Streaming on a Loop

I saw the worst minds of your generation

Well, fucking everywhere

Madmen in plastic pouches

Clutching petroleum purses

On pleather couches

Counting fortunes fueled

On broken backs

And acrid stacks

Pushing brinks in the night

Where forty winks nod

To the fall of all

As pens run out of ink

And droughts become floods

While beans are counted

On kitchen floors

Once teeming with life

Before antiseptic skeptics

Turned work into wonk

And tools into tech

As the walls crumble

Into bigger walls

That mock decency

Without stemming the tide

Of selfish immolation

By hordes of heads

Talking past the graveyards

Of tomorrow’s children

Their own progeny

With no escape hatch left

But to wander

And wonder

What might have been

If not for them

What the World Owes Us

Ain’t nothing but a song

Too long gone on and on

All so right it’s wrong

Coming again all undone

Leaving crumbs on the path

Window slits of fallen wrists

Soaking in the bath of salts

Emptied vaults with a twist

Running on full speed ahead

Our daily warfare over bread

Barely dead while walking alive

Can we thrive on sunken chests

In a deep dive of hungry thirsts

What’s worse we knew it hurt

Offending a past of faces replaced

On mantles defaced in disgrace

Cyber spaced out the airlocks

Culture jams and future shocks

We stopped but couldn’t halt

It’s our fault we must insist

Cracks in stories we can’t resist

Raised fist in defiant pursuit

Questions all moot in the end

Funerals for long-dead friends

Postcards unsent with rapt repent

Resenting the present all mangled

Bent anew with dreams untangled

Our newfangled old rewired binds

Left behind only to again rewind

Atlas drugged on Ginsburg’s mind

The Game

You’re not playing the game it’s

Playing you, fooling around

The bend with the judgment

Of ghosts, normalized, really

Reality agendified without a core

No bastion to restore the matter

At hand, dry land ahead before

Long lost dead oracles dreading

The shore, liminally cast at sea

In an ecotone of carbonized trees

Clones of me, and you, mechanical

Monsters of the deep, worst case

Scenarios abound so five minutes ago

Unmeasurable gaps in the serial logic

Tragic magic props up the negligible

Heroes of the macro, mercilessly metro

Mixed tape masters of retrograde petrol

Fantasies fueling micro ecstasies, high

Signs writ large under boiler plates

With fonts of wisdom reduced to memes

Shattered dreams of manufactured realms

Developed by teams of remote psychotics

Hell bent on robotics tapping into all things

Neurotic, shapelessly peddling erotic

Lingering shards of selfish othering

Quantum smothering of all fixed points

Except those anointed by immutable laws

Algorithmic problems intractable, redactable

Imminent disasters, masters of fantastic

Inevitable collapses but what if it wasn’t

Exposure

You can expose them

To war and greed

To violence and hatred

To sugar and caffeine

To viral antidepressants

And social media fetishes

To the world on a screen

To humanity’s worst

To a ravaged planet

To hunger and thirst

To toxic masculinity

And imposed conformity

To lack of imagination

To extreme desertification

To an uninhabitable world

To shattered dreams

And silent screams

And broken systems

And existential threats

Of nonexistence

But don’t ever even

Let them think

For themselves

Or to be somebody

Not off the shelf

In a world bygone madly

All mental no health

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NOTE: Not old but not new, some moment circa 2022 lapsing into the stream of thought wrought from sad-bad-mad news that spews forth from south to north. And, also, the product of sleep deprivation, overwork, underjoy, and a general sense that the math of life doesn’t add up and the world laughs uncontrollably. 😂