You are what you say; I am nothing

Now is the thrust of my disquiet
Made unceasing bitterness by bouts with nausea
and epileptic prophet-hood;
When, knowingly, lightheaded faith
Turns as the cold warrior turns
Conceding partly through half mentioned conceits
and the unbending will of a mental canker
Hushed I remain - lips sealed thinly
Intimations of perverse disillusionment
revealed as such: immense silence
Grim-visaged man footing the brink
alternating between various inactions
and various levels of stoicism
I sometimes feel as if the message
that will be my remembrance -what endures
when flesh does not and what inspires
when truth cannot - will be my most innocuous words
My most unfulfilled sentiments
And my most blatant misgivings

I can never be more than what I have become

Tell me what I need to do to become independent-minded

Obama isn't Malcolm X
Martin Luther King Jr, Jack Kennedy
or Lyndon B. Johnson
Obama is a jovial Israelite
Bill Cosby, Ice Cube
even Morgan Freeman

He's a bitter salve
Served in a flashy Happy Meal
The first Lord Regent weaned on Sesame Street
Who learned to swindle with the finesse
of insidious Ad Men

While Paul pulls punches from a place
of pure politicking - its original intention:
To convey policy, to opine openly
Some shrug indifferently
Others make a sour face
2011 wasn't Creme de menthe
2012 won't be a balm for chapped innards

The jig is up
Our number's been called
Advance in line, Knight to C7
Trip sullenly on your shoelace
Tug morosely on the sinew
Of the Last Empire

What If We Could

'It's only a matter of time,'
You said casually with the grace
Of someone who doesn't beg for listeners
Or begging for listeners, yearns quietly
With the practiced ease of a fierce conversationalist
Knowing your audience, fluttering eyelids
Smirking wryly, precisely
You brought up the tropes of my character
Fun-sized chunks of my personality:
Things I prefer - you proffer knowingly
And gauging the halting skid of my pupils
As they race and dance in the heat of relation
You apply just enough pressure
on bruised skin, to feel a surge of life again
And for people of my brood - Brothers in arms,
men/women/gender dissociates - That surge
becomes a hobby, rehearsed silently and meted out
In facsimiles of prior restraint
Then blushing with the vivacity and unfettered vigor
Of a mutt caught in the act
I tumble forward; Plunging headlong into my private regime
A jihad of such minute proportions
That ripples of struggle and aftershocks of conflicted being
Pool bitterly and stubbornly
Festoons of bygone humanity
The crisping lotus of a younger me

On the nature of things

Constituent bits of matter
From which all things rise and fall
And so doing reclaim their ancient format
Hexagonal princes, pinches of snuff
Tankards of remembrances sloshing
In a rage to be emptied, to earn immolation
We begin to end when we sense our beginning's end
Shuttling to a peak, downcast in perfection
Open a forum to the vocal majority
A mass of men with an odd death wish
whose picture of pleasure
is decadence so acute and so charged
it can hardly be called to memory
And in memoriam we jest
What enters blessed expires ash

Mercantile

I cradle misfortune in a frenzied bas relief of boredom
Mouthing a peeling phallus, puffing greedily
In the midst of broad-fisted raconteurs
Built of meatier stock and smoking stoically
I am aware of only my ass-bone
And even then I shift madly
Brushing ashes from my arms and legs
Choking with the filament of philip morris branding

That it never crossed my mind
crossed my mind as I sat
and sitting at the beginning
I started again, with a brief imitation
Of what I thought I ought to be

F5

Toward the apex
You bend to deconstruction
Find that all is none

Damn

Nanou II

I have a comfortable hand-me-down jacket
Rich with the twang of hand-rolled cigarettes
and tinted here and there by pools of coffee
dropped carelessly from trembling, inexperienced fingers
And staring up at meaningless swaths of beautiful hazelnut branches
I finger its endless oddities, that which set it apart from name-brands
and jackets shown attentive, retail-value care
It's less of me and more of where I go when me becomes too much
A portable cave of annexed ideas and thoughtful conversations
Hour-long stints of gazing mindlessly at shaggy carpeting
When I have nothing
Which is the majority of my parsed time
I suit up in the fineries of homelessness
And in the vacuum of pea-green introspection
I fulfill my needs