A Selection of Five Poems

Bumper Sticker The cyclical procession of repetitions Of the empty civic forms, rituals Rallying behind a gaudily colorfully emblazoned, yet interchangeably replaceable name Cursing with caustic opinion at or behind Some orchestrated, depthlessly incoherent Cause, year after year Yet hoi polloi do not weary of it Enchanted, endlessly as they are By surface novelty The liberty of their persons withering In an unnoticed grimy corner Her dress bedraggled, her figure malnourished While the silent flames of total control Lick away the timbers and melt the beams Sheltering this dilapidated display 3/19/2020 I don’t have any meticulous metaphors or colorful collections of words Compared with my compatriots, I am either not so unique or less skilled But I see what only one or two of them see and I feel more than what they feel and these feelings, these registers of sensation I can report. As Corona hysteria indeed has reached the crown no longer merely a physical contagion but one passed through the air waves, broadcasted pouring brain liquefying light into our eyes, our ears, ourselves And I think how pitilessly our present madness must be viewed for we care not, we do not, except through fear Through ignorance, through submission and abandonment of our will I lay languishing under the weight of these horrid inclinations, fighting a vain and silent war with powers unknown or unnamable, both within and without For brief periods, I win small victories and I aim to keep them in a line, one after the other but soon I am on my back again, tethered by the sickly corded vines of our present ways of living in empty pleasures and among vapid minds and even more insipid, monotonous, repetitive tasks and so-called duties A false name for the latter because even the best among us forget what the true and mystical duties of man are Our minds lay astrewn as though on cracked baked earth with not even the memory of rain to nourish them So as the soft kill of globalist hyper-sexuality hyper-individualism, atomization, hyper-fear becomes our integument I will force myself awake, once more and once more, each time my eyes are blinded, and I will shift myself even the breadth of a hair away from this deadly numbing life though this movement leads not to heaven, and likely instead only to silent death There is no hope in this course but there is redemption that in this solitary, quiet, unnoticed fight a drop of sweat intermingled with blood might spill forth and be transmuted into the freshest, purest water falling once unseen under the foot of another adding to the geyser of the deluge that is sure to come even where none are there to be swept away by its flood waters. Steam I feel like a creaking bellows full of steam, a locomotive boiler always releasing steam, no matter the movement. Where one part is stopped up or in motion, another leaks steam, oozes energy, spills life. How can such a self be controlled thoroughly? It is better to follow the way. Less than zero I am addicted to the Corruption But I disdain it I am a part of the matrix Yet I wish to abolish it I criticize others I criticize myself Nothing changes Unfinished “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally becoming bewildered as to which may be true” –Nathanial Hawthorne Discussing plots where the outcomes are contrived Viewing events that have been planned and constructed So much easier, so much more comfortable Like water warmed to the temperature of the body No thoughts required They are supplied, in a steady buffeting current Erasing the receptacle The Viewer does not react The reactions are supplied in the same way The voluminous word clouds That fill the nightly dwelling rooms Swathe over the lack The shells, the missing minds While lubricating this routine Greasing the skids For the life lived through cold inertia To continue Uninterrupted Completely steered By electronic fictions Directed by a cacophonous accretion Of digitally disembodied voices Projected shafts of light And clicks, and likes, and snaps, and taps Mechanically moving animatronic repetitions Of contentless interactions Among appearances of substance less than apparitions. These are the one’s Elliot foretold And their setting is akin to them Enveloping them with smiling Stuffed figurines Television screens Glistening adverts Denizen interactions The inanimateness of such an assemblage Overwhelms with woe. Surmounting even the very sensing of itself Wrenching, the observer of this record Driving, dragging, crying the typesetting Setting forth the method For indeed this is how Hollowmen Are made, made over, again, anew The unending repetition The musicless, unvital, disjointed dance That strings together less than ghosts What once were living, loving, striving, fighting hosts That once rubbed one another, and struck one another Now, languishing, only indolently languishing In the cool sterile pool of light Their irreplaceable life replace with nothing Not air nor straw nor illusion Too lifeless for even the latter, instead Only emptiness, deserted, alone, they cannot feel their tears.