Peace is of puzzles
All scattered
Before me
When war
Was more formerly
Stories
To bore me
And poor getting poorer
The norm
Uncontested
Made sense
But incensed
Nonetheless
We’ve invested
A fortune
Of favors
Engraved
In our labors
Subjected,
Subtracted,
Enslaved
By day traders
Invaders
Advance
From each angle
Except
When the mangled,
Star-spangled reign
Steps to the left
Because then there’s the problem
We solve them
Unarmed
And we educate,
Raise them
To raze
The alarm
Should its nightmarish
Blaring
Scaremongers
Come knocking,
Its gun-cocking,
Crack-rocking,
Lawbreakers
Mocking
The locked
Ballot box,
The tik-toks,
The youth lost
Yet to feed them
Spare change
Is all that it would cost

Let’s pretend
We trend to like
We tend to
Mostly
Playing nice
The sprawling
Fallen
Paradise
A part of nature
All its own
We decimate
This one true home
Insisting in the cloud
To save us
As we let the lords
Enslave us
Digging graves
Like Vegas babes
Keep track of time
Like meter maids
Still underpaid
And overworked
And haunted
Everywhere we’ve lurked
By what a curse
It is to live
To be this me
With more to give
Yet gifted with
A lesser power
All the universe
Is ours

Not a moment I dwell
In the ruminant shrooms
Can renew the same feelings
I think are of you
Could be minutes a day
A mere glimpse of your dimple-cheeks
Smiling away
Or immeasurable hours
Of city-star gazing
Intoxicated
By your humorous raven
Your optimist inner peace
Playful voice sacred
Melodically lulling
My cares to your side
You confided so quickly
In me and I’ve tried
To enrapture and capture
Each moment and value it
More than I ever would
Meaningless other ****
Just to behold in my hands
Your complexion
To make you the queen
Of my darkest dimension

The optimists are cute
But so incredibly naive
They think themselves
The fullest living
As they’re dying to believe

Don't run from the darkness
Or hide from the light
Feel the wind in your hair
Like an eagle in flight
Hear the streams serenade you
With rivers of force
Go get lost in the jungle
Then chart a new course
Through the pages of time
Through the infinite void
A celestial God
In the shell of a droid
As you anthropomorph
Into going bananas
Embark on safaris
Of conscious savannas
So give us a roar
Young lion, with pride
Your spirit is taking
A wildebeest ride
A stampede in each stride
You step into unknowns
Of intelligent life forms
At home in their zones
Stoking firestorm surges
And blastin' the tunes
An explosion of colors
And sweet sonic blooms
To share in the moments
Of one with the earth
The umbilical cord
That was severed at birth
And now reconnecting
With wireless friends
To sentient shut down
Micro-processing trends
With a macro perspective
On worlds of deception
To scale heaven's size
To the peak of perfection

Even when
I do not
Seem to have you
I do
I step with you in stride
Every day I get through
I contain you inside
My sole essence of being
And restless I think of you
Always as leaving
Me grieving, in search of
The tallest of peaks
To behold of your splendor
It renders me weak
And depleted, worn, weathered
And weary ascending
Still ardently seeking
Your love never-ending

A dissident,
Intricate lyricist
Implements
Policy
Volubly
Imposing prose,
And inciting
In writing
Takeovers
In droves,
Turns the drones
Into dawning red rovers
And clones
Who fawn over
The radical zeal
When she feels
Like berating
Opponents'
Ill logos appeal
To pure reason
In teaching it
Languages learn
To articulate grievance
In slashing
And burn

Never was one for the activist,
Always was more of a pacifist
Grabbin this’
Tinkering with all the ins and the out of its
Spittin’ specifics on how to break out of it
Trapped in the bottom of poverty’s shopping spree  
Gravity fadin’ to zero no stoppin’ me
Always want up but no social nobility
Still seein’ oceans as far as the eye can see
Spannin’ each day on the faith of infinity
Home was an island adrift in reality

My pen is a paintbrush
   My pain is the colors
The void is my wedding
   The stars are my lovers
My vow is unfaithful
   My *** is undead
The rain is my offspring
  The clouds are my bed
My breath is a dragon
  My pulse is a viper
The ledge is an eagle
  The bullet, a spider
My drink is a nightmare
  My drug is a dream
The drought is an ocean
  The flood is a stream
My wit is a dagger
  My grin is a cloak
The story is tragic
  The end is a joke

