Life’s Sentence

 

Which punctuation

will mark

the end

of our

lives’ sentence?

 

A period.

An exclamation point!

A question mark?

 

Until then,

we’ll settle for

an endless

ellipsis…

 

 

Previously published by “The Weekenders Magazine” and featured in the Scars Publications chapbook Poems of Pain: BUMMER

 

 

 

 

Save Our City

 

 

A cloud-cover this morning

After last night’s stars pinpointing the sky

Vivid in their distance and majesty

 

Sirens echoing all around us

An easy-to-hear pattern of marching boots

Coming closer

 

Windowpanes beginning to vibrate

Our sanctuary becoming as the rest of the world

Torturous in the waiting

 

Many choose to ignore the sleeping giant

His yawn and grimacing rising from the tomb of our fathers

For the settling of scores

 

Smoke seeping under our doors

Frantically gathering wet rags

Placing them over our mouths and noses to breathe

 

Someone screaming

Buildings shaking

All stunned before the grand falling

 

Running out into the streets

Where they wait

Gathering us up into army trucks

 

The dark green of metal and canvas

Long lines snaking out to detention camps

For our sins

 

Another world of the old world ways

The giant gnashing his teeth

To the altar of our doom.

 

 

 

 

The Pace of the World

 

 

The pace

of the world

now

 

Is too great

and too scatter-brained

to try to sort

or keep up with

 

Unless

we all do a little

to help

 

And maybe

we’ll slow it down

enough

 

That we all don’t die

a miserable death.

 

 

 

 

Pampered

 

 

The good in us

Dwindling

Ebbing away

Soon out of our reach

 

We could have stopped it

Years ago when we knew how

 

Now our minds

Diseased

Having too much

Sharing not enough

 

The butchers coming

Sharpening their blades

 

Many of us will flee

Many will fight

Too fat to win

Too pampered to last.

 

Not Happy Enough

 

 

Neither was Kurt Cobain

and Hemingway at the end and

Hunter

and Sylvia

oh thank Lord there’s no guns in the

house and they don’t have gas ovens

here cuz they don’t

bake things here in Thailand and I’d

never icky cut my wrists so no with

the knives and the doc won’t give me

enough pills or I can’t horde ’em long

enough to get enough of ’em to, as

they say, “get the job done”

 

hanging’s out too, what kind of a jerk

would do that?

Just imagine me dangling at the end

of a noose!

 

No, I’ll do my suiciding the old

fashioned way

with cigarettes

sex with prostitutes

too much drinking on occasion

non-stop pot smoking

ya ba and

living the

writer’s bohemian no job life

like other writer guys

that didn’t really take a firm hand in

outright killing themselves but

rather let the tar or nicotine

or the booze

the drugs

do the job enjoyably for them.

I throw my liver and lungs

in with that crowd.

 

I’m not down with the

immediate cessation of life

scene.

 

Vampires Suck

 

I don’t care

if she makes me

cum or bleed,

just as long as she

sucks all of

the life out

of me

 

with a hickey.

 

Previously published by ppigpenn, Nostrovia! Poetry and Boyslut, and published by Scars Publications in the chapbook Poems of Pain: BUMMER.

The Beatnik Cowboy

 

Some mornings a few years ago

but rarely now

when I go to sleep at

night

I don’t want to wake up in the

morning

back then, when dawn came

I was already depressed

thinking about the depressing

day ahead of me

and all the other ones I’ll suffer

through till I die

it is at this time

the individual needs

the solace and escape-invigoration-

inspiration

of mostly the illegal drugs

to my way of thought, suicide could

be the result of the patient’s lack of

the beneficial restorative (of the will

to live) of illegal

drug treatment

“I’ll tell you one thing,” the youngish

guy from Alabama told me, a guy

who sounded like and I’m almost sure

had more than his share of cracker in

him. The intelligent uneducated

American said, pointing to my stash

of methamphetamine, “that there is

the best cure for depression”.

