POEMS: 100623 - June 10th, 2023

[Robert Morpheal]

240523A
-----------

Only those who are wanting
can actually love anything
and most often they lie
about what they really want.

That is the way of things
and honesty is the killer
killing in cold blood
more often than not.

It is easier for some
to passionately love
what is dead
as there are no challenges.

The dead make no argument
and the dead only want
exactly what you imagine
that they are wanting for.

You can imagine anything
no matter how untrue it is
about a love object
to intensify your mourning.

A hair's breadth in between
loving and mourning
as the two flip sides
to passion's tossed coin.

-----------------------------

260523A
-----------

We all secretly want
and want to be wanted
even if it is only pity
for being a broken doll.

The head lolling around
some hidden pivot
where it retains attachments
to the chakras of agony.

A loosened pile up
of displaced connections
between sat on a flimsy base
rammed up into the cranium.

Feeling another crunch
that keeps to wondering
whether that is the last
and final form of severance.

The wheel turns around
and you hear Catherine laughing
about the various loose bits
that eventually fall off and out.

Out from such an unloved doll
that only wanted a gentle lover
who would take it away
to keeping it safe to herself.

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260523B
-----------

It gets to that point
where you no longer want to
pull out any of the weeds
because you feel too sorry.

Sorry to do it to them
because people are doing it
to people all of the time
and the screaming never stops.

That screaming that goes on
in the screaming streets
piercing apartment windows
overlooking the new Golgotha.

Everything is all about being
on the cutting edge of it all
and you are simply tired
of all the cutting up and down.

Then there are those who persist
in trying to pull you out
from any attempts at roots
the way hairs are sometimes pulled.

You are not growing
in the ways they want you to
because you are not that type
and you get the wrong chemistry.

You get it wrong and wrong again
because that is what you get
until you no longer know
anything that feels right.

The soil is the same everywhere
but it is something in the feed
that keeps poisoning everything
you ever hoped for as to a situation.

The desire to blossom even if
it is only once in a lifetime
but you are nipped in the bud
every time you stretch that far.

These are the badlands
and emotional weather is brutal
among those who come
to do the yanking and pulling.

No space anywhere
for anything to find its place
beyond the distant deep rooted
considered to be good timber.

That forest of carved faces
where you find no appeal
and are left to dangle
same as a limp straggling vine.

You want to strangle something
if you could reach that high
wrapping around a throat
and tightening the grip.

Had hoped friends on the vine
but only found the jungle
and not even a pretty one
to flower with.

------------------

260523C
-----------

Makes you really wonder
what you are protected from
so you write a long list
including everything
that you do not have any of
that might have been fun.

You try to be inclusive
and not leave anything out
that you would have enjoyed
knowing that it belongs there
on that long list of everything
you are supposed to give up.

Once upon a time you believed
in working at it and for it
but that never got you there
so you stopped believing
that you had any right ideas
that could get you through.

They took the fun out of it all
but they always rub it in
by showing you the fun
someone else is having
getting to do something different
that you do not get to do any of.

That contributes something
to your perpetual condition
of fiscal embarrassment
where there are plenty of ends
and even more never meets
adding to the price of shame.

There were always rumours
concerning the other side
and you thought you could
break through to the other side
past that brick in the wall
that has your name on it.

A little repository of ashes
containing every good idea
that you ever actually had
cremated from the start
as to any actual net worth
that might have come of it.

Riding the down spiral
after having fallen from grace
not having worked a way up
to where you could never go
past all those closed doors
and the portraits in the hallways.

You begin to want a new name
and a whole new identity
so that someone might find you
knowing your previous incarnation
never really had any sort of chance
to actually know that much.

The morgue has better bodies
than the one you are riding in
making you wish you could
simply drop your body
and pick up another choice
as to a better fit, form and function.

Maybe that would do it for you
when nothing else ever did
and you hear of people being paid
simply for having good looks
and having less to say than a corpse
reclining on a mortuary slab.

You used to believe in getting out
but the wrong people talked to you
so you had to give it up
knowing that it was a sign
that you were not wanted there
by anyone you could really want.

What you really want does exist
on many different levels
but it is the getting that is a problem
having worn yourself out
on one or another stray giving
that did not pan out to anything

Wrong number in the lottery
and the same when the phone rings
so you do not pick it up anymore
leaving machines talking to machines
while you remain with all the culture
that no one you knew ever wanted.

Someone in the background
insists on your pitching it all in
and tells you to start over again
to find something different
to do with your time
that does not waste money.

Your face having fallen
out from the rogues gallery
you are a displaced person again
and less noteworthy than the spider
arrived on a banana boat
along with a heap of yellow puds.

