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Mike Taylor Oct 2013
Emotionless, flowing through a crowd of faceless souls
A net of interactions that I am no longer a part of
Each second I feel less and less, until I'm an empty vessel
On the edge, brain going toe to toe with the devil

Rotting amygdala in the cranium, insanity
Not a single shred of dignity or humanity
Running off no sleep, tobacco and black coffee
No spirit left, except the pack in my back pocket

I want nothing, but need everything
all decisions past made to lead to serenity
Going with the flow has left me alone with no one
Why am I still here, where the hell am I going

Long nights, long days, pretending I'm something I'm not
Self deprecation and loathing patterns, indigenous thoughts
Result is cold and heartless, riskless life to avoid the loss
No solution horizon, mentally falling apart

Fed up, hallucinations gone and messed my head up
Yesterday is forgotten but tomorrow already dreaded
Depression has blossomed, guilt trips and sunken ships
Internal warfare, life is chaos amongst the midst
Julian Jan 2016
Gruesome blister on a denatured mind
Chimes rumble the anchored soul foggy with Elysian wine
Flippant ruse ignites a battered fuse rusty with malevolent impotence
Blustery portents beyond expired extent throngs the chapels and pickets along the electrified fence
That separates the grave from the gravity of a physics enslaved
A physics where disillusioned mathematics and decay are as sure as taxes and the last earthen day
Nescient of giant leaps our stepwise ascension is helical and cheap
It snails along with unctuous repetition of pendulous rhythm and sails biologically with evolved and animated meat
The advent of acid and bass is a keepsake for the epicurean chase
Of a fulgurant galvanization of phases that remain unfazed
Trends punctuate vain diversions and lionized conversions both raise and raze
The velocity of money ensures a melliferous alchemy of a well-oiled plutocracy buffered by praise and pay
Ivory-tower elegance is immune to demotic ignorance
When the shot-callers devise the rules to the game with impenetrable clandestine eloquence
Hebetude and lassitude sink abundant platitude and offer trite prescriptions for useless attitudes
But the vogue of disembogued vanity entraps individualism and trains martial raillery
Trends tantalized by preening epigamic tens makes the roosters become owls that neglect nest egg hens
Fatuous ambush of the Kardashian putsch is as clockwork as Big Ben
Murky lies appear in flimsy disguise suitable for mice “say cheese” demise
Privacy cries and answers only lurk accessibly when spurred by wise “why’s” never asked when garish time flies
Tweets and beats make us obese with threadbare wheat cultivated by nescient bleats
Beatific ambition obscured by the wail of sheepish sheep
Outnumbered by obtuse angels and a cute horde of meretricious dissolution that ever wrangles
The shelter turns to rubble and the cloister turns to bustle: useful convolution thus entangles
Agorophilia defiles a voiceless lechery on speed dial
Disembodied violence sprints a green mile bankrolled by the peaceful throngs slowed through the paid but dilatory turnstile
Thus we loiter in queue as the slew of vibrant militarized celerity taxes our pews
Pews which enthuse jingoism eager to apportion sentient deaths through religious abuse
We can surf beams of light chasing verisimilitudes of diversion bright
Of unwagered immersion gambling a pittance for vicarious thrills and riskless fright
To discover the vestige of war, a useless artifact of sore egos we now deplore
An enormity of unmoored evil percolating apace of the paradoxical rush hour from shore to shore
But more decisively than an implacable brush fire on pristine ground abetted by sleek star-crossed winds that soar
Irenic ignorance placates, because a vagrant vacant mind is more a felicity than a bellicose grimy crease
Because excess corrodes squinty detests, and partial enslavement is both a rest and arrest to earth’s untenanted lease
Decries the devolution of pop culture that transmogrifies people into sheep and then makes them sheepish over their peccadillos. It also bashes war as a callous mechanism of useless death. It concludes by asserting the paradox that the throngs in real life slow our movement but we can move at light speed through technological implements. It concludes that useful idiots are irenic if also disheartening. In the earlier sections it laments that materialistic monism is taking over because science has made us deterministic and thus blind to the numinous beyond that staggers beyond our comprehension. It addresses how we are silently monopolized by artful esoteric chess masters immune to trifling quibbles, and how distracted society has become with respect to digital plasticity and consumerist disfiguration spurred on by fatuous and meretricious values. It further satirizes the effigy of modern culture deliberately disfigured with grandiloquence to deploy resourceful linguistic invention. I hope you enjoy this piece!