Altering actions,
Projections,
Directions
Trajectories take
To deliver their lessons
Impose inquisition
Through force
And charisma
Convince you to
Lie, cheat and steal
An enigma
Required
To masterfully wield
The exertion of pressure
Agendas fulfilled
But it doesn’t take geniuses
For me to be
In control of the outcomes
Unanimously

Been making a statement
Since chalk on the pavement
Erasing complacent
Content in my basement
Been searching for famous
Since pen hit the paper
A COINTELPRO
Expose’ prose’n muckraker
No stake in your stockholder
Meeting this evening
Just cuttin’ deals laced with
A little left-leaning
Obscene acts of terror
Each letter a crime
A defacement of privatized
Property swine
Dispossessed but of rhyme
Like the spirit of Marti
Till I’m callin’ party boss
Shots of Bacardi

Mind
Corporeal shell
Carnal desire cell
Within temporal confines dwell
Imprisoned

Just try to do some good they say
Just do the right thing
Even if you do it
In the wrong way

Forget the way she made you feel
As mighty as a mountain
Throw away the memories made
Like pennies in a fountain
See her face begin to blur
And fade into the distance
Never reach her rising sun
That powered your resistance
Tell yourself you weren't worth
An ounce of her serenity
Change your mask until she sees
Your ugliest identity
For somewhere in the wilderness
You've both yet to discover
Could perhaps in waiting lie
Each others' truest lover

She seems to be drawn
To the tricks of my trade
To the art of my craft
To the cast of my shade

Like a moth to the flame
Of my flickering hope
Like a fiend to the drug
Of my slippery *****

Perhaps it evokes
Some chemistry questions
Addicting the senses
To crave my expressions

Reflecting the vision
She couldn't imagine
Would be chasing tales
Of my lurid sol dragon

Abandon the wagon
And blaze your own trail
With no holocaust
To my unholy grail

Come sail the exhale
Of my genesis breath
Come surf across brain waves
Of my ego death

But prepare to be swept
In my undertow's wake
When I rise and I fall
Like the tides of daybreak

Forsaken we'd make it
A night with each other
But no stars could fake it
My true sunlight lover

Until final lines
Of dialogue
Eat me alive
May I struggle to find
The right words to describe
Should we come to conclusions
That we’re out of time
May we still take a moment
To savor the wine
And when us
Is but remnants
Of dust
And decay
May our love at long last
In its resting place
Lay

Maybe it’s not meant to be
Monogamy
Or even love
Maybe we’re not supposed to be
The perfect pictures we dream of

Imperial as penguins
Spending half the world away  
And then returning after learning
How to make each other stay

For such a special little pebble
Like a diamond in the rough
But I have lionized my heart
And now this rock is not enough

And so I offer you my Mughal sun’s
Dynastic vagabond
As it sets upon Gangetic plains
Absconding far beyond

My eyes’ unfaithful iron curtain
I am certain
Will divorce us
Intercoursing through the person
Who renews the vows’ resources

Relief is a rare
All too scarce
Food source here
When it’s clear
I can simply say no
And refrain
From more deigning
To bend over
Backwards
In vain
All I gain
Is a thankless
And bankless crusade
And as much as it shames me,
Still going unpaid
Is becoming each zero sum
Dollar a day
An astray-
Course diverting
Me back to the grave
Like a masterless slave,
An unbidden submissive,
An outspoken critic
With no one to listen
To facts and statistics
Concise explications
Disowning the system
Excoriations
I can’t wait
To be free of this place
And be rid
Of the service
I still think
I owe to these kids
Who don’t give
Half a shred
Of the ****
That they live in
If I live or die
Or reply to the piddling
Remarks as I try
To remember alive
Not just how to survive
On this sustenance pittance
Somehow they can thrive
I just work
At this no-purpose
Circus deprived
Of a ring leader,
Just a few teachers
And creatures
All acting like
Shows must go on
When the bleachers
Devoid
Of a care or concern
Like the clown
Who can’t seem
To turn frowns
Upside down,
Is in town

