Poems: 220511 May 22nd, 2011 Part B

[Robert Morpheal]

220511G
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What nature does not break down,
other people no doubt shall,
until they can claim beyond repair.

Their common denial
is their denial of their own sadism,
but you know they are all torturers inside.

It only matters how much pain
you are willing to endure from them
as to who you really are.

Love is really about finding the right mixture
of how the one you truly love will hurt you,
and how you might hurt them in return.

All pleasure comes from that fact,
of pain, forsakenness, and despair.
You pull down the temple after shaving your hair.

Everything else is built on that same basis,
of softening up to the hard cold facts,
while looking for new ways to become more numb.

It is why the worm evolved its hard shell,
in its relentless effort to avoid being crushed.
We play games of soft and firm, pretending to trust.

Gravity and graves have defined our cultures,
where everything is always pulled down,
while we live on illusions that we build it up.

You denied me everything other than armor,
because you said a man has to be tough,
knowing I would crave the soft and gentle touch.

I know that you have the weapons,
that can turn anything from something to nothing,
faster than the blink of a human eye.

Makes me wonder at what might be the purpose,
to the endless streams of complications,
turning every battle into another lie.

I want to leave the bloody field,
finding there is nowhere to really go,
the same above as down below.

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220511H
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It is sometimes about the most difficult task
of finding new ways
to say the same old thing, differently.

That is the real work of poets and artists,
endlessly suffering outrageous ill fortune
for needing to say the same thing differently.

A calling I could never advise,
to those who do not really need
to say the same thing differently.

It is not so different from contentment with vanilla
as compared to needing other flavors,
except in the need for an obscure metaphor.


It is much better to be made by nature and chance,
to being completely contented with much less,
as to the more usual, predictable, habits.

That being proven impossible,
there is a definite need for getting tangled up,
in different methods of being tied down.

Life is all about the various ropes
that one ends up hanging from the ends of,
unable to tie them together.

It’s not unlike the rope trick
of those who try to make it into heaven,
along lines similar to the carne’s greasy poles.

You have to believe that you can hang on,
and that you can still get to the prize at the top,
no matter how far you are sliding down.

For the rare few for whom that is not enough,
there are other games to be played,
all about the same thing, done differently.

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220511I
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You look for the one who will absorb you,
the way parched earth absorbs water,
so that you do not run off along the surface,
but get right in, under it, into the dark.

It is always the light that destroys you,
with its excesses of brutal attention,
burning you up if you linger too long,
making you dry and brittle before your time.

It is as if every man needs a hole,
to hide himself in, and never come out of.
It is only that the ways of getting in are variable,
but everything is is always the same.

You do not want to go like a king in a barrow,
buried with some gold and precious things,
though there are always those who play on you
with nothing much, beyond that sort of fate.

You do not want to have to wear the crown,
unless it is your very own crown of thorns,
but avoiding becoming a public spectacle,
because you never want to rise up that high.

You know that you need someone
to inherit whatever you really chanced to care about,
but short of finding a disciple,
you find they have left you completely alone.

It might be that is how they cut open your head,
to take out what ever they want from it,
and to put in what you refused to allow.
It all ends up being about impossible changes.

You know now there is no way to win,
but you still want to negotiate your position
as to the way that you want to lose,
from among all the possible ways of losing.

Sometimes that is all there really is,
that stands between the beginnings and the ends,
aside from all the declarations,
as to what, and who, and where and when.

There are those who exemplify that freedom,
leaving me to envy their particular forms of plight.
Once I had much higher aspirations,
but they were lost in the endless fight.

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220511J
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You are the paranoid,
still guessing what keeps you pinned
in the insect killing jar
of your formaldehyde life.

Something preserves you,
but you are unable to break through
the glass jar that contains you,
limiting your movements and vision.

You grow afraid of your own theories,
as to who has put the lid on,
the confines of your little life,
always analyzing what might have gone wrong.

Nobody will tell you,
any of the real answers,
leaving you with your rosaries of fears,
counting the strings of little beads.

You have learned public denial,
acknowledging its unbounded importance,
having become the secret paranoid
afraid of revealing your paranoia.

The only friends you ever get to make,
are the ones who have no real answers.
It causes you to become afraid of asking questions,
that would make you seem too odd for them.

You have given up on revolutions,
and are only looking for a way to disappear
from every form of dissection,
dropping out of being a subject for debate.

It is that despair as to finding a pleasant exit,
becoming paranoid as to finding a way
to escape political interrogations
before your execution by the Lord.

What you want you cannot get,
and what you have they threaten to take away,
every prize fight you were dragged into
leads to defending your worthless crown.

You know you need to find the one,
before being consumed by the many.
They only eat you alive,
and you fear they will roll you for a penny.

You know you need a lesser humiliation,
that you can stand to really live with,
instead of always made to play the fool
jerked around like a puppet on a string.

You know all your fears are groundless,
in all of the official accounts,
of your rubber stamped and cancelled life,
as it slides into the paper shredder.

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220511K
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I never found the one
who really understood me,
though I looked for her everywhere.