Here is a response I posted on another poetry site with respect to this poem. It explains the emblems, themes, philosophical agenda and metaphors of this poem so that more people can appreciate the level of meticulous care I preen with my craft
“I understand the charge of hyperbole, that was unintentional. It is an epiphenomenon of protean grandiloquence ( multi-pronged connotations suffering entropy through translation) crafted to emblazon lurid imagery and to conceal arcane mystery with an emphasis on cadence. When you use big words it is inevitable that some words chosen connote more strongly than you originally hoped for when writing it initially. Also, it was not designed to be solely a scathing harangue bemoaning the decadence and anomie endemic to this zeitgeist. You should read the final four or five lines (after I lambasted how war makes human life unnecessarily disposable for expedient aims). In those lines I marvel at miracle of technology wizardry and insinuate that in modern times we can wager much less to gain the same thrills we would have risked life and limb for before. Instead of a bottlenecked turnstile of industry that admits one person at a time like when entering an amusement park (the sluggish pace of premodern industry) to fund the clunky and internecine annihilation operated through rapid-fire death ( “Disembodied violence sprinting ‘the green mile’ A.K.A. a prisoner’s last walk before execution). The pace of society is a central theme of the poem throughout. The gravity of a physics enslaved implies the dilatory and dismal apprehension of a universe moving at an infinitesimally slow rate. A helical and cheap evolution mediated by animal meat snails along throughout history only to precipitate the exponential acceleration of human progress witnessed more recently after the advent of language. The rate of speed (the velocity of money line) is the lifeblood of all culture and all entertainment but it has become such a blur that it obscures the inveterate values of a leisurely stroll rather than a hedonistic galloping gallivant. Ironically, the plutocracy depends on gradate—(thus slow enough to lull people into the “say cheese” mousetrap (privacy eradication)—cultural devolution (clockwork like Big Ben to me evokes the imagery of a slowly ticking clock, a fixture and emblem of the proctor of the old world domineering over newfangled world prospects). Pop culture centered in the Anglophonic world depends on a rapid velocity of vagary blustery with money inuring people to fast-paced changes that abide by slow-moving subterfuge( the Kardashian putsch). The word ambush in that sentence implies that the encroachment of hegemons depends on a furtive approach solidified by an alacritous leap at the heartstrings of mankind in a moment of brinkmanship. The mousetrap is the slow roll but steady bet “say cheese demise”. The irony is that the only way this plan could work is because “wise why’s are never asked when garish time flies. This bewilderingly rapid pace is also the mechanism whereby sheltered obtuse angels are desensitized by breakneck cultural celerity that disabuses their naivety thus leading to useful convolution (paradigm shift). But there is also a lament that “meretricious wranglers” could lead to unmoored decadence bewildered by a smug agnostic relativism tethered to nothing more than the culmination of momentary fads reverberating in a plangent delay chamber like a finely crafted sound effect in a musical production program. The poem ends optimistically by concluding war is a vestige and concedes that partial enslavement (PC culture) is irenic precisely because it shepherds pedestrian considerations predictably in order to secure a stalemate. The Earth’s Untenanted Lease is thus arrested by counterbalanced nuclear specters. This leads to a rest and also an arrest of territorial claims. There is so much deliberate and emblematic imagery deployed here, drenched with subconscious enrichment that is unintended. A perfunctory interpretation of this piece misses so many astute cultural commentaries. The poem ends on a relatively positive note. The final several lines announce war as a vestige but concede that peace is built upon a latticework of acquiescent sheep indoctrinated to despise the past rather than learn from it (this goes slightly beyond what is directly stated). This poem in essence is about the ironic dynamics of history at the intersection of our modern cultural identity.
Julian Mar 2019
Flippant polymaths exude the frippery of travail for lapsed inordinate surgical gains in temporal but temporary acclaim that owes its provenance to the gullarge accentuated by the guttural tempests of silent windfalls that wrestle with sharks and snarky cagamosis with pilfered fame without rulers for rules that own the profligacy of a cineaste game

We cannot surpass our talents with ease when the treecheese of inevitable distance between equipoise and insanity is a tantamount inanity of prolixity for the sake of freedom rather than servitude to the slow meandered steps of trudged verbigeration that needs to be exorcised from the seat of authority for the plodding inconvenience of time earned that shakes the listless yearning people who lie and spurn

Demagogues are trifles because they are anoegenetic and care not for the abligurition that consumes the energy of a dismal life lived on fringes rather than reaped with grimaces for binges that continue to absorb the painful pangs of twinges that hedonists are of interest