Nowadays nary a day goes by

when I don’t take his hillbilly advice

and I don’t imbibe in this supposedly

most noxious

of life destroying evilest most sinister

and detestable in its powerfully

addictive effects chemical – hell

bathroom cleaning product, Vick’s

inhalers and battery acid consisting o

the most feared lethal dangerous

deadly destructive of our youth and

the older folk illegal drug substance

and taking this “Nazi Speed” I’m like

Mr. Confidence and poem essay short

story producing like a madman, like a

Philip K. Dick and Ginsy

it’s kind of like in Cowboy times with

me and writing, back then it was the

whiskey talkin’

here in the Twenty-first of these

centuries we got the tweakers

poeticizin’

I believe sort of firmly in this

the idea of safe irresponsible drug use

to offset the plastic fake phoniness

effect of our consumer propagandist

and TV movie defining unable to self

actualize in a false values, pitch

person shaped desires, created fake

unfulfilling even when the wants

desires expressed as needs are

abundantly met/filled social

organizational goal

Wealth accumulation as the ultimate

goal and retail therapy make or a full

unfulfillment in the beginning and end

the great Walter Benjamin was not

wrong when he suggested

the anomic and egoistic disruptions of

a person’s life

the detrimental effects causing social

and psychological states inimical to

the continued survival of the

tormented dude or dudette, may be

offset by the effects of drugs. Mostly

the drug effects of what are currently

(2009) considered drugs of the illegal

kind.

Personally I suggest the use of strong

marijuana, type

cannabis sativa, soil grown, from

Jamaica.

Show me a higher breed of cat than

the Rasta. As energetically and I

suppose happily bursting into song so

suddenly it makes one jump startled

a people I’ve ever come across.

 

 

Thank Allah for Cigarettes

 

special k kreates

bloated

dimension drifts

and personally inflicted blood

bath-like

personal wounds

when you do that first or those after

that first

one too big a shot.

careful, kids and adult old women and

men

transvestite and transsexual

psychonaut curious in your chair at

home or with good folks risk taker

journeying learning

old hippie or, “the receptors are there!”

might as well

thinkers world and beyond

alike

be careful:

 

this is some powerful shit.

 

 

 

 

The You of You

 

Satin streets

and

alleys paved

with fool’s gold

that’s America

the USA

just to inform

you dreaming would be

immigrant – or help us you

terroristas

if you is still

got the notion paid the smugglers

to get you illegally or legally

into this fine

always been always will be

country and people

 

because nowadays

as the social philosopher types

tenured or not

arm-chair

or actually read a book

and finished it

last year

person you are not

Dare I say:

if you

keep looking

things

in the end and on the way

will definitely

not be alright

nor ever near so

why?

Because you lie

as you have been told, no forced,

the truth or

future past

it passed

and was in turn

passed on to

as the whom you think is the fake and

spurious real

you, of you.

 

 

 

 

My Generation

 

They said

we couldn’t

do it

and we didn’t.

 

The only thing worth

living for is dying

and those Twilight Zone episodes

you missed

 

given the conditions

of the day, year, moment or hour,

are always ripe for

Spontaneous suicide!!! Yikes!

 

Learn to live with this

and less

is the whole of the law.

In the here, now, present, past

and future continuous?

Which just may not too exactly

nor not

though maybe

might

be you

or whom you should or should have

been or will be

though again maybe

you

nor not you?

Forever.

 

 

 

 

Never Understood

 

Where the hell

Have the frozen

Mists of immemorial

Time shut their portals

To matter and mind

Ponder-less

Speculation

In a basket

With fries

And coleslaw?

 

I saw myself slowly dying

Then awakening to live again

Before

An ability to achieve

Joy, happiness, comfort or

Satisfaction

Left me

Alone

And upon wakening

I asked why?

Regular Shots of Liquid Valium

 

They say we’re only dancing

on this Earth for a short time,

my problem is, I don’t dance.

Dancing is for pussies….

 

So let me bait you instead

Islam is fundamentally flawed

as are all religions

You fucking German war pigs….

 

Jesus, Muhammad, all charlatans

Buddha,

cool dude….

 

But with Buddha no “out there” God

directing traffic down here

that can be called on to control

things, actions, cure diseases

miraculously

Nobody to pray to at night pleading

“Dear God,” “Help, I need help,

again,” and then

always ending the prayer with “and

please make me a better writer

and guitar player and get recognized

and get the fame and the groupies

and may I grow old gracefully

get a grizzled old man good-looking

face

that can still attract young and older

women

and help me to curtail the panic

attack freak-outs

that send me to the emergency room

where I get a room and

regular shots of liquid Valium.”

