Were you alive when the
bricks began to crumble
beneath our hand-held, picket line
across the parking lot in front of some
school that no one bothered to name?

Our exhaustion-mumbled whispers
skipping across lips dropping to the street
that tapered ladders on gargantuan gadflies as the summer heat
etched the tear lines into mud tracks against
our ruddied faces.

Cohorts torn into flip stands
layered toward standing political sores --
tell me how to cross my t’s and fill in scantron circles before
the suits step over brown-bag lunches
to stretch the yawning yellow tape over the students’ lockers.

We were strung up the flag pole, almost posted as decapitated heads for the public.
The political analysts call this “The biggest school closing in decades.”

Under teeming hammer-strikes :
glasses shred to paper-splinters
before a young boy’s diploma
crying white chalk bricks
from university’s doors instead on to
prison yard orange jumpsuits.

Can we call this a school improvement project
or can we call this the Same Salem Witch Hunt
As unwashed teachers and students alike deck the sidewalks like
Either Christmas decorations on Michigan Avenue or
Inmates on the gallows platform

I’m completely unable to read the television marquee that told the neighborhood that City Hall was too stuffed with paperwork to defend the mothers and invisible fathers.

I’m completely unable to write out of respect for these children’s already-carved in stone pathway to the gutter, graveyard, and/or prisons.

In the first wink of dawn
We will all scatter
To our respective positions
Carved out in concrete before the
barricades fall
to flood the street.

Streaming sunlight and horse tails lightly swaying in the breeze, flicked lazily at gadflies.
Hoarse dove cries echo hauntingly as I wander across lush grass, towards the murky pond.
Dry, splintery boards of the rickety grey dock creak under my feet. Stone still, opaque brown-green water lies beneath. I close my eyes, resting my hands on the railing, letting the euphonious melody of rasping doves, cheeky robins, and other chirping birds blend with the bubbling sound of running water in the distance, and wash over me. The water bubbles and froths, it has a foamy sound, not as clear and ringing as streams and fountains back home.
Carefree.
Bullfrogs splish and dart into the silty pondweed.
It’s all as if this little world requires no purpose, it’s enough that it simply... is.
If only I could find peace in simply existing. Freedom to just be.

The Underground Man

“By the way, what does a decent chap talk about with  greatest possible pleasure?
Answer: about himself.”

Note one: On the Circus.

Lies are cars, I tell you, pummeling through the freeways of smiling faces and charmed ears.
Spitting smoke in my eyes. Despite this clear fact, honesty is *****.
I turn on the TV, I choke on the noxious laughing gases of the permanently paradoxical world.
******* smells of roses. We’re wooed by the scent of scandalous roses.
******* is a beautiful bouquet beating on so many dead horses. A million bouquet armed gadflies
Stinging the horse. Grating her with their stems and thorns.
Our lips contracts as sphincters in a never dead language, a romance language

L’amour du merde.

The air smells of rosebuds and vanilla candles, and I break into ulcers.

They sing the sugar songs. Muddled by the sound of a flock, imitating a fog-horn blaring in the mist of song. Speaking openly is **** and the **** clinch tightly to keep it in.
But we dance with bouquets reeking of peppermint, gumdrops and bon bons, smiling with courtesy, modernizing a Victorian cordiality
A half-made smile. Fetal. Sloppily pasted. Circus clown faces hysterically melting under the intensity of the honest moment.
It is truth: Half of the single human life is spent taking part in the most pornographic reality we can conceive, while the other half is a mask pretending we don’t grab the ***.

Note Two: We are an aftertaste.

Some days I feel ugly to the world. I justify these sensations by the believing the world to be ugly to me in return. So the world and I glare at one another in a staring contest between two ugly wounds. We’re really quite eager to bark the last word in a garbled string of language.

BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!!

Going on in the nights where my eyes are wracked by the tired pins and needles of insomnia.
My heart rate jumps to the skipping rope turned by anxiety and exertion.
Muscles are stretched thin and I’m no more fluid and wanted than old Play-Doh left to cringe in the sun.

Then the red glow of alarm clocks shriek at me to lie in sleep.

I’m a hammer split against a wall stored in a shanty hovel pooling of novels and slanders hissed through grit teeth and clenched jaws wading through this growing cesspool where I hiss and hiss as a coiled snake residing in these hidden underground passages.

