Friday, February 8, 2013

Bits

If a bit falls in the cloud
Before it gets any pageviews
Does it make a sound,
and if it had two million
Two months ago, did it?
Time is a mystery
Wrapped inside a gordian knot
Wrapped inside the human brain,
But the internet's a funhouse,
and our memory is a mirror.
Facebook is now, on its way to then.
Youtube is always, and never.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Half and Half

I've come to a sort of rough comfort with space
'Tween proverbial rocks and their partner, hard place.
Between need to and want to I've left some regrets,
But neither is that choice as bad as it gets.
Between want to and want to, I'm no more than half right,
and the what's wrong can never be less than half my fault.

The Consumer

I have lived decades on a steady diet of American Culture.
I have chewed on it for long hours and drunk it down in great gulps.
It is in the very air I'm breathing; immersed even now, I absorb it by osmosis,
and because I cannot push it out, I am heavily impacted.
After all, American culture is not high in fiber.

Writer's Edge

Writer's block's well-known, a failure of the whole brain.
Writer's edge is much less so, a failure of imagination,
Where I step out as far as I feel that I'm able,
Swipe at ideas just out of reach on the table.
I'm not brave enough to take a step closer to them.
I'm not fool enough to take one step closer to them.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Core Beliefs

An incomplete list of my core beliefs:

1.  I am a fifth-rate poet, pretending to be a fourth-rate poet.
I have to believe it.
It's a safety net
For a man who has lived dangerously enough to learn that

2.  Indifference is the only emotion that can't be disappointed.

Another Link in the Chain

Our starched moral rectors play dismay well,
Their mouths open, aghast at the bloody mess
Made of what they try so hard to sanitize.

First, the teens are taught to be meat puppets.
Then, we throw twenty-five of them,
An unmatched set, into a big, sweltering melting pot.
Finally, we tell them to grind it out for a year.

Didn't anyone know this is the recipe for sausage?

Friday, February 1, 2013

Watson

Donne had his sonnets;
T.S. had his tomes.
Holmes had his mysteries,
and Watson had his Holmes.
Jacques Cousteau, he had his diving suit;
Chuck Yeager had his wings.
What we search for is the same;
It's strange we'd all find different things.