In our world gone mad

In our world gone mad,
We have the thief in the night
Out in broad daylight
While we buy and sell, stealing
Away from calm and from sense.

There once was a man
From an island, it doesn't 
Matter which. This tongue 
Is the sole silhouette Time
Bequeathed to him for his trip.

The name of the place
From twenty-five years ago;
A memory's lane;
Psychoactivity's seeds
Referenced throughout childhood, why?

Cadmeian Dream

Cadmeian dream where do you hide,
  dream of founding conquerors?
Novel ideas glinting beside
  innovative conjurers;

Narrative man, marionette,
  dance a jig we haven't seen.
Reveal things we'll never forget
  when their forms in shadows lean.

Discovery bright magnetize
  kindred soldiers to a fate
Inspired, driven to strategize
  campaigns toward something great.

Where's the ancient magic now,
  once from caves of numinous
Mystique? What are we to allow
  prophecies so ruinous?

Almost everything is given,
  leading us, fascinated
To the hollow shells we live in:
  blank slates, deracinated.

Almost everything we're burning,
  and we know the fuel won't last.
We're capable of discerning 
  danger but speeding too fast.

What have we left now that we've thrown 
  it all in for knowledge? We
Toil to relearn what we've disowned 
  pursuing technology.

Technology is not what matures
  insights, compassion, or trust;
Rather it's a pipeline for tours 
  of infrastructural rust.

Culture is gone America,
  schizophrenia and ads:
Our tradition generica 
  of attention-seeking fads.

Recognition at any price;
  everything exists to sell
Cult-of-personality heists,
  hallmark of our living hell.

What's authentic and what is not,
  and more importantly—who?
This pre-apocalyptic spot:
  nothing revealed, all on view.

Systems and secrets, sabotage 
  lurking at the rainbow's end
Sculpt from the mists a drab mirage,
  and the powers play pretend.

Or are we the real pretenders,
  gaming life to build a sense
Of importance? We upenders
  who'd shake up our portents' fence?

Flattened, diluted, left to run
  aimlessly, as in a dream 
Whose conditions are cunningly spun 
  for a big business's scheme.

So what are we, and who am I,
  what makes of me a Cadmus?
Why should people rally to my
  ideas of joy and sadness?

Yet Cadmus did know who he was,
  let his nation come from fate;
Clearing my own self-concept's fuzz
  is enough to contemplate.

Something I’m trying to hold onto

Always insisting 
 on the most extreme
  nothingness,

Bitter and afraid—
 not of being ignored,
  you've never been noticed—

But of having to wait
 in the incalculable queue,
  already dwindling and gray.

Unwilling to gamble
 living in vain (until when?)
  you want another nothing? Now?

Nothing is nothing,
 yet here you are:
  something I'm trying to hold onto.

Splashes of colored ink,
 papier-mâché fantabula,
  cryptic libido,

Note taken of the yellow-
 striped grasshopper
  who climbed over your shoe.

Afraid of inertia,
 quiet home days
  indistinguishable from graves.

But we have luck, not pine,
 we have four walls and more;
  we have time.

Though we're aging, yet to emerge,
 bottle up each vintage of art
  with experience and tenderness.

Each episode
 when I call you or you call me
  in excitement, look!

The cardinal in the backyard tree;
 the woodpecker
  rapping on the windowpane.

We are small,
 but we have small things
  that can sustain us.

Since we weren't born
 into great things,
  let us accumulate

These tiny, common
 miracles anyone 
  can have, yet these are ours

And ours alone;
 when you dream of blood,
  wake up beside me.

Something Sure

Something sure is not so near 
Hunting thoughts grasp its allure.
Seeming rather very far,
Streams of wrath come curse the cure.

Despairing to make some more,
Who cares will break, squirm, and stir
Daily grinds year after year
Praying to find something sure.

Hypochondriac

I used to be a hypochondriac,
Terrified of every blemish or spot,
Until horror became insomniac
Episodes wherein mental illness fought
To drown me in its accreting onslaught.
Now you fret the appearance of a mark
On your hand, inconsolably distraught;
Compelled by anxiety to embark,
Downwardly spiralling into deep, dark
Ruminations on if it's cancerous,
Locked in deathful thoughts' inhibitive arc.
The dermatologist will answer this.
When they investigate all will be well,
We'll move on to the next paranoid hell.

There’s a hole that we know

There's a hole that we know and we want filled,
A dream that settles in the void like mist.
Somehow a cloudy rheum that distorts kissed
The comfort of a conquest we could build,
Lifetime endeavors of a heart unstilled
At the thought nothing it wants may exist
Behind that fog; there's only a clenched fist
And a flood of emotions overspilled.

Come twilight rainfall washes through the void.
Every idea is reduced into light,
Sound, senses, perceptions and paranoid 
Formulations for the brain to ignite
And cloud over again what we should see:
Not that it is there, but that it could be.