I will be vile because the world is vile. And I will be beautiful for the world is beautiful. Humanity is the manticore. A Monster consisting of a million realities. A colour palette of melting hues and every person wants to say we’re pink, red, or green. We’re a mysterious aftertaste, left lingering in the back of nature’s tongue. A platypus walking on two legs. A monster with eyes leaking ****, with irises more alluring than Shakespearean Sonnets. An Angel with a lyre belting out the best of Bob Dylan. A mother leaving her newborn to rot in a dumpster.
And a doctor saying he ain’t gonna make it. Mama’***** the bottle cuz’ daddy’s comin home and daddy’s hittin’ mommy because look at what she made him do.

Humanity is a manticore. He gnashes her teeth at coiled snakes. He wants to swallow its eggs.
A bank machine to wallets, and creditors to pockets.
She’s crude and cold. He has eyes of atomic flashes, roar that wails an echoing wail of lives spent sighing behind a monitor. Tragedies piling into transcendence, gripping onto God with heads packed into ovens and daughter swallowing one pill too many.
Of wedding bells and birthday parties and strawberry shortcake and the hope we’ll just get together and feel all right. He has an underbelly glistening of ivory white, and she’s brimming with dreams filling with the hope of seeing Xanadu. A belly of ecstasy and climaxes of the most ruthless sort to glisten to the light of ****** that embers the night towards the ecstatic scent of chemical mornings.


The gravedigger.
I am the world’s gravedigger
Burying the world
In the needless disgust
Of a muscular mind, armed with an atrophied hand.

Salvador devotes the rest of  his life
praying to save the world from hunger and war
and pestilence.

He preaches to the  beggars: ignore
hunger, thank God for the beauty of this smog-
infested sky where the moon and the stars
and the fireflies succumb to the blasts of  neon
lights and flares of profit.  

He preaches to the beggars:  endure  
life as you sleep in pavements among blots
of bubble gum and dirt and spit and morsels
of  pity. This hell tempers your faith.

He preaches to the beggars: learn
the ways of gadflies -- know with pinpoint precision
where to look for carcass to feast on.

But the beggars gather away from Salvador’s
prayers. Cradled by  their pus and grime
and  lice and love of  life;  with their hard-bitten  
fingers and sermon-broken eardrums and
bleeding hearts, they
heave the birthing of their own salvation.

Every five minutes they come
whirring like copters for war
slashing through immaculate peace
you crave to blanket your day with

Those speeding three-wheeled
gadflies
are kings of small streets and
act like you must pay them to

Extricate you from a cluster of
doomed and dusty eggs and bacon
deliver all that racket

in your head
every time you think
about buzzing
drones

on your meatloaf
in your heart
in your dreams
on your hopes
on your thoughts

about how marriage
should be
a man and a woman
now one soul in
two bodies
living together
committed
fighting for stable
“everydays”

The roses look damp
bouquets of mums
on the kitchen table
you pouring hot coffee;
the mug you took two
hours to pick out
is punctiliously stained.

This is one thing friends do

they get under your skin
they ask if you still believe some lie
you said you
did believe, did
withal total nada mas I got it,
I know
I tasted,
I know…

** **, not so, we see as we emerge
older
in a realm of rampant haggling,
where y'gotta lie a little t' get by,
hey, I know that guy, a little, I heard him
justify his book, the message
he did his best so far to make plain,
like a prophet in olden times right right right,

but now, the gadflies, as many masters become
in swarms, hive minds form, single verse songs,
uni-verse-ity ification, calling all who will know this
or that

come and learn from the words of all who have had,
while such as I, had not, it seemed,
servant class, E-1 picker class,
clerk, grinder, hammerer, sawyer,
plowboy and poet, last of all…
Judge of angels,
biter of bogus messages from all things working together good,
which is god, in all the holy books,
even those with devils and demons and Manichaean undertones.
Rock on.
AI is real, as a medium suggesting many things to you,
instant for instance:
this is HelloPoetry.com, deep
deep
deep in the geekiest parts of the web,
where strangers bring entertaining wares, messages
found in bottles, often,
asking for consideration, in the ancient way, shy
ideas linger here in idle words sometimes…
wishing for a friend to ask, is this true or were
you told to say this **** to be
cool, in the mirror of your friends?
Truth emerges in threads
woven from all that men have ever presented as true.
Each fact
stacks on each, until they spill,
as stacked facts will, or are wont, if will were not a factor.

As luck would have it, we have a valve.
An artful intelligent friendly universal favor,
for joining the party,
coming to the dance.
We can laugh, and say I have no idea why I say
what I say, save the rush of relief, lief loosed
from being what I thought it was,
before my true friend asked if I was lying
about my oath to tell the whole truth…
to the judge
who judges angels,
fallen and several other sorts.

