My life's become an echoplex, I'm struggling in most respects; And everything feels so repetitive While nothing near me here corrects. My life's become appetitive, And sweet addiction's sedative I pine for more in spiraling descent These days with nothing else to give. So wastefully my time is spent. So why do I accept, content Or somehow otherwise am paralyzed While life goes by without consent? The morning yesterday despised, In fog and smoke once more reprised, Conducts my life to labor and ennui; I smoke, I work, no one's surprised. What does it mean, our being free; Or living self-sufficiently? A resource-craze has birthed the paradox Of grinding daily just to be. The schedule for tomorrow knocks Upon the door and clicks the locks; And in the space I have between the shifts, My idle time reclines and mocks. Financial obligation lifts My skeleton; my spirit drifts Away entangled in monotony, In social and in corporate grifts. Restricted in autonomy And living a disharmony Of thin-stretched hours of work and love to meet Necessity: economy. It's not as if I lack conceit; The dream exists, but factors eat Into my time and leave no energy Beyond them that I may deplete. I feel the pain of urgency But not its prodding synergy. I grind my life down only to subsist, Not further any strategy. And even if I should persist With grasping hand or flicking wrist, Don't I maneuver vainly in this way Of tracing paths to windows missed? Am I improving from this play? But if there's nothing I can say, What image can I conjure but of ash And dreams primordial as clay? Am I the sophomoric splash That flattens out beyond the flash Of an initial ripple that could hold Some promise past its passion's crash? Am I the song that grows so old, Whose scant dimensions have been told? What differentiates or gives me worth, Or would should I not feebly fold? *** It's true that I accept a dearth Yet still expect a holy birth Of romance from a hidden chrysalis To somehow blossom for my mirth. Perhaps I am duplicitous To think my love is not amiss, To think that he could give me what I want Beyond a cure to loneliness. I am deserving of the taunt Of his desires, and how they daunt Me in a mirror image of my own– The masculinity that haunts. The femininity that's sewn Into my being has postponed It all, and his ensures I'll ever yearn To hear the penetrating moan. But the affection he returns Becomes enough; the ember burns, And while I breathe I cannot let it die. It's his to nurture or adjourn. Suspended in his seeing eye, I languish in the need for lye, For turpentine, an absolution's cleanse That for my faults may rectify. The world is in my dirty lens And cricking cracks its backwards bends In the reflection that we give ourselves– Projecting, meeting means not ends. What wisdom follows folly's delves To meet the self-fulfilling hells, The products of our gray proclivities, The frightful turn of number twelve? Unique our sensitivities That on us in our weakness seize Like physics' limits, nature's prophecy, Those subtle, secret properties. I can't explain the mental key That lies beyond the frothing sea Of stimulation and analysis; I'm ignorant as poppy seeds. But now as deuteragonist Of our shared lives, paralysis, My former comfort, echoes in his ear The stasis of his lone abyss. How is it I can interfere? A voice from outer atmosphere, The wind-tossed poet on the utter fringe Whose vision isn't very clear. My airy words, could they impinge? Do those with dreams like his astringe? Assuredly. Question's how to bridge the gap That gives his life its hopeless tinge. When we awaken from this nap, At last allow our wings to flap, What form will be revealed the clarion– A murmur or a thunderclap?
A place for my poems 