We cannot exorcise the demons that give stygian weight to exchequers beyond the gamut of money but rather the currency of velocity of thought that owes its weight to weightlessness of spaces between the spacious and the limited tract of isolative territory that many mendicants looking for sustenance travail in insolence and in perjury of their solemn duties for self-serious honesty they lack a vista to see their crimes as more than just a pettifoggery of disputatious wranglers that wrench and then contemn the objects of their moral scruples to contend with nothing but the vacant expanse of a limitless injury for a momentary slip of cultivation and countenance

Frippery is hard to cobble with lapidary wit because succinct grievances are fallow ground for the permanence of atrocity and the temperance of felicity to conform to the desiccated pathways of limpid but livid excoriations of willful ingenuity met with aleatory rambles that sprawl incalescence with words as a dying occupation that is resurrected from the abeyance of its pragmatic utility to distinguish class from crust.

The triadic fatuousness of snarky sharks recruiting the gullarge of paranoiacs to deputized alacrity lead many strident vocations astray as they pilfer the nullibiety of spectral ignorance and defy the gravitas of the primiparas of a swollen technocracy, an outrage that scarecrows with prevenance have adumbrated against with strident accelerations of sublime velocity

So we swim in perilous straits against the demiurge of inclemency in fated rittles for the turpitude of wraiths and engineer every aborning day a new foofaraw of unalloyed atrocity
Now more than never should be deployed to ensure that the castigation of scoundrels and guttersnipes that exert a rip tide to those stranded on the shores of littoral desiccation might find the pristine beachgoing public an amenable treat proffered by exorcised sheepishness in reiterative bleats that quarkswarm only the antinomy of sentient masteries by shoveled civilizations proctor to horological insistence in design

So we designated an abeyance of heydays to create a rippled nostalgia that creeps in the winter storms that singe even glabrous ignorance with the twinges in absentia of the regal crows that circle the sun as the sustenance of the alighted moon as we reach for the heaved Richter teeming with ablution for venial commination of prolix croons that exert a Palo Alto rhyme

Phenomenological fields distal to the cephalocaudal origination of limber and the ironic counterpoint to that strife in excess rather than dearth of the henchmen behind the exchequer showcase that fluid thoughts surpass the limits of the dentistry of cosmetic cosmology simultaneously a scientific boon but a coarse albatross

We are criminals in a world stranded by ****** apostasy because of the sincerity of minstrels meets plodding human ignorance as exemplars rather than the apotheosis of divine excoriation of wastrels and flattybouches who webdoodle their way into the extinction line in some computer file swiped from eccedentesiasts who often in uncouth barbarity forgetfully abide without the temperance of floss

So what are we to make of magisterial wits of wiseacres who pilot tenable objectives like Indiana Jones flexing his comical whip when the gunfire of cacophony inundates our ears with a lisp of cockalorum imposture rich in chewing tobacco and its ungainly gripes and tenacious grip

Should we seek salvation from the treecheese of arboreous terrain amenable to the newfangled windfall of agricultural whims that dare now with caprice but not quixotic disdain to reconfigure the parsimonious levered engagement of melliferous fungible transaction between sabbaticals and chief financiers dubbing the vociferous limn of the primeval fulgurant incandescent ethereal quips?

We strive for palaces issued with dimes, dozens and scores of retinues that retain the patina of sophistry as the gullarge makes the vangermytes cozy in their defensively mechanized citadel buffered against the unheralded malversations of mammon intersecting with primordial chemistry that give the philanderer a guise of philanthropy despite professed gainsay that perjures because hucksters are winsome with fiduciary risk

So we calumniate with lapsed puns and Potter’s Spells as we dredge the indemnity of bustling heydays that extend beyond the bailiwick stated because of the prolonged trace of nostalgia that frazzles our voluntary expeditions with misanthropy as each libertine instinct becomes subject to stop and frisk

How to balk at such a garrulous repartee as proffered by swanky intransigence that shakes it off in a quaky town that hates the Swift refrain that endangers the fatalism of recuperated foresight borrowed from the armamentarium of corrupted killjoys who swim in a dalliance with the itchy myths that drift from powerlessness to voguish debauchery of insouciant internecine fringes frayed by the tomes that decry Stygian drift

Shiftless and rooted in rintinole absolved by plackiques that enchant the voyeurism of repined squalor of industrious frippery deracinated from the aureate complicity of largesse calibrated to mobilize the skittish mercurial yuppies to a dance with divestiture, taxes and an earthen death, we sprint the evergreen mile toward the scrupulous invention of enthusiastic euphemisms arbitrated by the procrustean silt of the leaky faucet of enigmatic timelessness etched by chiselers to beat “Us and Them” and warn the vanguard of the front rank about the thespian rift