I started with feelings
Then worked my way down
Severing ties with each chord of my heart
And in limited contact with pleasure and pain
I learned how to reform it
And tear it apart
Till the one who first broke it
Sees only my name
And remembers how eagerly
I sat awaiting
Her presence of penance
Allure captivating
My instinctive intrigue
Enveloping entropy
Nevermore sure it was her I’d endure
The way she would dig in my skin with her purr
And her wine glassy shards
Of retractable claws
That bent all of my will
And revealed all my flaws
From another past lover
Who left me my heart
Still intact, beating fast
But as hard to predict
As a weather forecast

Afternoon thunderstorms
Burst on the scene
But vanish before
But a lightning bolt seen
And all we can do
Is await it to dissipate
Listen to it
Hit the steel roofing corrugate
Anticipate when the sun
Again shows its face
Maybe this evening
A fleeting glimpse setting
And hopefully heralding
Midnight tranquility
No later torrential
Waking calls
Chilling me
Down to the bone
Guaranteeing tomorrow
I can't charge my phone
For the power again
Will be absent 'till when
I know not
Deprivation from
Illumination will end
And then I can pass time
Blankly staring at screens
Until afternoon thunderstorms
Burst on the scene again

What does it all matter
Religion and science
The future is now
And the gods are behind us
Reminding us where we let
Faith conquer fact
And believed only some higher powers impact the track record of humans in union
Just Trumans in ruins
Betrayed constitutions
And freedom illusions
In each revolution

Until at the grass roots we grow a new movement
To rise up and wake up the slumbering giants
The common man’s struggle to topple the tyrants, we’ve done it with violence, but never with silence
But in reconciling the ghosts of our past
With the differences in all the shadows they caste
We can iconoclast the plastic misconception
That all of our saviors need win an election
To bail out oppression with jail cell detention
And hush any mention of selfless expression

When bullets are ballots and money is mallets, then liberty’s truth is injustice for all
We can fall to our knees and praise be to a wall
Or measure the magic in this crystal ball
If we keep seeing fortunes and fame
On the brain, then the lions we tame will in vain take the blame
And all of us lose the food chain waiting game
As I share my Thomas Paine going insane

Buyer beware
Oh, you're in for a scare
When I tell you your hair
Does not need that much care
That your phone
Doesn't need to cost
More than your home
That those things that you own
And you don't even use
Are as faulty and paltry
As what's on the news
That your new pair of shoes
Is the bare feet of poverty,
Your right to choose
Is some Lot in Life's Lottery
Stocking your shelves
With the Keebler Elve's spells
And stuffing your stockings each year,
Jingle bells
Someone else's expense
Isn't worth your two cents
You dispense it like dreams
Of the white picket fence
While the industry picks at your pockets
Unheeded
Insurances claim extra coverage is needed
To breathe and to read
The fine print on the label
Approved FDA chemical
Farm to table
Just turn a blind eye
To the advertise lies
Inundating your eyes
With disguised dollar signs
Like some supersize fries
Fill you up for five minutes
Then leave you as empty
As when you first bit it
The infinite Amazon
Shopping mall pantheon
Built to the corporate gods
Of Emoticon
Keeping you spending, and clicking,
And liking,
And posting,
And boasting,
But mostly just psyching
You out of reality
Plastic-wrapped packaging
Boxed in a fallacy
Now shipping free
Who they want you to be
Just a product to brand
For the others to see
You consuming it all so
Conspicuously

And I brought all the words
That I needed to say
Dare I form them
Some rather
Material way
Some ethereal sway
Taken hold
Of my hand
And with dexterous
Penmanship
Each inky strand
Made its mark on the page,
Freed my soul from its cage
And let spill the life force
By the edge of my blade
Let it flow unreservedly
And
Unrelenting
Instilled
In serenity’s
Solace lamenting
And still
In calamity’s
Calming
Fomenting
A wrath only I
Could begin to describe
And a madness
Of malice
Too warped to decide
Which is which
Who is who
Where to go
What to do
In an infinite void
There is merely
Beware
We are here
We are now
We are locked in its glare