------------------------------------------

260523D
------------

Do not want to go there alone
the way I used to go there
simply to come away
with the usual feeling
as to having lost something.

A sort of hollow emptiness
that carves out the insides
where you tried to find exit
from inside a typical shell
without creating a disturbance.

Never create a disturbance
and never disturb anyone
in your diligence at evading
being referred to as disturbed
in the avoidance games.

Do not want to upset anyone
and do not want to intrude
particularly in private places
where one is not wanted
and bad memories are kept.

All those common places
of usual discomforts
among unconvincing actors
playing unconvincing parts
in the melange of bad plots.

Treading lightly as to subject
and keeping away from too near
to whatever might offend
knowing no one is interested
as you waste time and money.

Only matters how you waste it
as to the who, when and where
getting nowhere
that makes any difference
being the only place to go.

It was a long way down
but you were never really up
and no one that you knew then
ever bothers to remember you
in any meaningful way.

That leaves buyers and sellers
but you do not have
and do not want the goods
so you do not know what to say
beyond a passing politeness.

If there was a set up
it was not anything at all
that would be in your favour
but sure to bring you trouble
right down the entire line.

You want to get away
but it seems too much the same
no matter which way you go
and you can never seem to find
that one real exception.

----------------------------

260523E
-----------

By the time you know
they say it is too late
to fix whatever is broken
in the course of deliberation
or in the flux of chance.

The makings of disconcerted
impossible desires
for improbable loves
providing some illusions
makes for feeling more free.

Freedom is only a feeling
that you can try to cultivate
until you get the knack
as to how to fool yourself
into feeling that free.

If we went all the way back
to doing the past again
it would mostly be the same
not really knowing yet
how to change little nuances.

It is the big things that matter
the way the deep end mattered
from the shallow end
and never making a splash
from the high board.

There is no real respect
for that sort of thing
and a nickel and dime life
is more embarrassing
than life long water wings.

The same devil is always in
all those little details
as to where and who and when
without need for any
more specific references.

It is not what you ever say
but who fails to speak for you
that is always more decisive
concerning the actual outcomes
of necessarily trivial acts.

We have not learned as much
as we like to think that we have
and there is no actual way
to jump that same old groove
from mine to yours.

Only different collisions
with the same general relativity
that makes up the outcomes
and one particle ends the same
as various multitudes of others.

How can that possibly be fated
unless we are actually in Hell
and free will is merely a myth
we were tricked into thinking
could make anything possible.

Bumping into different people
to bounce off into void spaces
in the very same ways as before
because the universe is that cruel
and that desolate a sort of place.

Space costs too much money
and it costs too much to fill it
and soon they will bill you a fee
for the space between your ears
where you used to store dreams.

Just a different crush
happens to the same destination
with all those forever mistakes
made in the same forever ways
that it is all too human to make.

It would never be any different
if it were done again
even if it were someone else
because what is broken
can never really be fixed.

And if we tried a thousand ways
it would still be broken
and it would still end up the same
despite all the details
being entirely rearranged.

And how do you make a deal
with the right sort of devil
before you run out of time
and run out of deals to make
so you can pretend at being free.

---------------------------------------

260523F
----------

You might have guessed
that I really want for something
in a different obscure part
of this god awful matrix
that we are so fly trapped into.

That feeling of utterly stuck
in our patterns of movements
to the sticky surface of it all
and I cannot get off
not in that way at all.

There is no getting off
in that way at all
kept to merely passing time
rearranging miscellanies of desires
into their broken sequences.

Seems there is nothing here
in any way that I know
and anywhere I know of
to hope for within the realm
of what is actually possible.

The grim truth of it all
but I keep scraping up traces
that there used to be
something I could want
to simply disappear into.

That is lost to me now
but then again it always was
a reaching for something more
that could never be grasped
within the sum totals.

Something to eat me up
as love might once have done
before it revealed its illusions
and in ways surpassing the means
that comes of routine toil.

The here and now has lost
any vestiges of similar appeal
the way a stale garbage can
spoils whatever falls into it
leaving only more longings.

Clearly it was all that time
spent with the wrong crowd
that left its bad feelings
imprinted onto everything
that resembles or suggests.

As if I never knew anyone
and missed that only cliched train
at that forsaken lonely station
that takes one high and out
to something real again.

All that endless looking at
wears one's eyes out
into seeing what is not there
in all that heap of make do
broken wings and pretty things.

Nothing that I know of
is anything near to enough
and stuck at where I am
only whets the many appetites
that thrash about at everything.

It becomes an animal caged
but to no truly good purpose
doing the same old tricks
for the same old audience
becoming absolutely boring.

