field hollers of the dispossessed maybe it was the war that disgraceful exercise of power and duplicity maybe it was the assassinations that rocked our little niche of security there was always something i don’t know those three words have fallen from the honest lips of thinkers and wanderers i don't know great religious philosophical and political lament the first wave of what was to be called the baby boom nothing was more certain than uncertainty pioneers or more correctly guinea pigs the rock and roll generation hiding under desks in atomic bomb drills told of communist bogeymen under every bed consumed by so much confusion the bible read against kerouac on the road or henry miller read with a flashlight the brush fire became a conflagration theology displayed along with the pill everything was televised and someone on the west coast knew how to finish a sing song chant that started from the east coast the fad and the phenomena sputniks and puppets mass culture and home town simplicity far more questions than answers transitions became brick walls yin and yang graying suffering from insecurity where once it celebrated change the vine produced nothing of permanence and the smoke’s now a haze the music struggles with hints of new realities sex drugs and good old rock and roll internal themes and half crazed anthems dancing to external rhythms and field hollers of the dispossessed PRETTY POEM Write me the pretty words we’ll dissect your technique over brandy Napoleon, write me flowery images to make your point in lace and frills, tell me how Harold loves Ellen or Mary or Joe or some other dumb ass who plays your game of avoidance and fear— dodging bullets on your knees Yeah baby, write me the pretty words, intricate little images of rolling alliterative tripe and painful rhyme, it’s a cute illusion, baby, fiddle the world away and your life. NOTHING REALLY MATTERS We’re in an army friend, draftees our likes are inconsequential conscripts, ‘cause it’s us against them, again, or so the idiot says some will die, the sacrifice of soldiers and nature, nature’s in our shadow babe, the price tag cometh and it isn't pretty “it ain’t even close.” I GAVE YOU ME Woman, I love you so, I gave you me through your tinted glasses— everyone’s tinted glasses, greater love hath no man than state of the art death. LIFE’S RECKLESS SHOTS How things can escape the mind, actually being expelled while clinging to the memory, The pain of every day’s love lost the agony of losing one’s grip on reality’s thin ledge over the abyss. Love conquers all, in a cruel hoax, love doesn’t conquer it lifts and elates, but only for those who know it’s understood only when it’s not understood. THROUGH ALL AGES The path through all ages soul defiled, heartsick tradeoffs friend of mine, we make them and they make us, It’s an attitude problem, light the night, the night needs it, tell me again the wondrous story of capital’s delight, tell me of maturity, the modern man’s delusion laboring for what never was at the command of what isn’t, lacking only a participant for a fool’s trilogy— an all star trinity, yea, I love it, participatory democracy dripping blood. LOOK AWAY, LOOK AWAY People who have nothin’ fightin’ over our ideas as if they are ideals— ideals as only we saw them Yes and yea, the condition of grass after elephants battle For people with nothin’ are fighting over our ideas— ideals as we state them, It’s a mean mood running through denuded forests I know this, because we can no longer see the trees of our discontent, It’s a mean mood in hand furrowed rows through barren soil, It’s a mean world that roils through barren water. THE DOUBLE VISION INHERENT IN LESSER WORKS Images of forever in a plane piloted by real people on their way to forever or anywhere, Why don’t I see as the others see? What is my crime? Damn I tried, I think I did How is it then I feel so different? If only I’d known, yea, right, I would have done nothing different it’s been an acquired taste, for all I’ve done, I’ve done to myself. THE MAGIC OF DOUBT Livin’ the life, in the staring state of panic, free form confusion except for those times of storming cerebral dancing a dawning of stone cold heat of deep water stillness, something for the pain amid the journey -it’s a tale of wind telling tales in tall trees, and it’s about road time in the mind life on the road style of the old doubting magic, anxiety and elation coming now to rest poles apart yet united a product of cries in the dark and knowing glances on the road to oblivion. concluding existential lament today i learned that the birds most don't make it more than about a year and here i sit intent on immortality and i can't even fly |