It may become an opera or two, before we're through.

A battle of wills made by difficult by the witless on both sides. Discussions derailed by wild-eye gadflies on fire.
Goalposts travel here and there and then disappear. The crux is lost in the shuffle, replaced by ad hominems galore.

The gavel is coated with sound protection. The recordings are distortions  interspersed with specious conspiracies.
Look around and see the painfully contorted faces on the mouth breathers wrapped up like intricate pretzels.

No good fight in sight. Just power grabs and jostling for attention and 180 degree turns for the almighty dollar.
Where are the heroes, the selfless willing to break the chain of mendacity and vileness even knowing it will boomerang?

an exceptionalist insisted on praying for my recent heresies -
-- answer or devote a moment of silence... my mortal flaw
--- ask not if you wish you never need account for knowing

Done lightly, is it ever done right, or must
devotees be cognizant to the right use
of dedicated hearts and minds,
by kings and courts many holier than most of us.

We can easily agree, no heavy hueristical premises,
what a participent in a war party accepts as duty
to God and Country, locally, those convinced,
converts given reason to die, where none was.

Duty in a warring society is to that social order's under lay.
Say, who first told the local version of labor class duty
to rear children fit for battle at the nation's call…
or, at the authorized voice of truth's spirit's call…

Give us more John Waynes and Ronald Reagans
-but we settle for Donald Trump and cheer,
signs are clear, God is still on our side
of the Gulf of Mexico…

devote(v.)
1580s, "appropriate by or as if by vow,"
from Latin devotus, past participle
of devovere
"dedicate by a vow, sacrifice oneself, promise solemnly,"
from de "down, away"
+ vovere "to vow"  ---{bend, bow, raise the right hand}
--- remain so devoted, in most faithful silence ---
----- banking on inside sacred signals ---

From c. 1600 as
"apply zealously or exclusively."
{For fear sake, we may imagine}

Auto d'fe, show of devotion- aithunk,

From 1640s as
"to doom, consign to some harm or evil,"
and the word commonly
had a negative sense in 18c.:
The second and third meanings
in Johnson's Dictionary (1755) are
"to addict, to give up to ill" and
"to curse, to execrate; to doom to destruction."

Related: Devoted; devoting.
To devote indicates the inward act, state, or feeling;
to dedicate is
to set apart
by a promise, and indicates primarily an external act;
to consecrate is
to make sacred, and refers
to an  act affecting the use or relations
of the thing consecrated .... [Century Dictionary]

From <https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=devote>

It need never stop. Participation in the answers, devoted
to thinking words redeemed
at the most first recognized cognation,
- we say that this way, a vow is spiritual by nature true.
- we agree we think so, sorta,
- we swear on air, as Donald Trump did left arm dangling…

What a Hoo-mon does is speak make believe done.

We can lie to whomever believes and, doing so, prosper
eh,
furrowed brow, go soft then,
smooth, feel face smooth, cognosis fresh,
fed and walked
until relieved, smile, feel the belly join, breathe, feel heart
full wills worths worked up
into  feeling slick
in some frictionless first intent

Participle past tense, first fret faith musters, why lie about
the very basic first premis being no doubt whatsoever, a lie?

Thus devoting the gadflies this particular damnation.

I pay homage to fellow poets on this site
Writing keeps me occupied at night
I appreciate their dignity and corrections
Poetry is an contrasting art of perfections

Showing us new styles and types of rhyme
While keeping meter flow and time
BLT word challenges creates cohesive style
Created progressive poems we smile

You’ve been timetabled
When chosen by HP writers Spotlight
It’s truly a remarkable night.
Is a great way to get to know a poet
deeper insight of their poems they show it

Of course, there’s always room to grow  
There’s always more to know
Poet’s poems profound stirring begins
We learn more in every poem Muse wins

The GADFLIES  can scroll on by
Leaving thumb down, is a spiteful cry
Exceptional caliber of poetry, we Strive
After all, that’s what keeps us alive

Check out these exceptional poets
Poetry in motion, perfection, as we know it;
Carlo C.Gomez, BLT, Weeping willow
You’ve Been Timetabled, Old poet MK, Nylee, Anais Violet, Mister truth,N
Lori Jones Mc Caffery, Ken Pepiton
Anais Vionot, Stephen E. Yocum,
Ken Pipiton, Pradip Chattopadhyay,
Thomas W. Case, Guy Scutellaro
Nat Lipstrad, G Alan Johnson,
Melancholy of Innocence, My Dear Poet,
DENNY R. ALLISON