Wherefore art my purpose in life
I'm filled with passion, love, and fight
Bursting with spirit until I'm overcome
By social anxiety and a long line at the grocery store

I want to be good but I'm without determination
I've been taught leadership, sure
And I don't want to be a follower
But do I want to make others into followers?

Is it possible to do good and not be a hypocrite
To organize people for a purpose
Without taking advantage of them
Without rewarding their efforts fairly?

Verily I remain a thinker, a ponderer
And regrettably not a man of action
It must be a moral quandary that keeps me at home
Because I could never admit that it's only fear of failure

The oxygen has run out of the town.
All the dogs have left the pound.

And all I see is black.
The patients have been healed.
The dogs have been adopted.
And all I see is black.

I turned on the radio.
Black radiated from the speakers.

That's all I hear and see and I don't acknowledge it.


Say, why don't you hop on the expressway of the mind?
Just take the exit numbered infinity.

Your soul will be lifted again.
Nothing more is sacred at all.
There's nothing more do to than save face.
After acting for so long, you believe that something's real.

We know that morality is just a fantasy.
We know that displeasure and misery is still a sensation, so we pretend that morality exists.
We pretend, safe in the knowledge that we never wanted morality to be a fairytale.

Black won't recede,
It's ascended to a self-declared deity.
So we swim away from the evening tide.

Thank goodness that everything has a timer , so nothing is permanent.

My soft skin opens,
draws you in, earns your trust, and
then swallows you up.

My pancreas busted.
Sugar was too sweet.
The candy I trusted
Has taken my feet.

I thought it was virtue.
Truth, I always sought.
I must now bid adieu
I won't take the shot.

As a writer and poet who absorbs the world and then bleeds out truth, I'm finding it harder and harder to break through the political propaganda that television, radio, and web media has conjured to dominate and control so many minds. I can work around the programming by introducing abstract moral truths, but the moment I reference modern cultural, my work goes ignored.

I feel myself losing touch with a society that I’ve taken for granted my entire writing life. In a gluttonous feast of sensational media
that has proven nearly impossible to extricate ourselves,
we allow the power of profiteers and con-artists
to stream content into our minds that programs us
to accept unprecedented levels of violence.
We celebrate military-style police powers
to remove our freedoms of expression,
the rights to own property at reasonable expense,
and our most basic rights to life under a banner of liberty.
In an **** of hatred and greed, a large swath of society
has proven comfortable with exterminating
or imprisoning human beings for the color of their skin
or the origin of their birth in private-for-profit prisons.
Yes, I definitely feel we are lost in a spiral of human descent,
where there is no end, only torment and death.

-Ron Gavalik

Towers of cards, they fall.
As if bombs could build a wall.
Like miners who die for fuel,
But we don't count ourselves cruel.

Falsehoods can be true
As long as they don't impose upon you.
The tithes we give at church
Don't keep the birds their perch.

The oceans run green with gunk.
All that's left of the tree, its trunk.
In the morning we go to work,
But everything else, we shirk.

Thankful, the world spins on,
Long after we have gone.