Exhaustive rescue squads prepared for the dearth of monetary heft in times of perilous drought denigrate the authors of famine to the indulgent parents of inordinate sabotage of narrative for riskless arbitrage that is the outrage of sciamachies between platonic indifference and the tantrums of the feckless in the dangerous hearth of the cavernous wilderness of limitless imaginations that stagger so far beyond orbit they become satellites to vagrancy and whittled paragons too distant to dissolve in the ethereal chemistry of incalescent uproar sadly flanged by the Dopplers of ephemeral fate

Squandered by the desuetude of a snarky intervention I issue invective at the proctors of deafferented limbs for barbarous swine meeting expediency in demise, bemoaning the placid distaste of rectified cries that issue candles for each acrimony beyond the permutation of the staid inflexible limit of 88’

Bashfully we careen through argosies of curiosity to fossick the stalactites of timeworn intuition and reckon with their converse ironies that drip faucets of mildew that remain hidden unless poked by plucky flashlights to inspect the paragon of erosive filigrees of a bewildering paradox of polarized design that one meets the ceiling at inception and the cousin strives to clamber empty space to know with faint certainty the bulldozed irony of superordinate coexistence

Now we return to the majesty of a spurned wiseacre that evades the snappy parlance of a wrenched friction between the physical and the metaphysical elements that constitute a commensurate reality so supernal that its ostentation creates lifetimes of reiterative growth that spawns crimson red and bloviated blues to find a fulcrum of balance between the malversation on one hand of criminal sinister machinations and on the other hand the execrable self-righteous ignorance of a hidden vehicles of dexterity that are subsumed by a subtlety of legislative graft that owes its forbearance to the sanctimony of perseveration without the laurels of persistence

Now we wed the concepts between the ambidexterity of a monolithic titan who wanes rather than waxes himself because his glabrous head already exposed requires nothing new because the empire that struck back is denuded by the thorny imbroglio of a sunken Rose

Timmynoggies are perfect for haberdasheries of saccharine and glib excellence as measured by the ****** cacophony of unmerited applause that strains the resourcefulness of the silent mastery of magistrates in mellifluous alcoves surrounded by the soundproofed rigors of an execrable dereliction wilt into the imaginations of the few that watch movies with errantry rather than pleasantries of gaudy nonsense enchanted by a striptease of the wanton zeitgeist that some balk at but everyone knows

Time earns the spangled banners of sloganeering because of the fastidious creations of pole folders that maneuver between quips borrowed from antique movies and swindled affectations of yearning of many of all fears inevitable with the malevolent passage of the technocracy from cheers to vehement inveighed jeers

We should fear the watershed because it necessitates the evaporation of winsome ambition and implores the subservience of a guiltless fascination with abominable regress concomitant to the acceleration of money preceding a whipsawed downfall ensured by the funereal spates of requiems to oneironauts who plunged to their deaths on headlong flickering whims past the craggy landscape of lunar concordance and through the abeyance of qualms to flabbergasted self-importance in the eradication of provident fears

Memorials exist encoded in the temporal twinges of agony that straddle the cardiovascular throbs of impermanence that sweat with each simple beat to blather about the repetitious nature of a livid nature scrambled in exodus of the emigration of senseless blather to the subroutines of regimented sleepless paragons of travail in every pedestrian feat accelerated with each passing foot traversed by vigilant and eager feet

Tempests crowd the cluttered hamartithia of dredged incompetence leading to the foreclosure that precedes the simple derelictions that amount to grievous uncertainties that squawk in the plumage of the frippery decay of an autumnal fall from gracile riches landlocked without room to sprawl rigged against every track that is a surefire gleeful keepsake to meet, greet and serenade the claques adorned with the monikers of the Greeks

Trembling beneath the weight of mellifluous sauntering dingy designs that exude the anguish of our provident but incidental remonstration against the plodding indifference of the artistic clerisy we sputter against intransigent annulments of the emotive human engine calibrated with creaky pistons that rumble with furor of abrasive protest in timely haphazard elemental designs for vanguard ears

Tridents shed the fossicked leaves that are divisible by two but not inevitably glue that solders the identities of people congregated around a situation of gleeful sprees rather than wistful regress into a temerity without regret that gets dangled in the purview of the spiteful wings of armies that drawl when they sing vapid songs for vaped bongs but not the soberly cheers because of the deafening din of conformity oblivious of the honorific crescendos that still peak after so many restless years

