Setting Priorities

It seems like when money talks,

Those with less better take a walk.

When money runs the culture,

You're always on the clock.

When setting priorities, some repair

To due dates, or first person there,

Without loyalty, judgment or wisdom,

Though if nothing else, it's fair,

But when I'm with a friend, at a game, in the hall,

and interrupted for somebody's phone call,

Unless it's a family emergency,

How can I help but be appalled?

Memory Games

Mensa recommends a mind-palace for memory games,

But I come home to a mind that looks more like a cave.

It's, to most, uninviting. There's no doorbell–no door.

Staying in means enduring hard, uneven floors.

It's rough, dark, and downhill, more descent than a ride,

and I'm so gutless, even I don't know what's inside.

Girls Girls Girls

There are girls who dance deftly across stage's center.

Others sit in eyes' corners, just waiting to enter.

There are friends I might like to cast in new roles

And betrayers whose grasp emptily, sound depths of my soul,

Go-out girls and stay-in girls, for my glutton and sloth,

Girls like Liberty Poem, made up from whole cloth,

Desirees with desires, from here to earth's end,

But the ones that mean something, they remain now as friends.

Sins Three and Six

Of the sins, are three and six genetic, or are they learned?

Are our desires born onto our silver tongues, or are they earned?

Some people want based on who has those things, and how they make them seem.

Some people want what's shiny, to see others watch it gleam.

Some people want some things just so their enemies can't have them.

Some single-minded avarice can snatch people, can kidnap them,

While other peoples' deepest wants change slowly, over seasons.

Suffice to say that human greed knows all the forms and reasons.

It takes four quarters for a contest, and four decades for a rival.

Is wanting more than the other guy has a habit, or more primal?

The Man on the Ground

I wonder what it is like

To be the man on the moon,

To be the vanguard of vanguards,

To be outnumbered by emperors

and even by messiahs,

and thus by greatness to be made alone.

I wonder, because I know only the crowd.

I know how it is to be dull, to be stunted,

Only sometimes inspired, but every time loud.

I know only the life of the man on the ground.

The Man on the Moon

I wonder what it is like

To be the man on the moon,

To be the vanguard of vanguards,

To be outnumbered by emperors

and even by messiahs,

and thus by greatness to be made alone.

A Timeless Nothing

My writing is an empty gesture.

The din of the crowd will eat it.

My writing's a timeless nothing.

Once online, the whole world can't delete it.

I can't write anything meaningful.

My soul's still empty, though I feed it.

I can write anything I want,

'Cause who in the heck's gonna read it?