Type caste system arch villain chillin’ like Ivan
The terrible chemical weapon describin’
The end of the world vibin’ lionized Mayan
Still skyin’ as high as a Lucy blood diamond
Fine dinin’ and winin’ with sabhines and sirens
Declinin’ these Roman Republican tyrants
A stubborn ******* beast of burden survivin’
Like ghosts of the guillotine dreamer revivin’
Enlightenment vivid with livid land minin’
Kaboomin’ the gloom when I see these kids dyin’
Just tryin’ to weather this Stormy norm climate
A violent sea risin’ and still you deny it
The science, in favor of implicit bias
Your nation-hate patriot ******* riot
Your ravenous consumer media diet
Your guns and your slaves, all your property private
Your for-prophet poverty trap spreading virus
Your silence of lambs in the face of Goliath
My sting with that sling got’chu feelin’ defiant

Satiate your need for greatness
Not in gilded glory
You must never let society
Best sell your famous story
For no store-bought thought is novel
Lest it come first from the shelf
And no god can be believed in
Lest it come first from the self
For you must look within and then without
Identify the villains
Fight the battles no one has
Against the other billions
Who count upon the dying light
To offer its illusion
To illuminate the hopeless night
Rewriting their conclusion
In a new, exclusive twist of plot
To drop mouths to the floor
When really not-so happy endings
Have been done before
And will be told for eons more
And be forgotten all the same
And so I roar into the cosmos
And I make it fear my name
This epic tragedy, a comedy
I laugh at the abyss unknown
Existence is my kingdom come
Mortality’s my throne
And in remembrance ballads sung
Throughout the ages that proceed them
Are the legacies I leave behind
Now you just have to read them

Not veracity
But frequency
Determining
The truth
And it is just
How many times
The jingle ringing
Ears of youth
Have heard
Routinely
What is schemingly
Alluring
And seductive
And its limiting
Abilities
To reasoning
Deductive
What its function
Is inherently
To pacify
The meek
But in reality
Adherents
Are empowering the weak

Lost inside the silent nights
And deafened days
Spent waiting for the end
Of this journey I set out to find
The way out of this maze

Still wandering the corridors
And hallways in the dark
Nostalgic is each move I make
Then out into the light I step
This place has made its mark

On this vagabond unbound
By the shackles of the past
Though the wanderer remains
I have found the will to lead
Me from these shadows that he casts

Can do
Almost anything now
For a profit
The older I get
The less likely
I stop it
This urge
To encourage
The remonstrance
Resonance
Counter-intelligence
Twisted
Its gifted
Most fervent
Resistance
Enlisting in
Anthropomorphic
Existence

As I ponder the mysteries
Question the answers
Entranced by enormity’s
Drawn-to-scale terms
They take turns
In their petty,
Pathetic
Concerns
As I’m turning each page
To disturb me,
Disrupt
What I just want to seek
Not to share
Nor explain
Nor would I deign to teach
For to do so
Would merely be
Lessons in vanity
Man in his vapid
Evaporations
Condescendingly
Rising in higher-formed
Hubris delusion
To elevations
Far above
What the students
Of even
The most of well-grounded,
Eclectic
Diverse juvenescence
Have ever expected
Of class is in session
From me
Or the host
Of these Holy Ghost preachers
Pretending
We’re of degrees equal
In kinds
Of mind-bending
The will of the people

Been a minute
Since I took
Half a second glance
And looked
At what resides in each of us
Beneath the surface feature stuff
Reflecting on the one who I
Became, the same brain stimuli
Still unified in all but form
Perplexing, cogent lightning storm
Projected from my eyes, the sun
To wash away what they had done
And none could cast their shade
In my direction
For I was remade
Rejuvenated in the glade
And stayed this way
As far away
From them I journeyed on astray
And lost all track of time
I lost my mind
Intelligent design
Had redefined my evolution,
Elevation
To divine
And the creation
Making gods of us
Revealed itself
As humankind

The boots and bombs
First dropped in Nam
By order of the best of us
The king-elect who earned our trust
With pacifistic vision quests
The family values kind of guy
Was old and rich
Misogynist
And still you people wonder why
Demands can not be met with this
Depression-causing
Greatness cyst

Not blind,
But perhaps
Blind ambition became
The undoing for which
We remember their name
The ones who inspired,
Commanded great legions
But made far more graves
Than they ever made
Freedmen
With exploits of legend
Like food for the masses
And earth could be heaven’s
Equivalent rations
But flags they were wrapped in
Were packaged for sale
And utopian dreams
Weren't drawn to full scale
Only drawn to the power
Corrupting ideals
And then gone in the flames
Was the heart that it steels