Confederates line the avenues of bustling caverns of cumulative human disdain so willfully flouted by the wrenched corrosive frictions of vibrant deformation of the cultural narrative that encapsulates the collective bubbles chewed and jettisoned like bandied candy and then defamed without justice because  hurricanes churn up the reclusive emergence of protective vanity chased down as a sunken cost for a siphoned glory of tribal pride despite the strictures of logic

Creeping with insistence is a subaudition of governing gravel that entombs many steadfast lies that embodied people living delusory lives under a paradigm that has been subverted by the feats of science into a morass of irrelevance and the chances are many of those so deluded still breathe the air now more polluted but balk at the memories of the fallen passengers on the convalescent train that accelerates sunblind but respectfully toward a systematic engrossment of swollen intellects whimpering about the tautologic

We finance our prescient rodomontade with rodeos equipped with zany clowns who spurn the tridents of Poseidon because of the iridescent gloss of sheepish and flippant zealots who churn against the wrestling match of televised irony with accentuated eccedentesiastic disdain amended by a tolerable diversion of ennobled gallantry zip-zagging among the many valid quodlibets and missing the mark entirely on purpose to vacate the possible raillery of those who balk at time’s chosen serpentine tracks because of limited pedagogical tracts

So lets solder a forceful brunt against the senseless regalia of modern omphalos and return to the plenipotentiary fields of resourceful human inquiry into the chagrins outmoded by convenience but amplified in vociferation by the prosthetic extension of a grangull humanity outfoxing itself into a zugzwang inevitable in the future with collateral losses because of senseless invidiousness orchestrated by the immiscible dermatology of divisive facts often about race and ineluctable tax

We conclude with the optimism that refineries become gentrified by the superlunary squadrons who bask in beatific beams of anonymity and that the pollution preceding our evolution is just adventitious rather than central to the amelioration of wavy screens ennobling so many upstarts to teach themselves the majesty of lucid dreams and to capitalize on ludic ideals divorced from the urchins of radical idealisms that ironically poach rarefied air with smug pollution of narrative scares

Without trepidation we can muster the largesse of civility to create a progeny that has a recursive progeny of heirs that defiantly imagine a world bereft of specters of the soporific imagination enforced by the lapidation of insight from termagants who stride with ursine acrimony naked bare and envision a global meliorism that is careful, picaresque, pragmatic and filled with meritocratic care

With those ornaments of an aureate measure in mind


We leap beyond the enumerated infinity in time's proper design
Nat Lipstadt Feb 2014
Please read the notes first.


Tally time, conclusion forming,
"Some day," grown nearer.
Tree's longest branch,
Coming to reach, reaching to come.
Soon to beat and plead upon
Cottage window and door.
Rooted whisperer, jealous reminder,
Revered warning, timely sounding,
Your time of *Reckless Choice
arriving

Destination's unnamed coordinates, uncoordinated,
Journey from wherefrom to wherever, unrecorded,
Observed by silenced overlording sky,
Testimony of the seeing voiceless clouds,
All nought and to no avail, destination head-shaking,
These white witnesses,
Muted, deaf, dumbfounded,
Knowing, yet  incapable of telling

State of sated steady staid,
Sundered by sharp silent sounds,
Reckless surpasses Riskless,
Life is a recitation, an enunciation

When my less to say is soon none,
My Reckless Choice, now chosen,
Unforced but enforced,
I shall be gone
The Sound of Trees
BY ROBERT FROST

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.
Tsammy-D Jan 2013
I can only afford glances
Swift and riskless
You can't see me
And you can't know

Each detail of you
Means more to me
Than you will ever understand
But I won't tell you

Am I a coward, for
Knowing my limits
Knowing we would never work
Knowing you'll never love me

I try to turn away
But I can't
You're too close
You're too far away

With a turn of your head
You catch me
I'm frozen as you smile
A confused smile

Do you think me psychopathic
Your smile is dramatic
And slightly empathetic
Do you already know

I'll promise myself to keep away
But you're magnetic
If only you loved me
If only you loved me
Stephen Peters Jul 2016
All roads given, and I took the shortest.
With each step lessened, one more second
Could be granted to my resting joy:
A contempt existence riskless to the pushing wind.

Only, when looking behind from the alley vantage,
Points can be seen where decisions deemed
Correct at the crossings, a straightforward
Mind decides to never turn.

This is a consequence only in hindsight is learned.
I've had much time to observe this as my road,
The shortest road, has been nearing it's end.
And as I lay myself upon the frigid brick,

I can no longer feel the wind.

— The End —