Poems: 210513 - May 21st, 2013

[Robert Morpheal]

210513A
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We have so many places to look,
that we can no longer find any answers,
which forces us
to an abandoning of most questions.

I thumb through magazines,
never finding exactly what I am looking for,
having checked catalogues,
and sifted through newspapers.

I saw someone who looked like you,
across the street,
and on another day, speeding away,
in a shiny new motor car.

There was a time, that seems long past,
when I would have followed you,
to the ends of the Earth,
even if it was only to share the same abyss.

Now I wish you had found me,
long before these desperate times,
of repeated failed attempts
at various types of escape.

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210513B
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There are so many ways,
to get wasted.
Sometimes they make you think
you have really done something
more than fall in.

Having fallen in,
you take a roll in the muck.
Then you wash yourself up
and nothing feels clean anymore,
so you try another ritual.

You give up four letter words,
because they are all too violent
and you are tired
of being the perpetual victim,
of all that futile attraction.

It is always about needing
whatever it is that you cannot get.
So you try to come up with
reasonable facsimiles,
even if none of those gets you in.

We do not really have any choice,
but we must always choose carefully.
It is all about knowing
the right people,
though that is where it usually goes wrong.

You are never at any of the parties
that I am invited to,
so I move around the room
the way a fly moves around a room,
trying to settle for something.

It all seems to be a ghost of a chance,
that I keep haunting,
on the off chance that you would show up
and that we might make a real splash,
in some utterly outrageous manner.

I am no good at trivia,
and I often lose the name to a face I know,
as I keep breaking from routine.
I am too much the wild thing,
that cannot be broken enough.

I hear that they broke you,
so now I always look the other way,
trying to find the unknown,
in the hope that no one else will notice
what I really want.

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200513C
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Sometimes the trouble is,
when one is young,
not finding the right way
to run away
to join a circus,
to avoid all of the problems
one might cause in later life.

Marry a young circus girl,
and do stunts together,
doing no one any real harm.
Don’t let the clowns
come between the two of you,
while the Ringmaster
performs the ceremony.

Always steadfastly mindful
that politics is for lion tamers,
and keep well away
from that Sunday School
sideshow of freaks,
run by the bearded lady,
and the human snake.

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210513D
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It is only a matter of belief,
and the humbling moment
when you give that up too,
realizing that you were nothing
that you once thought you were,
and you were less than nothing
as to anything you wanted to become.

You drop your pride,
the way a prisoner drops a gun,
from outstretched fingers.
You ran out of bullets long ago,
and there were too many targets,
all moving faster than you could go,
as you spun in the breeze.

If you really changed anything
as to the world,
you only made it more difficult
for yourself to live in,
and whatever you thought you had found
left you with something less
than you had before the discovery.

Most of that being a monopoly,
where the assets are hoarded
by the other playing pieces,
constrained to moving forward
along clear demarcation lines,
from territory to territory,
of toll gates and being bumped back.

It is always easy to lose an argument
if you are not the one
who is supposed to be arguing it.
It is only the conclusion that counts,
not the repeated forays,
across enemy lines,
along with endless battle cries.

What you put in only measures up
against what you happen to get out.
They remove your soul,
the way pieces of shrapnel are cut out,
leaving those warning scars,
that you yourself cannot see:
knowing only their effect.

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210513E
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It is the random arrangement
that represents the losing proposition.
The way it is with showing one’s true colors
at the wrong time and place.

History is never kind
to those it makes into its servants.
They end up supporting
the one or the other official position.

Nothing so very different in that
than being broken into pieces,
becoming part of the summer wood pile
made to wait for winter.

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