Lacking some vital components
Of sustenance
Constantly grouchy and drowsy
Because of it
Body reduced to
Cadaverous, frail
Lazy muscles but hustle
Do I without fail
At the crack of each dawn
In the dewy, brisk chill
Run an hour on empty
And then get my fill
Of the daily bread rations
Potassium passionate
Fruit satisfaction
With just a few spoonfuls
Of protein combined
With this breakfast of champion's
Everyday grind

I am chaos
I am the substance from which your scientists and artists build rhythms
I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy
I am chaos
I am alive
And I tell you
You are free

Give up and quit
You want to stop writing
Put down the pen and just call it a Nightingale Lightning bolt failure
To spark any bulbs in the attics and
Basement’s creative misplacement
Still can’t seem to find my mind’s
Goodest vibrations

What if love
Was just fragments
Mere figments
Imagined
What draws bodies close
To embracing
Impassioned
Would tragic
Just typify
How it concludes
We confuse its temptation  
With swinging of moods
Could illusions
Enamor you
More than a kiss
What possessive delusions
Compel us to this
Missing piece,
Wishing more,
Holding dear,
Longing for
Bore the weight of its loss
Like misplacing one’s mind
And therein
It shall stay
It’s in one
We must find

Always the mind
Of a younger man
Mine
Has become suddenly
A much older one’s
Spine

Press on
And you may
Live to see
Victory
But defeat teaches more
And comes quite naturally

More passer
Than dribbler
The scritch and scratch
Scribbler
My flow is a river
In come what May
Winters
I swim in the shiver
And even in bloom
All my numinous
Withers
My luminous
Gloom
Still obscured
To the witness
My freakiest nature
Survivalist
Fitness
A wishlist
Of ashes
Compassion
Impulse
And with tact
My collapsing
Synapses
Convulse

Picturesque starlit skylight
By day I dream, by night I write
And long to take the raven’s flight
Bespectacled in lights so bright

Where I surmise she may devise
Some semblance of the dawning’s rise
With me in mind, as I abide
By time’s fair-weather friendly guise

Alluring in enduring youth
Rebel like hell, but fear no truth
Resist temptations to reboot
The formal matrix agent suit

Out here among the simple folk
The cattle driven burden’s yoke
As I the boy who pride bespoke
Still rolls his mortal boulder joke

Awoken once again to end
The sullen reveries I’ve penned
Behind these compound walls defend
The powerless to my will bends

You know it when you see it
When you reach it
When you be it
Do not chase it
But embrace it
You have just begun to taste it
Let it spiral from the heavens
And consume you in its gaping
Mind-erasing, soul-escaping  
Divination of creation
As you sink into the sands
Of a permanent vacation

The wretchedest recklessness civilized savage
Still life of the dead party politic Ba’athist
On acid dispellin’ out
Truth sarin gases
A flask full of blasts from the way passed Jurassic
A passive assassin
Amassin’ a chemical
Weapons grade cache
And then armin’ the youth
With a freshly baked batch
Of this back of the class
To the top of the caste
Stubborn *******’
Cultural iconoclast
Smashin’ bumpkins
And bumpin’ my tunes
On the track
Cashin’ in on the super PAC
Alternate fact
In the ashen green pastures
Of post-truth Iraq
I got stacks of sealed caskets
Of old me’s I buried
And tales of the lost souls
To Hades
I’ve ferried
For taxes from cryptic coin cons
Cemeteried

There must be some questions remaining
With answers that wonderful brain is Abstaining
From asking the beings above you
Their nameless  
To shoulder the blame for the way
They pour dirt on the cover up
You can’t uncover it
Something unwilling to let you forget
The debt

Struggled to find
My identity
Finally
Had an idea,
An assessment
Decidedly
Knew who I was
So I thought
And proclaimed
Unto others was proud
To be known,
To be named
But ashamed,
Unassured
I too often became
And now every day hence
I am just not the same
Human ego
Or entity
Subject to change
Conscious mind soul
Embodying
Products of influence
Just an ad space
Personhood
Discontinuous