Give me a nice Cup
of Starfucks:
Quickly procured
and scantily done---
I don't care about all
The Plastic
on my tongue,
So long as Their
army of Robots
churn out The Dope
from Morning
to Dawn.
So pour me
that neat Cup
of Cheap Grace,
A dozen or so ounces
A day,
Easy and laced,
Until All of Our
Bodies Shut Down.
These days
Are of endless novelty,
Absurdly modern:
High profits for the ones
Who trick passion with
Morsels of jittery confections—
Fast melting, quickly expiring.
Highly. Profiting.
Age of sensational Spasm,
Locked behind which, a long dusty
Book of delayed shame,
Regretfully nostalgic.
We cannot perceive the reality
of how we arrived upon
This existential wilderness,
Whilst being too busy
Occupying our conscious,
Shunning The Truth;
Rather to take it all
Up the Ass—
Than to bite real Peaches,
Causing them to Gush,
To Spew and Bleed—
The Sticky Juice
of Act and Consequence,
Pleasure and Pain,
Dispute and Acceptance:
Will We Ever
Relearn to open up
that rusty chamber,
Neglectfully sealed in our Hearts,
and refill its long-emptied
Reservoir to the Brim
with True Essence and Blood?
How cruelly did Youth
Dare us to dream so frivolously,
That every burger we flipped,
Every broom we pushed—
Every petty tip waged to our once
Or still hungry pockets,
Dimmed our Brilliance into
Barely containable and feigned
Smiles, veiled behind which lay
Heaps of deferred aspirations?
And are We so hypnotized to confide
In this modern, fast-forward dreaming,
That the weight of Hammer
and Chisel became too much to bear,
Too much of a nuisance,
Unwilling burden
For our unwieldy wrists?
Or is it simply too much a shame
For our extensively kept faces?
.
Long ago, in a pre-man age
Championed by the gods and creators
Who lived under cosmic rifts and divides,
Among them, a tiny yet miraculous notion
Was suddenly conceived—
Like the cataclysm bringing forth
An all new Philosophy and Faith—
A race of thinking, civilized, even
Highly intellectual beings
Whose core conviction sang:
“We are born to Dream,
To Work, and Sweat
Not as obligated labor,
But as Our birthright
To keep our too often wandering
Souls Pure and Intact!”
.
We now sit in wonder,
“Who were They?
A People who proclaimed themselves
Through endless Shame
And its complementary Glory,
Mankind? ”
Crowded places filled with gazes of much un-needed Inquiry:
Curious, tense, lustful, and envious—mostly afraid—
Vexing to the extremities of bone.
Can’t a Brother eat alone
Without getting smothered by cloudy and judging glances?
damn unwholesome souls
lurking rampant on this Earth
so disturb me;
perpetually motivated from outwards, of which’s approval they seek;
must we ceaselessly suck like maggots
and compete with one another in nothing
but creature obsessions?
Escaping the suffocating boxes of Men (and Women too),
Rows of densely packed Crackles sing like
Stereotypical Hispanic Aunties,
Fast and incessantly energetic—
Sitting on the power lines, they look like
Lines of blotched ink, so morbidly jet black,
That a weak mind may just mistake them
For a bad, bad omen—
and can we stop reducing our fellow creatures
into metaphors of our own mere understandings?
You see, it might just be a rest stop
Along the journey of their mass, seasonal migrations—
Amongst themselves, a make-shift conference is undergoing.
A slow walk toward less crowded blocks,
Outdated Post Offices and Abandoned Factories,
Peeling Paints; Corroded Metal Beams—
Ironically, at such sights, the soured Heart sits more at ease;
Maybe they remind Us of our lost
But once True Essence,
Now empty shells, waiting to be swallowed up
Whole, down the fat, fat belly of the Real Estates,
and gentrified into “Creative Work Spaces.”
Looking into the dark corners of these obsolete Sentinels,
A pair of dimly gleaming green eyes peer back
in Innocent Caution; a Young Black Feline.
“Hey there, Friend.” You say.
For it is a rare encounter, after all,
On this humid Dusk quickly morphing into total Night Fall,
It is only you and the cat
Keeping Sigil at the Graves, six feet under which
Lay the molding corpses of the Earnest and Industrious.
Eventually, this on-foot excursion ended,
Leaving you atop an empty garage, possibly
Another tasteless fruit of some Real Estate Empire—
The view falls far short of what you anticipated:
Foggy flatlands scattered with boxes containing men and women
who mostly busy themselves glancing at each other.
A breeze blows, but does not freshen your face.
Oh February of 2018,
You stubborn Animal,
Must you so soon leave us empty handed?
I dreamt of more adventures in your bleakness.
Invisible War inside,
Takes a toll on Daylight—
leaving Wakefulness
to helplessly Latch
onto deep Nights—
where one toils away
in darkness
but procures Fruits so few;
for the Upright Heart
anticipates the Shining of Dawn,
containing not the passion for
dark room drudging—
then how come?
that We behave as such
inverted Creatures
who disobey our Design—
allowing the evil to work in Day,
yet the Good to sweep at Night?
Is there such a thing that is the epidemic of talking too much?
Pull any shrink out of the herd and he spills a bucket-full of opinions and ideas:
.
Christ, look at him, thinking he’s a real piece of work with his impressive verbiage, fancying the things he’d likely never get a true grip on…since when, or has it always been, that an individual’s unsubstantiated fluff, as long as it sounds glib and looks sleek on the mere surface, is taken as an indication of decent, even amiable character?
.
What happened to the old fashioned virtue of reservation? The idea that genuine acclaim and affirmation is established not by one’s words, but by his/her undertaken actions? People at large make too many decisions about each other that are based solely on what they hear from their counterparts, impervious to the lamentable phenomenon that society has become not only tolerant of, but more so attracted to the rampant presence of fast-talkers and their empty quick wits.
Ask not for middlemen who’d rather draw a picture and think of all the good things that can be done, instead, take trust in those who dive steadily into the field without self-advertisement.
Particular Moments
February 27, 2022
In this City – Part I
The City is indeed a peculiar place to be—
it is a eco-chamber that sources its
raw goods from outside its borders,
and in return, never manage to return any
fruition of equal liveliness or consequence;
it is a mischievous juicer
that spits out yellowy-green puss, putrid waste
from the best apples and oranges
innocently fed into it;
it is its own twisted mega-church,
with its organs always blasting
on high volume—
deafening drones of motorized something’s;
heart-wretching screams of lost Souls,
with all of their needless violence and commotions;
it is a rotting garden of surprises:
festering garbage lodged uncomfortably
into crevices better served for other purposes;
dog shit, or those of humans and the alike,
left behind for invisible, miracle cleaning crews;
broken parts of otherwise wholesome constructs,
carpeting the roads’ medians
and their left and right side walks—
.
When putting all of its saucy elements in view,
it indeed looks quite like
a bewildering, if not entirely mad arrangement
for Man to gravitate to.