I wanted the one
who would want to keep me alive,
long enough to enjoy being her invalid.

It is a condition of mind,
that comes from too much experience,
as to what ends up broken or fixed.

Too many different types of losses,
make me want to be free to choose
what I would actually choose to lose.

A strange kind of freedom
that has been made attractive,
by the brutal course of other events.

There are too many wounds to heal,
so she has to want me as her invalid,
so I know she will keep me alive.

All the others I came upon
were only intent at slaughter,
wanting nothing but the spoils.

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220511K
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You came only as the tease
of what I could not have,
to spoil my tastes.

You could not remain with me,
after kindling my desires,
for being thrown to such flames.

I do not know what protects me
from every sort of contentment,
the way crows protect shiny things.

I was only a discard,
pushed aside in the commotion,
in the process of being thrown away.

They way a bit of litter
is blown down the length the road
at the will of the winds.

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220511L
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Winter is the long wake
for everything that is over too soon,
when the flowers bloom
and the first buds break into leaf.

In that way we mourn the future,
while it rests under a white shroud,
everything long awaited
proving to be such brief promise.

It is always what lasts the longest
that makes the most impression,
making our lives seem too severe,
kept in that dark and cold.

Romance suffering the same penalty,
with its short lived expressions
that some of us want to stretch into forever,
only to find they are too similar to flowers.

Most of life is as winter, harsh and cold,
flowers turned to wilted remembrance
everything having passed too quickly
the way brief spring rushes past and is gone.

Perhaps it was the seasons that killed us,
the way everything ends frozen in decay.
Before the beginning comes an end,
and so we never see each other ever again.

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220511M
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There are so many ways
to cut a throat,
without using a knife.

It hardly matters
because there is so little left to say,
and most of it meaningless sounds.

Mutterings and mumblings
ineffectual insignificances,
conveying one’s own triviality.

A cluster of loosely connected carbon
carelessly thrown into a far corner
of the god forsaken universe.

The small stain on eternity,
easily swept away,
with the dust and crumbs.

Vocalizing desires,
never really led to anything,
more than a futility of language.

One becomes the erasures
of various censored out phrases,
that never make it onto the page.

Savage war cries
have rendered illegible,
anything in the idealistic footnotes.

Seems no one paid attention,
because it sounded too foreign
to their own turns of mind.

Those footnotes never meant to be read,
by anyone of any importance:
a shunned forbidden incantation.

You can be misled by ghosts
of approval,
as easily as by anything else.

The machine churns out copies
of new battle plans,
skipping bits of peace stuck in between.

All you really know
is you cannot really ever escape
the public or the personal apocalypse.

You can always watch the horsemen
riding across the headlines
of various newspapers.

If you believed there was a prize,
you know you did not win it,
disqualified by the contest rules.

Something is always lost,
for every bit of metal medal,
that you jingle in your pockets.

You feel the next bullet
hit dead center to your heart,
in a long, slow sequence of the same.

A machine gunning in slow motion,
starting at the cradle
and ending at the grave.

You throw a little dirt on yourself
as a quick sort of reminder,
that no one can ever become clean.

They got you dirtier than you were,
just when you thought it would come off
somewhere in the wash.

You give up trying to advance,
and then you simply try to hold on
to your little piece of turf.

If there was anything important
it was only a bad dream,
from which you woke up all alone.

You browse the want ads,
and the personal columns,
confessing you have become a stranger.

Your loneliness grows
from being surrounded by those
who do not understand what you need.

You could light a candle,
you could make a wish,
to emphasize your desperation.

You hang on
to what the winds try to blow away,
as you try to make something of it.

You fall the way a stone falls,
only to learn nothing will catch you,
from way down underneath.

The only hand you ever won
was a suit of cards,
and you could play the joker.

You once thought it would be different,
but now you know it never is,
and you can die from a touch or a kiss.

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220511N
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There was a time
when every dark word became true,
and every light word
was rendered false.

It proved
that the poet cannot illuminate
the poet’s own manuscript:
it only conjures up devils.

But a poet learns to play
with devils,
due to the loneliness
imposed by language.

It all began with nursery rhymes,
proving that it is true
that the dish always runs away
with the spoon.

Poetry is similar to garbage picking,
trying to rescue treasures
from out of the discarded trash
of command and control.

When you have nothing else,
you gather abandoned words,
as if you could build something
from those bits and pieces.

You find it never touches a love,
in any way you would want to touch a lover,
and words are the bricks in the walls
forming lines, cemented with punctuation.

Poetry becomes a form of possession,
similar to speaking in strange tongues,
cerebral convulsions,
threatening permanent deformities of thought.

There is no forgiveness,
for those afflicted with writing.
It serves to make them uglier,
than the ugliness that brought them there.

You can never write yourself in
to anything that anyone claims to be heaven,
but you can always write yourself into hell.
It’s the way they fixed the game.

Some people can read between lines,
to what you really meant to say.
Some are afraid to read
exactly what you said.

It’s the way it goes,
if you are not one of those on top,
but only left to floating up
from lying dead on the bottom.

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