Poems: 020223 - February 2nd, 2013

[Robert Morpheal]

020213A
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I dabbled in the black arts
but without any dialectic,
leaving the left and the right
to weave their spells on others.

It started as child’s play,
trying to invent a ritual,
that would provide freedom
from the boredom of children’s games.

When you suffer from one curse,
you tend to seek others,
looking to join a legion of the damned,
simply to rid your self of loneliness.

The condemned seek the condemned,
not knowing anything else.
Some say it begins at birth
and only ends in the grave.

You hear about the better parties,
where the damned out do the blessed,
at escaping their daily solitude,
finding your membership was declined.

You weren’t qualified
for the right type of sin,
having done all the wrong things
at the wrong times.

The routine games of childhood,
take on more serious meanings.
Nursery rhymes prepared us
for what proved to be inevitable.

You learned that you could do well,
if the others would let you hopscotch,
but then you found out they didn’t want you to
ever land of the correct square.

There is longing for the lost innocence
when there was nothing sinister
about playing tag, and almost everything
seemed fresh, bright and true.

Some say that it all went wrong for me,
when I wanted to cast a love spell,
that always ends in the sound of marching boots,
and destined to the wrong army.

There is a war that has no borders,
respects no truce, knows no lines,
unlike the battles of toy soldiers
fought on manicured lawns, on ant hills,
and for other little heaps of dirt.

There are wounds that leave no visible scars.
There is coming home
after never really having been away,
knowing it was only a bad trip.

You try to find a crutch to hold you up
from where you have fallen,
but you have fallen down too far
and you need much more than that.

Whatever it was it always begins the same,
in that forbidden pursuit of being loved,
where you lose your face, your name,
and whatever else you were thinking of.

Ending up walking in circles,
having lose your way,
and not really certain what way that was,
having no one left to dream a dream of.

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020213B
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The universe does not forget
nor does it ever need to forgive.
It impales our faltering moments
in its devious structures.

I wonder why it wants to learn so much
about every new type of suffering,
while we become so weary of details
we want to put an end to all of that.

The liquid in the glass is more precious
because it deadens the pangs of curiosity.
It becomes poured with greater reverence
even if it is poured more quickly.

We want to stagger wildly
beneath the far too distant stars,
feeling as though we have fallen
from somewhere in the distant heavens.

The light of morning will come too soon,
and that means counting the dead.
We have become as empty as the bottles,
under the hard surface of our transparency.

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020213C
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Method is neither good nor evil,
even when it is only acting.

You question the role that is played
and you want to close down the theater.

You want to pull down a shade
over the light of the sun.

Turn it all over again,
saying it was only a bad dream.

Nothing much that we can talk about,
without creating more misunderstandings.

We are really complete strangers,
pretending that we know one another.

Even if we chose to touch each other,
it would seem like the touch of alien species.

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020213D
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The distortion and interference,
of human existence,
affecting the vertical and horizontal hold,
creating test patterns,
superimposed over our fields of vision.

It is always a test
of the emergency broadcast system,
and if this had been a real emergency
you would never have been told
as there would have been no one to tell you.

Emergencies of that sort happen every day,
spiritual ambulances racing to the scene,
to recover the wounded and the dead.
You can see them if you close your eyes
and look down the street.

Intimacy seems a thing of the past,
vaguely recollected as to some long lost world
that was not as divided and categorized
to everything being put in its place,
and nothing allowed out of line.

We can blame it all on Artistotle,
who similar to Plato, was a man’s man,
playing with sharp edges and hard corners,
beating and pushing everything into place
with a brow beating logic.

From that springs forth every perfection,
along with the desire to escape it,
in one or another variant of dark mystery,
where reasoning always fails,
and the gods speak with a female voice.

Looking for indications of a future,
that has not been processed by the machine,
into a uniform output of all the same,
even if only to escape the same idea
coming at the same time, to a room of prisoners.

Communication is largely a formality now,
picking various common stock phrases,
never really meeting anyone original enough
for any sort of real conversation that breaks through
routine exchanges of trite formulations.

Everyone is always too busy,
and usually nothing interesting ever gets done.
Everything is urgent and has to be paid for,
even when there is nothing to do,
but never question the purpose.

I was disappointed
when you defended the blockade,
and I could not get through.
You left me perishing in the wasteland
accompanied by your laughter.

I was looking for a wild ride out,
as I had already discovered the fact
that there really is no freedom.
There are only different types of prisons
and sometimes a choice of torturer.

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020213E
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You are happy with your game,
the way that it plays out,
but you did not want to play my game,
knowing it plays out differently.

I wanted a big, loud, skyrocket
writing names into the sky,
and you only wanted a light
for your habitual cigarette.

It makes me want to escape these times,
as if I could go back to where I want to live,
where the artists were free
to conspire and to know one another.

Now it is not happening,
and everywhere I go it is the same,
a time of mourning
for the passing away of history.

I think it might have all ended,
rather than beginning with Andy Warhol
running the first and last factory
in the alpha and omega of creation.

Now everything is mass produced,
and that includes the rubber stamp minds
that one commonly encounters,
all reduced to being a pixel on the same page.

The temple has been torn down,
after a long brutal assault,
by bankers, business men, and muscle.
Leaving not enough spare change for a soup can.

It is impossible to build anything anymore,
in a world of ever smaller people,
and the rising cost, putting it all out of reach,
of anyone you have the privilege to know.

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020213F
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I have never felt as alone
among other people,
as I do in these times.

I have lost all appetite
for what you feed me,
and I feel hungry all the time.

A totality of independence,
striving at elusive self sufficiency,
makes one too needy.

And when you become needy,
you are no better than tainted meat
stinking at the butcher counter.

The wrong people make me needy,
always coming at the wrong time,
always proving me the odd one out.

It is not what I needed to know,
and it frightens me more and more,
that I have not broken free of it.

The criteria have all changed,
and I never fit the popular definition,
of anything you really want.

If we choose to intersect our lives,
it is only so we can prove
that you do not really want me.

Chancing to anything more than that,
seems the hardest thing in the world,
and could consume entire lifetimes.

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