I have become a monster
held down in the pit of it all
neither wanting the truth
nor finding enough beauty

---------------------------------

270523A
-----------

Waking up tired of it
to hear the Sun laugh at you
right out of the blue
at your absurd predicament.

You are not getting to play
any of the roles
as any of those characters
that you really wanted to play.

It is only another stage
and you are being kept back
somewhere behind the curtains
not really given any real part.

You can imagine at least
a thousand different ways
that you would have preferred
to have ended up instead.

Though here you actually are
comforted by nothing much
other than you did not choose it
to be anything the way it is.

You log on to online
where it feeds your imagination
with desirable options
that disappear as you scroll.

Going down the page
you keep looking
for that final bottom line
as to how to get out of it.

Nothing comes up
as to a link or instructions
to actually follow
so you surf your boredom.

You cannot seem to buy in
and cannot seem to buy out
from where you are pinned
in between and out of touch.

Your fingertips always touching
the numbed borders of nothing
character emblazoned keys
that clatter the perpetual push.

There is none of it anywhere
where you chance to reside
knowing the only local source
has discontinued publication.

It is that kind of place now
and the tabloid is so bland
it is a watered down version
of a Tupperware social.

Maybe everything is plastic
and there only for display
but do not handle the packages
unless you can pay the price.

The voices in the street
are talking nothing
simply passing the time
at mostly nothing.

It makes all that new talk
about trends in clean living
seem far too difficult
to even begin to entertain.

--------------------------------

300523A
-----------

You begin to think you know
at least what it feels like
to be a loaf of white dough
baking in a hot oven
as the Sun does its freak thing
pummelling the hard pan earth.

Anything green is screaming
those wilted screams for water
wondering if the cruel sky
has forsaken every resurrection
struggled up from the dead land
comprised of countless ancestors.

A slightly delirious mind strays
into wild imaginings
as to an endless number
of new uses for the various
types of frozen liquids
in rainbow colours and flavours.

Thoughts of running parched
tongue along ice chilled skin
dripping an exotic flavour
along the edge of a molten flow
that is gradual liquefaction
as if we are melting in the heat.

--------------------------------------

020623A
------------

Spending time with normal people
who treat you as if you are a suspect
that does not have a normal sort of life.

You do not have a normal family plot
and do not have any normal children
who were supported by a normal job.

There is nothing normal about you
because you do not know the gossip
and you drive a strange looking car.

You do not do any normal things
proving a normal lack of ambition
and worse yet you still have goals.

Horror of horrors they think
if you chance to achieve anything
that makes you even less like them.

You might be something dangerous
and somehow you seem different
and maybe it is the way you speak.

You are careful with words
indicating there is something to hide
and you do not drink a popular brand.

They do not want your food
and they try to avoid your story
in a vague fear of contamination.

Must be something wrong with you
that you are trying to conceal
under a friendly disposition.

You might be a terrible monster
that the news warned them about
lurking within a human skin.

You did not live the way they lived
and do not do what they always do
to pass their boringly normal time.

You simply are not normal
and you definitely do not fit in
with a crowd of normal prisoners.

You get an uncomfortable feeling
that they are holding back the truth
about what they are really like and do.

The many dirty little secrets
that school kids will not tell you
in the belief you snitch to the Principal.

They feel uptight for no definite reason
when you come around to the game
those being normal will not let you play.

--------------------------------------------------

020623B
-----------

We are most often teased
with the possibility
of the impossible
to the improbable extent
of whatever it might be
that might not be disappointing.

We are steadfastly diminished
in the diminishing of chance
and getting increasingly worn out
in the pursuits of nothing special
that proves less than it seemed
in every rare instance of caught.

We nibble at the disappointments
making pretense at satisfaction
while secretly harbouring desires
and covering over the envy
about others who have the dibs
on whatever we really want.

We often secretly await a call
that never actually comes
and wander among other people
seeking that special moment
until the others prove themselves
too annoying to tolerate.

We wash away in that deluge
of what proves endlessly contrary
to any actual sorts of contentment
in one or another instance
of more convenient rearrangements
as concerns this or that hunger.

We know confusion is the normative
confabulation of a typical mind
meant to become lost
in the ever worsening mind maze
consumes each little portion
of what passes as an ordinary life.

We never liked ordinary life
and found normal to be irritating
in the arts as in everyday passing
reflected as nothing more
than a deepening sense of lack
populated by robots spewing cliches.

We never wanted ordinary anything
in religiously concealed cravings
for what is variously exceptional
and it is only the rare thing
that truly captivates us
with its offers of enchantment.

Everything that we wish
is always what we could not have
and so we maintain personal museums
made up of various hopes and fears
intent on the potential amusement
of one or another posterity.

