Poems: 150218 - February 15th, 2018
Robert Morpheal
160118A
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Seems that they all left,
for better places.
The sorts of distant places
that you never hear from again.
Leaving nothing but questions
in their wake.
Pretending to be the survivor
as to everyone having died out.
The sort of ordinary lie
one can convince one's self to live.
Circling around again
not knowing anywhere to come down.
Coming down,
or being brought down even harder,
is always the hardest part,
of what passes as living.
As if they have left anything
for anyone to come down to.
The change in your pocket
will never buy your way out.
It will not even stretch
as far as the illusion.
Everyone made other plans,
and you were not one of them.
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160118B
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A sure way to lose
is never to be allowed to play.
They keep you waiting
to find out,
that there is nothing to wait for.
Time passes that way,
persistently teasing at threads
of pretensions at existence.
Your welcome wore out,
a long time ago.
Left you hanging around,
on the edge of extinction.
An endangered species,
near to begging trophy status,
to find a space above someone's mantle
as a place of symbolic warmth.
At least that would be valued,
and perhaps even prized,
the way something that is possessed
can become prized by someone
who really is someone
who can confer that sort of honour.
The cruelty of coincidence
is no such luck,
and no one really wants you there.
It feels too late to start over,
from wherever you began.
All that time in between
apparently having been erased
as if nothing ever really happened.
There is no way to go back
to do everything all over again.
There is nothing on the agenda
that contends any attraction.
You hesitate in between appointments,
with no remaining sense of direction.
There is nothing left to have
of anything that you came for.
The future feels antiseptic
over scraped knuckles and knees.
Trying to make it through,
all you do is end up going down.
No one gave you permission
to interrupt their lovely lives,
by intruding yourself into theirs,
on some weak pretext.
There is always some gossip
that you can sponge up,
about rumoured occasions,
you were never invited to.
A toxic poison,
that eats away at you,
leaving a social corrosion,
as to it all falling apart.
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290118A
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A maze meant
as to reading in
to things,
made malicious
scatterings.
Cruel device
ensnaring the unwary
in entanglements
stretched out
into forever.
No way to go,
past chicken scratch
forage
of particles
broken into habits.
Nothing
worth cultivating,
that is not broken down
the way grain is broken
into sacks of flour.
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150218A
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Technicians of style,
the harbingers of dictatorship,
filling in the expectations
of tightening control.
It comes to a point
where the machines always win,
and freedom is turned
into the struggle of a fly on flypaper.
A disempowered smear,
deprived of any real effect,
beyond blackened bits
of what is broken off.
Consonant wings,
and vowel appendages,
made critically evident,
in a flailing dissection.
The twentieth century
still in rapid retreat,
marking a cruel time
as to the defeat of any art.
Morning traffic streams
rising from unmarked graves.
Dive into the river
never expecting to surface.
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150218B
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A ceaseless imposing
of rigid requirements.
Everything stiffed,
into inflexible encasement,
until it is a straight line
run down a barrel.
Gives a kick
when it is fired out,
to force it to being on target.
The kids dance
like they are powder monkeys
avoiding any trace of spark.
No telling what it feels like
to be shot down that many times,
to getting nothing but opium dreams
without the opium,
shattering the jagged night
into exhausted fractures.
Feeling as emptied out
as a last shot at it.
Watching it all get away from you,
and you are caught in a trap.
Something that never ends well,
no matter how it ends going down.
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150218C
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Everyone has forgotten the story,
so you ask politely if they heard it,
knowing you will be telling it again
for the umpteenth time,
trying to seem remotely interesting.
Another way to get tired of yourself,
and of hearing yourself think,
about all that futility in the world
designed to make you feel powerless.
That is about what passes
as the only intimacy,
that they allow you, that is tolerable.
Having thoroughly immunized you
against that alleged disease
that might bring you anywhere close
to anyone that you might actually want
to become that close to
beyond senselessly rubbing flesh.
Little irregular doses
of the people whom you do not really like,
that you have nothing in common with,
who force you to play make believe games,
so you make them all believe,
whatever they want to believe about it,
trying to make do with the illusion
that it still really means anything to you
in regards to anything you wanted to do.
You do not really pass as anything,
that you are told that anyone wanted any of,
but you fake it well enough
in public situations,
to fool all of the people all of the time,
that are designated as your friends.
If you had a better memory for lines
you could have taken it to the silver screen,
and made a good living at it.
That is the way that it works,
if it works at all, and when it does work,
the way that things work nowadays.
You note the punishing emphasis
of syllables of endless private messages,
displayed in full public view.
Only the truly paranoid make the assumption
that anyone else can actually read them,
and those permitted to place the blame.
That becomes interzoned
into data streams destined for the few,
who have the method to decode them.
An encryption that no one can ever crack,
buried in anything.
Those decades of detailed briefings,
but never the slightest clue given
as to how to extricate yourself
from your miserable situation.
You know that you are compelled
to erase all traces
of any accomplishments,
knowing that none of it belongs to you.
There is nothing left to claim,
after recycling.
It never really matters to anyone
what you came for,
or what you really wanted.
You could not prove personally interesting
to any whom you would want to interest.
It is as if you were completely erased
in the course of some bureaucratic process,
the way editors reject a fiction
as not being written correctly.
Language is not your area of mastery,
and you have no idea how to make money
from the right sorts of lies in the right style.
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