No God out there to call for help on

that stuff

according to Buddhists,

it’s all inside

gotta discover or bring it out

and we are all alone

but a drop in the ocean

of All.

And….

Oh shit.

That scares me.

 

 

 

The Convenient Delusion

 

It’s out of habit

necessity

sculpts

a fool’s head.

 

Brackish

it’s Obama

stereophonic

play-space with

your woofers

and tweeters

pushers

and policers

incarcerating

mighty

empire dread.

Yeah it’s

a real palace

of wisdom

your drunken head

hand drawing

art? Inside

mine skull.

Just remember

in realities

less real

and profound

one may not

equate mountain lion = cougar

or eventually discover

after thirty eight or forty

years of hard study

life and reading

’tis a strange sensation

when you

discover

there is

no “d”

in privilege.

 

 

Today, I sat and pondered under the powerlines. Watching the blue birds fly, below an overcast sky. Listening to them sing as the sunshine forced its way through the gray. I did not think of the seeds in my testis drowning. I thought of the Sun, now free of the caging clouds. The age of Pisces, and Jesus fish magnetically affixed to drivers’ license plates. And the impending age of Aquarius. And how the distant light of nuclear meltdowns will never reach our eyes, or the eyes of our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on.

We, as combustible beings made of disintegrating biological matter, will never fathom what truly lies above and truly beyond us. Our ancestors gave them names. The Big Dipper (and its inadequate brother). Orion’s Belt (not made from dead animals’ leather). But in the grandest scheme of all things, they have no names.

They are as spontaneously explosive as we are. Do you know how many nations on this minuscule rock possess nuclear weapons or nuclear reactors on the verge of the pin pushing towards the red of the dial? (There are 8 as of today, can you name them all?) Maybe we should be less concerned with the megalomaniacs with their finger hovering over the big red button, but what lies in the silent, endless. nameless darkness above us. Stars always burn out. We, as humans, will simply fade away into the darkest of ages.

Typed by Chris Butler

That thin blue line

He judders temporarily
until falling into steady rhythm.
Frowning through the slow minutes
Paul Tristram

The police came a calling
With questions they’d ask
Answered before –decision made.
The air was alien
Time exited the room
By their contact they
drew a supposition a false
image born. They smell
fear as the blood runs.
The finger rules the gun
The finger rules the brain
A shot death before the sound
touches their ears
This thin blue line
That breaks or hides an act
In a shadow to say
I had to I had to…

Through the window’s Heaven and Hell

He stares from his grey locks
Out passed the mirrored glass
Into the beigeness of the gridlocked
Horn laden car park.

His wife of years, too many to comprehend,
Stares across at the counters where
They come and go, dreaming, looking
at their youthful optimism, veined with a wish.

While the grandchild – wonders under
the table. In a world made of his mythology;
within a world engineered in which he is just
another fish, within the ever increasing fish trap.

They fall beneath the surface. As the worm
finds solace. Compressed within time.
She breaks with an absolute silence that is
as pure as absolute blackness

The cut up

A possible or potential Bowie lyric from an American poet

1. From Francophiles, 1958 by John Matthias

Incanted incanted
So we, in repastures tower room
Think in French by Berger to Morocco
We’d proclaim the absurd to the surreal
Headlong to Paris over the hill
Through the unsettled valley
In the settled code of the predatory age

Steinbeck and Sartre understand
The boulder up the hill
Paid the wage of Sisyphus
Went a good long way to the blossomed leaves

Not anybody’s trees gave us arms
From our tower: I’m no existentialist
Obliged? If obliged between the work
Of justice that surprised justice
Of the authentic old conspirators
Named assassins who co-ordinate sabotage
The beeping change of key leads to green
Transhumant fields

Steinbeck and Sartre understand
The boulder up the hill
Paid the wage of Sisyphus
Went a good long way to the blossomed leaves

Incanted incanted
So we, in repastures tower room
Think in French by Berger to Morocco
From our tower: I’m no existentialist
Obliged? If obliged between the work

Steinbeck and Sartre understand
The boulder up the hill
Paid the wage of Sisyphus
Went a good long way to the blossomed leaves