of human innovation
Welcome, my brothers and sisters, to the Anthropocene.
Mar 18, 2020
Mar 18, 2020 at 11:44 PM UTC
Everything is poetry and poetry is everything.
I~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~l
Everything is poetry and poetry is everything.
Variegated and multicoloured rich rhyming
Every line a rich tapestry of finest work.
Rhyming refulgent words brilliantly shining
Y-chromosomes with male characteristics
The male poems less feminine than the female
How do you tell the gender of a rampant poem
In everything is poetry and poetry is everything
Naughty poems are food and drink to youths
God fearing Catholic Poems are ubiquitous
In praise of God these poems are school fed.
Sunday schools singing their hearts in praise.
Prayers set to the music of the mighty *****
Oh the Victorian poets were the masters of it.
Everything is poetry and poetry is everything .
The modern poets have lost the art of praise
Redemptions are hard achieved in gods name
Yet more poetry written on a toilet wall.
As six mumf ago they cuddent even spel poet
Now by Jove they are one. Hallelujah.
Desuetude books of self published remainders
Poetry being all things n all things being poetry
Osmosis of a dilution of simple talent lost.
Epistemological studies of poetic knowledge
Tied up in blue ribbons in chronological order
Rarely seeing the light of day on a dusty shelf
Years on a collection of dead poets published
In everything is poetry and poetry is everything
Sagas of eponymous hero’s before a nation
Escalading castle walls to rescue fair maidens
Vexatious poetry going nowhere but hanging
Every stanza a cliff-hanging story of old.
Refineries built to recycle old poems for new
You know everything is poetry as I have stated
There is not so much on web-sites ever seen
Hundreds of poems viewed n little critique
It gets brushed over with a simple thumbs up
Now next time you wonder ...Can I inspire. ?
Gainsay with gusto the death of the verse.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Written by Philip.
November 16th 2018.
Nov 16, 2018
Nov 16, 2018 at 7:59 AM UTC