Cemetery of Unbecoming

 I'm in a holding pattern, 

turning in unending circles

 despite myself 

Chasing tail through unlearned lessons

 in determined quest to bite myself.

Spending days in distraction

 finding ways not to hurt myself.

Re-living debauched memories 

in urgent search to find myself.

This is the Cemetery of Unbecoming 

Buried seeds of lust and longing

Unmarked passes made and missing

Moldering in bargain bins

While single magpie loveless sings.

Muddy boots, palms blistering

I'll take a little risk again

Disinter this interest and

Allow myself a fix again

Basest of humanity; 

faceless forms flick rapidly

through catalogues of flesh on screens;

engorge on empty lechery.

Perspectives over-pinned and tucked;

present the organs you want sucked 

or maybe you will do the sucking…

Anything to break the fucking 

tedium.

And if not flesh; what then, what's next?

Which path to clear a heart perplexed?

To undermine a mind obsessed 

with poisons?

 I can't destroy them 

After all the things they've done, 

Ever-present accompaniment 

Greasing the slips, licking their lips

Instilling distillery dictatorship 

Placing their bets while I plant my regrets

Supplanting my honour with guilty cold sweats.

Necromantical nectar 

Throat golden with glamour.

This pyre of promises - 

 beacon of rancour.

Flare in the fumes of a belly distended

Expose silhouette of your soul villipended

And scorched scarlet afterglow cheeks unrepentant 

Luminate languishing lustful intentions.

The fuel for destruction’s the same as creation.

Energy unspent explodes in frustration.

Witness

I am swallowed by my bitterness

and I swallow it

in this fractal frame of failed relationships.

Cynicism soothes my wounded seat on shelf.

I can’t stand going out.

I’d rather sit here by myself.

I’m past all the politics,

all the pitifully petty pecks of poison.

I’ve destroyed some neural pathways -

traumatic mistakes in my past days -

I’m taking small steps to start to fix them.

Small steps are fine, but small talk is a human affliction.

Fill the air with comforting fiction:

soulless banality hosed down and repeated as wisdom

by those who love to speak but have never learned to listen;

giving advice even they don’t believe in.

It’s deceiving

telling everyone you’re

Fine

all the time. It’s not

Honest.

Holding back - substitution of feelings in place of facts.

Illogical reasoning misleads and distracts.

Choreographed outward expression to avoid exposing inner lack

of belonging.

This wrongling has always felt that gap.

When I started reading Phillip K Dick

I felt seen. Something in me clicked and it all made sense.

Let’s just say, for argument’s,

that you understand

how it feels to live life as a grain of sand.

Watch unreactive distracted citizenry

wail and gnash and wring their hands;

apathetically prophetic taking knees 

instead of making stands.

Trembling. Waiting for breath.

And when it comes, the hurricane howl ignites the spite that underlies society.

Sparks to the skies, and hang sobriety!

Times of extremes clouding clarity of conviction.

If we’re all victims, 

Then surely we’re all, too, perpetrators.

Ears filled with these half-baked statements of journalistic tinnitus

pushing the same old them-and-us.

Propaganda pervasive; twas ever thus.

Psychological soundbites and deep cuts.

And as above, so below. 

On a personal level, it’s starting to show.

Look among you! Do you even know

how many are masking? How many know?

For all of the feeling that’s public displayed

how little is shown when the mind’s whirr is stayed?

This adrenaline engine is seemingly binary:

tectonic plate movement rate

or warp times infinity.

Where is the nuance? Where the gradations?

Where are the plateaus and smooth undulations?

Youth speaks in infinites, we speak in finalities.

Counting up daily accounts 

of fatalities.

Powerless but to bear witness 

to all of it.