Month: May 2015

Mouldering

I am plagued
by repete
sickness.
I am too familiar
with the ins
and outs
of a great many
anti-biotics.
Sinus…
tissue,
lungs…
all have been plundered
by infection.
I would never have made it
in the middle-ages…
they would have buried me,
just to ease
my suffering
and save themselves.
For now
I cough endlessly
and bring up
thick,
dark-green mucus.
It feels
productive.

Withering, inside

I have a mech-suit
I wear.
It is bulky
and it let’s me
do…
just
do.
I move the heavy,
lift the things…
put stuff
in the places
that stuff
goes.
I cannot
take it off.
I am the operator
and I am trapped
inside.
I sit
at the controls;
a weak
and tiny,
puppet-master.
Some day
the mech will fail,
collapse to the ground,
and stunned onlookers
will paw
at the latches
and straps
and expose
my frail and dying
self:
“Why, he’s so small!
Just a wizened figure
gripping a felt-tipped pen….”
A sheaf of unread papers
will cascade
from my weakened grasp
and drift away.
“Who will move
the things
and lift the load
now?”
Then they wander
away.

Carrion cargo

Avoiding the traffic,
and the frustration
the freeway brings,
I run the side route
that parallels the trains.
They are loaded
with cargo
that has circled
the globe.
It used to fascinate me;
this snaking supply line.
It gives me cold chills
now.
We are no more
than a simple fault
in this line
from all-out
disaster.
We owe our daily lives,
and our life-lines,
to these far-flung links
in a chain
that increasingly
looks more like
a noose.

Tidal zone

There is nothing more beautiful
or honest
to the writer
or the reader
than the naked truth.
When both know it,
both experience it,
it makes the moment
more powerful
and real.
It can mark periods in life,
it pins them down,
so that
when you stumble upon them
(in song,
in journals,
In musings)
you recognize the brutal truth
as beautiful.
And yet…
for both the writer,
and reader,
acknowledging it,
in the moment of creation,
is almost impossible.
We are forced to wait,
’till long after
the benefit of such knowledge
has passed;
when only useless hindsight remains. We live life,
instead,
like shore-birds,
running towards the truth
when it recedes,
to peck at its leavings,
and running away
when it encroaches,
never wetting our feet.
Instead we eek out a meager living
in the tidal-zone
between
the reality of what we truly feel
and our willingness
to confront it.

Slack tide

So much advice,
always unsolicited,
to explain life
and how to live it.
I’m doing it
all wrong.
It shows.
I cannot measure
any success
by any of their
yardsticks.
I have no initiative…
no drive.
I am lazy
where I am meant to be
bold…
comfortable
where I should be
antsy.
Chances taken:
zero.
Rudderless
I have mastered dreaming.
More planning takes place
as idle dreams
and desires
but nothing concrete
emerges.
Should success
ever occur
it will be accidental
and I will need to thank
fate
or happenstance.
I have prepared
for nothing.

On the porch

A new song
on the radio…
another young voice
discovering agony…
angst.
Sometimes Los Angeles,
sometimes New York
play paramour
or
parasite
in the telling:
a place to run to
our run from.
A new voice
expressing
that the world
has already
jaded it.
But I have already ridden
this ride,
and from my rocking-chair
on the porch
I politely give
‘A’ for effort.