Secretly craving a type of escape
that finally satisfies at least some
of those pent up secret longings
for something entirely different
than an avalanche of ordinary
that pins down and crushes.

Better yet and far less likely
being something different
that would actually be lasting
rather than a passing glimpse
that defies all manner of realization
within any more personal sphere.

We make do with whatever it is
that is entirely insipid
as to it being tasteless and bland
enough to be somewhat popular
telling people it is wonderful
so we can feed on their reactions.

Our carefully practised approval
brings their approval in return
so we can bathe and wallow
in what spews from their fountains
feeding our pretense at having found
real meaning and approval.

That type of vampirism is common
being both anticipated and expected
almost causing amnesiac forgetting
as concerns the other varying types
of ending at defining so many others
in terms of their give and take more.

We are overly tolerant of it all
due to having been rendered unable
to keep on caring about any of it
being the habitual goings on
that satisfy nothing and are offerings
even the gods would laugh at.

They used to accept nearly anything
that anyone chanced to throw at them
but they are beyond any pleasing now
having developed refined tastes
and having become very selective
as to the detailed ingredient lists.

We secretly wanted to get a little
before we are done away and gone
but the odds do not look good
based on the burden of experience
and the way people always shun
the mere mention of possibilities.

They are so extremely afraid
when it comes to anything that is odd
and does not fit in with their views
as to the steady streams of advertising
that keep challenging them
about how to avoid being noticed.

----------------------------------------------

090623A
-----------

Boil all those great ideas down
to the shame of being as poor
as what is burnt to the pan.

And not one idea worth anything
more than a plug nickel is worth
without the money backing it.

The what you do not have sort
of being sorted right out
the way fists sort things out.

That part of you so bruised up
until no one recognizes you
as more than an unfortunate spill.

The sort of shame that comes
at having lost too many fights
where everyone loves a winner.

--------------------------------------

090623B
-----------

All you are is the mess
comes from what you did not make
and you did not make much
in the real and final reckoning
where they tally it all up
as to where they would stick you
entirely out of sight and mind.

You have lost your balance
and you have no actual footing
having slipped on the slippery clay
that you were made from
planting a face into the mud
similar to footprints of stars
made in concrete.

Different walks of life
and only know street scenes
creating cold alien feelings
along cutting edges of rifts
between everything wished
and everything that actually is
playing with the senses.

It is always the not having
that has decided it all
even when tricked to believe
in the having something
leaves nothing but a memory book
compilation of tragedies
where something was broken off.

You are not as you once were
but you are not anything you wanted
while in between seems wasted
in the cannot go back
and cannot ever get forward
to any sort of comfortable place
within the bounds of any settlement.

Nothing will ever feel settled
the way the wind stirs it up
only to run everything aground
with the keel ripped out
every tack being a wrong tack
on that ever changing map
where there are no destinations.

The wasteland feared most
stretches as far and as wide
as everything that is out of reach
used to make you feel too generous
as to ugly and squalid offerings
rejected by the fringe dwellers
who believed that was not enough.

It was all really only a turning about
who would actually show up
and who would always stay away
from where any stand is made
between heathens and savages
examination of socially embodied
variants of a martyr complexes.

Even they always wanted more
than only a reason given
to come to despise the host
in terms of whatever they thought
were their better options
leaving nothing more
than a trickle of messy laughter.

Too late to make any of it up
as you can well imagine always is
but any lord knows you tried
and that is not the half of it
since what was found to lose
is how the furnace is stoked
that smelts discontent to its purity.

Could have been happy once
but they took all that away
to where there is no getting back
and no more satisfaction
in replays of long dead games
knowing how it all turned out
when the crowd broke and scattered.

All that is really known from that
is how to burn fiercer
in harsh terms of restless ambitions
consuming most everything
in that whirlwind of flames
conceals the unbridled passions
and without directions' reigns.

A personal apocalypse
end times confrontation
never knows the hour
past dreams turned dark
as to what could not be saved
from reaper and threshing floor
for any peace or place.

---------------------------

090623C
------------

It is not anything much
and one does not want to die
to absolutely everything
that never really satisfies.

A sort of hanging there
in that inverted condition
an upturned signpost
that has become a warning.

A warning to anyone
to stand well away
from dangerous discontent
that might contaminate.

The infection might spread
becoming a dark gangrene
that leads to amputation
of the mind.

Monitors are sounding
monotonous alarms
about critical conditions
that will evacuate the room.

No one is considered safe
and the subjects of the alerts
no longer to be trusted
with the safety of anyone.

Followed by a test
of the early warning system
full of childhood memories
telling you what went wrong.

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