They All Look the Same

Whether bulls and crescent stars, or lame old donkeys and elephants

Surrounded by a sucking cyclone of superfluous sycophants

Speaking for a cabal of corrupt and crass and callous cads

By violating viewers' vision with a myriad of dreary ads,

They all trade on our worst fears so, we'll trade in our freedom.

I really hate election years, although I guess I know we need 'em.

Check Your Six

I promise I won't let the trash sit for days.

I promise I won't smoke 'til our house sits in haze.

I promise I won't ever say you look fat.

I promise I won't trash your friends or your cat.

I promise I won't just watch baseball all day.

I promise I'll go look for work right away.

I promise I won't blow you off all the time.

I promise I won't put our business online.

I promise I won't be charmed away by another.

I promise I won't come between you and your mother.

I promise that soon, I'll come to the point of this rhyme:

I promise this won't be like last time.

Consciously Irrational

The facts are in, though they've never been out.

The facts that came in can suit only doubt.

The fact that you're still green, and I am nearly ripe,

The fact that you aren't, and won't be, and couldn't be my type,

The fact that I'm a swelling oval, and you're parallel lines,

They give me little pause, just enough to say “it's fine.”

The fact that I can't bear what you believe,

The fact that you'd prefer I leave,

The fact that you're a completely different breed,

They cool my mind, but not my need.

20/40

As friends graduate, move on, my mind dwells on the road.

I've traveled parts with people; in the whole length, I'm alone.

It's best traveling light on such uncertain paths.

Once confident in the route, God changes it fast.

If you asked me a year ago what I'd be doing today,

I'd say almost the same thing, just half a world away.

Hindsight's not just 20/20. It's the luxury of rest.

And foresight, done at high speed? 20/40 at best.

Why I Write, Part x+260: Why I Unwrite

In my youth drawn by song into meter and rhyme,

But with no sense of my place in it, and no sense of time,

I've learned to treat great masters' sweat-born inventions

As an Empire to fight against, as merely conventions,

So I cover over them, thinly connect them, bite into them, a spider.

I'm no author of record. I'm only the unwriter.

Playing Doctor, Pt. 2

Diagnosis: Mood disorder that doesn't exist.

Symptoms Include: Tendency to insist

On passionate wording of grand declarations

Announcements, pronouncements, and their explanations;

Attempts to regale you with tales of past glories,

Or at least entertain you with shaggy-dog stories;

Preferring my eyes' lies to other, wiser senses;

Ignoring the banalities of income and expenses;

and disdain for life, contemning days and nights

For you, and somehow thinking that it's right.

Playing Doctor, Pt. 1 (Why I Write, Part x+259)

Diagnosis: Mood disorder that doesn't exist.

Symptoms Include: Tendency to insist

On passionate wording of grand declarations,

Announcements, pronouncements, and their explanations;

Attempts to regale you with tales of past glories,

Or at least entertain you with shaggy-dog stories;

Preferring my eyes' lies to other, wiser senses;

Ignoring the banalities of income and expenses;

and disdain for life, contemning days and nights

To write.