New Poem: 12/22/09 (Untilted)

Here stands
a 14-year-old boy
first souljacked into wonder
at the waterfall's pool
and spent 30 years
trying to translate the unspeakable
unlikely fusion of joy and terror
that kept his soul spinning
after everyone else around him
put their souls in Park,
in hock to a system
that revved their engines to the breaking
point, pointed
to a horizon they'd never reach,
and convinced them they were going
somewhere. here,
there is no quest to create a following,
the folly of a flock of sycophants
who really only want a slice
to fit into their pie-shaped
pinwheel grafts,
that would make the Mystery
a piecemeal thing, exchangeable
for something extra in the bank.
here stands
a culture, one foot in the cradle,
one foot in the grave,
pissing on everything in between,
libertyandjustice4all who
fall safely between its brackets,
pigeons so comfortable
in their pigeon holes
that falling outside the lines of the design
becomes a crime.
i want to be dangerous.
i want to be Grendel to the status quo.
i want what that 14-year-old edition of me
saw and heard so clearly,
an outsider invited to the inside
of a feast surpassing
anything the elite can create as a distraction.
tell me of this "real world"
tethered tightly to the mentronomes
and claustromethodical chronometers
where i can happily exist as "eccentric"
as long as i am "harmless,"
as long as i play by its rules;
telll me
that only fools believe there's
anything else,
that i'm jeopardizing my livelihood
by refusing to play the game . . .
i'll tell you of a wonder beyond myth
that mocks the feeble mathemanics
of monetary rule,
that "harmless eccentrics"
are like museum exhibits, animatronic wannabes
that only amuse,
that only fools would sacrifice
their liveliness
for something that cannot live at all . . .
yes, it makes one dangerous
to those who think they have it all
when they've never knelt
at t he waterfall
and found more joy
than their cupped hands could hold,
more Mystery than words
have ever told.

Rearranging the Landscape (Yeah, another long-winded rant, just deal with it)

We've dug a hole, collectively, and we're pulling the dirt in over our heads. And anytime anybody shows us a way to climb out, we take our shovels and kill him or bury him under the dirt to shut him up. You know, I wonder why God always gets our "sloppy seconds." We wheel and deal, and when that doesn't work, we manipulate behind the scenes, and when that fails, we put on the "poor me" show . . . and when everyone stops falling for that, we increase the self-victimization until we alienate even the most stalwart of friends . . . and then we come crying to God. I mean, when He got to me, there wasn't much left to work with . . . so, if what you see before you looks like a wreck of a man held together with spit and baling twine, that's just me. If I seem at all to speak well or eloquently, THAT'S the miracle, that Poetry breathes through the likes of me. The world needs poets who, like outlaws, rearrange the landscape. Like terrorists . . .and although one could argue that plastique and bullets are immediately more impactful and thus more effective, words have shifted spiritual and emotional landscapes like rapid-moving glaciers since the dawn of time, before bigots and tinpot tyrants ever earned the name "dinosaur." The emotional energies that power this machine are furious in the extreme, insatiable, and usually ungrateful of what they receive. It's never enough, is it? Vicarious living at your fingertips, television and world-wide-web, landscapes and terrain erased to create space for a mini-mall that's a clone of every other mini-mall . . . access to goods and knowledge is practically unlimited . . . so why the fuck are you so mentally bankrupt? These are the clinics where they operate on your brain, and with all the assholes out there who throw bombs in response to abortions, how come nobody's bombing THOSE clinics? You catch and cage every thought you have, strangling them with the umbilical cords of your broad-band intentions and short-spanned attentions . . . because if one of them survives, you might develop something like perspective, and if that happened, you'd have to be HONEST and face the fact that you're DAMNED by the very engines you built to pave your way to a pseudo-paradise that was never worth living OR dying for! How many of you are already walking around, bought and sold, not even missing the soul they're sucking out of you from every television set, every political media whore, every Mega-Macro-Store, the whole damn lot of them vampires, and you not only invited 'em in, you let them have a house party! Slap a brand on me, a scarlet P for poetry, make me wear it on my forehead in the streets--right next to the L that's apparently already there . . . not that you'd ever have any trouble figuring it out, when I'm ranting loud enough on the subway to make people back away from me, when I compose poetry while I'm chasing two parakeets around in the pet store I work in trying to convince myself that I'm not just a manager trainee, I'm a POET, dammit, a POET, and someday, if you stupid fuckers don't finish the job of ruining the world, maybe I'll be able to reshape a piece of the landscape . . . not for a monument to myself, there's too many people in that business already, and unlike a lot of others who claim to be Christians, I have some concept of "humility," which is basically "A man's got to know his limitations," and brother, I know mine--most of 'em I learned the HARD way. I've seen the way people bristle, the way they're picking up their shovels and pickaxes where they've been working on that mass grave for humanity, ready to commit murder in the name of the System, the icon of their Idolatry, as related by the Industry Standards and Ratings and Product Tie-Ins, combining to create a revolution-proof culture-condom. I know what it means, and I'll bet YOU know what that means, and if you mean what you say when you say "by any means necessary," then now's the time to start arming yourself with what you know, because the next war that will be fought will be for the space between your ears. Just because resistance is futile doesn't mean that it's not an obligation--it IS an obligation, and even if everything I fight for is a "lost cause". . . at least I know where I am.