Papercut Composition March 30, 2012

Enduring tangibles with no complaint,

Tolerating cuts, bruises, smacks upside the head.

Even inflicting scars of your own

For patent visibility.

You rate them a 1 out of 10,

Rate them a smiley face.

“See how I tolerate sticks and stones?”

 

But smiley face doesn’t rate

When you’re hit by stupid people shit.

You practically beg to be dragged into their shit holes,

You consciously leave your safe space and head over to the pity party,

You refuse to turn that frown upside down.

 

You’re the living martyr,

The unscathed freedom fighter,

The self-celebrated veteran of future wars.

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Ode to self deception March 28, 2012

Did you know about the take and give

The give and take,

The forget and forgive,

The live and let live?

Cause I’m living and you’re letting die.

 

Now I’m trying so hard to work it

And working so hard to try

To find the hole you intentionally tripped into

While I was running heedless ahead

Flying our thousand-colored kite.

 

And I refuse to seek attention

So now I’m attention seeking

But your attention is time limited,

Space limited

Goal limited

To a goal that wasn’t me

In a time of confusion and

A space reserved for solitude.

For interrelational reservation.

 

Too bad so sad that

I don’t endure iron clad oblivious.

Self deception has pickable locks and

I have hidden picks in my pockets;

I have a new question.

Why did I think I was a goal of yours?

Your ego is your goal

And I can’t judge that.

But if carniverous vampire bats are altruistic enough

To vomit up warm blood for the unlucky hunters,

Can’t you vomit up a little empathy

For someone who needs a few minutes of help?

Bitter Reminiscence March 26, 2012

Where are your roots

When you’re too tired to till the earth that sustained your family for five generations.

 

When your back is too bent to drop the seeds of hope

Into the fecund, black soil

And pat them down.

 

When you’re too arthritic to push a wheelbarrow of manure

Across the long, low fields.

 

When hauling a sack of fresh potatoes or squashes

Puts the strain of age on your lost muscles.

 

When your mind is too befuddled to appreciate the joy

Of anticipation in the labor.

 

When venturing outside is wrought with the risks of broken bones and pneumonia

And is no longer a spring into life.

 

When your bite is too weak

To chomp into fresh cucumbers and ripe green beans

And you have to eat peaches in syrup from a tin can.

 

When the annual nostalgia to know the colors of the zinnias and marigolds

Is overcome by fear of fractured hips.

 

And you no longer reminisce about the year of the thousand tomatoes

Or the prize winning pumpkin because

 

Nostalgia will stab your soul

Before your garden breaks a bone.

Avolition March 22, 2012

My poster children,
Holding out tracked up arms
For cool, smooth injections.
Psychotropic solutions for nerves and
Cool, smooth relief for demonic brain rioting.

But do you feel cool, smooth relief or
Do you feel absence?
Sense of smell, feel, animation
Substituted for
Ephemeral demon-numbing fluids.

We like to say that foreign body fluids
Hydrate your scorching minds.
We like to say they don’t
Flood you with thick mud that sucks you down,
Inject you with bacterial scum that poisons your innards,
Force feed you bloated, rotting animal carcasses that make you vomit or
Leave you naked to the onslaught of the endless trash of hurricane ravished homes of endless bodies with tracked up arms and minds.

But you’re soaked down by the wave of septic sewage,
Your affect more blunted,
Your speech sluggish,
Movement slowed.
Involuntary tremors and
Automatic lip licks.

My poster children,
With earthless eyes
Robotic joints,
Cataleptic points
Of view that you never voice
From inside your stupor.

My poster children,
Holding out tracked up arms.
Where is your will to live?

an elemental grounding March 14, 2012

Low ambient interference,

Tooth throb eclipsed by metered mental ache,

Sweating stupor,

Sluggish dream.

I revert to the elemental longing

And call out my grandma from the dead.

She is the constant hum

behind my left ear.

Not my conscience;

those were invented by frustrated mothers and fathers.

She is an at will hallucination of balance,

Originating and existing like earthworms

That spend entire generations

Underground

With their minerals and roots

Without the yellow sun

to tempt undeveloped imagination

and inflict seasonal affectation.

 

She speaks grounded, from the ground

Consciousness stable in her earth without quakes,

Directing me to remember her last words to me.

And I recall her sweating and frail

Twisted in hospital bed sheets

Desperate to remind me

To water the earth that holds us.

 

And now her voice is as forceful as her character

Like the gods we knew.

And I’m confused by

The unemoted sympathy.

“Am I still your granddaughter?

I know I put on layers of facades since you died but

It’s still me.

No one else but me and you can help me right now.

And right now, my self hypocrisy is burning through me

Like caustic acid.

And I keep getting knocked over

When I try to run.

And I keep getting up and my mouth keeps forcing cracking smiles

When my own body tells me to stay down

And listen to the ground.”

 

And my grandma answered,

“Your pain is beside the point;

Your pretentions are irrelevant;

Your shift change amusing but insignificant.

It’s of little consequence what you or your species stands for.

Your representations are presumptious and your whimsies, capricious.

You ignorantly mistake the rare come-by disillusionment for wives’ tales.

Your fears are dragonflies twirling toward death by bewilderment.

But don’t pretend to me that you don’t know what you are

And why you called me out.

 

In this inverted dimension,

You are me

And we are both composed of ancient elemental stardust.

Never let anyone convince you that you are insignificant;

You are the infinite universe and all that is in it.”

a disenchanting day March 8, 2012

Just about to burn toast smell

Wafting in with green tornado cloud

Inkling of junebugs and leaves

Taking hold in your windy hair

 

Swerve your bike to avoid hitting

Balding, paunchy, cigar dragging man

Zig zagging red and yellow Mexican poncho draped

Over left leg limp

 

Junebug hair, wheeling half cycle bike,

Gum stuck on shoe, brain stuck on

Evasion of intellectual death by

Disdained orgy of self sacrifice.

 

Don’t swerve again, but:

Poncho-man is raising one shaggy eyebrow toward

Snearing, purple Roark monolith

Where you might still stay

Encumberanced by devotion to yourself;

Buoyed by disentitlement from society;

Afflicted by irresponsible apprehension

Towards all and none.

 

No right to minute of your life

Or energy

achievement

existence.

But you already swerved your bike

And pulled some bugs out of your hair;

willfully redirected egosim

Betrays you to you.

Uprooting presumption March 7, 2012

My walk slowed to intention’s pace

At the international airport.

But it was too late to refund the tickets

To the land of drug trafficking and street violence,

Police inaction except in corruption,

And contempt for the relics and progeny of European invasion.

But I’d never felt such unaffected acceptance

Or happened upon such passion to learn and predilection to teach.

 

I almost turned around at the metal detector

When I saw the hard-faced guard.

Billy club in one hand

And a sneer in what could have been a pretty voice.

And when I saw you behind glass handcuffed to your shame,

I knew that I’d never seen such

Patent remorse,

Refutation of pretension,

And will to live.

 

I was intimidated

By a bad rumored neighborhood.

Eyes from the windows and around the block

Glared into my white face.

And projected suspicion and mistrust

Onto newcomers.

But I’d never had so many people

Watching my back.

And I’d never seen

so many people hugging.

 

I was so nervous

Walking into that nursing home

Of craggy grins, drooling mouths, and drooping eyes.

Wafer bodies and wrinkling hair

Antiseptic corridors with hard green carpet and

Remiss hope,

Lost minds,

Deferment of death.

But I’d never heard so many people

Speak the stories of life with such vibrance

Or foresee the future with such promise.