I’m lost in Rome,
all the roads have brought me here.
I’m searching for home,
Holding a picture of it near.
I step into the metronome,
I enter with an identity in my pockets.
I speak to the garden gnome,
He’s asking if I’d like to buy a silver locket.
At a legato tempo,
10. The metronome keeps ticking.                                                         ­       
My lips only stay chapped,
Simply because I won’t stop licking them.
“I’m looking for the Lucky Fix.
The Shaved Jaguar told me this is the place.”
The Gnome haggles me up in my face,
“Oh please, I know all the old tricks!
I now control your brain stem.
You have a long way to go! You’ve been trapped!”
At an Allegro tempo;
20. The Metronome keeps tocking.
On the stage,
The Kangaroos are still kick-boxing.
Breaking free of their cage,
The only price is to make you dance.
“I seek to barter for some potions",
They want to know, "So Why have I been cursed?”
The Hooting Owl, offers them a grand notion.
“Keeping thinking that and you might just burst.”
30.The metronome stops on the off-beat, .
“Where is the Lucky Fix?”
I began to grow impatient!
“Don’t you first need your feet?
Your priorities need to be layered bricks.
Your addiction to gratification will lead you to defeat!
You can find the matches in the Fire Station.
I know some of the tricks. That’s a good place to start.”
The Goblins are looking for the heart.
40. With a Presto Tempo
You must reset the Metronome.
TJW 2013
.

I told you the ticking madness was enough to turn it into a panic race, so detached from all that we are made of, we become nothing we are made from. Now ingesting genetically assembled seeds - that don’t deserve the name seed at all. For seed is life, she belongs to mother earth, not a synthetic corporate beast.

A patented man made pill that sprouts an idea of life, a deception, that when ingested in it’s varied shelved forms and assimilated, draws us further and further away from nature, and our nature, and man, now part robotic manifestation through assimilation alone.

And they come with their chains and capitalist whips to break the backs of the earth reapers and sowers who fed yesterday, who fed their fathers, chaining them into a prison unbreakable, suffocating beneath a system controlled by paper. But surely man, his free thought, seed and crop, is more valuable than paper slavery?

And our brother labours in pain, all but to produce a good, or a bad that the unsuspecting haggles for, all because their growing inner robot has a dogmatic pining to be more than nature itself. He seeks supernatural, he seeks fame and status, and to be a god, but that “god” has no concept of the cosmos he was set forth to know, to praise and to be praised by, so instead he worships artificial idols.  

And the fight continues. And the madness ticks on, debilitating the organic ones; seed robbery after seed robbery, crop seize and acquisition after policy, after policy, after tariff after bill and there is no bailout. It’s all woven into a web of intricacies, leaving no room for natural, no room for humble.

Then they say the meek shall inherit the earth, and I wonder when, and by question alone I am reminded of the ticking madness. I am reminded that natural, never questions time.

two feet shuffle
onto the matted down, stained-brown, maroon-ish
welcome mat while

a head shakes off the dusting of snow
its shaggy hair has collected.

breath billows out of a mouth
like smoke from a burning cigar as

a body, with glasses fogged, fingers frosted,
bundled up in scarfs, and mittens, and layers galore
inches into the grocery store

where a bagboy slouches in a
half-dazed stupor, eyes glued to the clock,

a self-righteous old lady with her
back bent, voice shrill,
haggles the price of soup

and a baggy-eyed mom snaps hushed
chastisements to a *****-faced boy,
with ratty hair falling onto his blushed face.

in this store, customers move slow,
with nowhere to be and nowhere to go

and the holiday jingle heard playing
above them, betrays their heavy hearts
and sunken spirits.

outside, it is cold,
but inside this store,
it is no different.

The charity shop smells of yesterday's arguments
and the mannequins legs' are slimmer than mine.
She poses ethereal in the window,
wears a skirt I outgrew 2 years ago,
he would be on her if she could part her peachy lips.
I look beyond, hidden, watch
while he haggles over the price of his own shirts.
I laugh, I skip and potter home,
my thighs chafe,
I don’t care.

I.

On the surface easily gliding,
  are my hands. I keep on the table
  an ajar carton of cigarettes. Then slowly
  becoming in my pocket, taking form of a hand,
  a crumpled cinema ticket when straightened,
  ironed by plainsight, walks with lines, the end credits roll lasciviously like an estranged lover
   whose face I can almost touch.
  When let go of closure, air thins and I move
  secretly with fluency. This is how objects
  escape my grip.

II.

  In front of the eatery, a transit.
  I had a dream once in a depthless sleep,
  a figure in stilts studded with guilt.
  The face next to me, disquieting the music
   of currencies, naked in sound as the truth shaved
   like a beast. The nearby tarmac resounds with
   another throng of absence. As a substitute
   for beings shackled to duty,
   the oncoming woman assumes theirs,
   borrows their faces of dreariness and ***** a thousand times like white sheets harassed by
   the wind through opened windows.

III.

    Define space as a venue for collision.
    Say when a red-haired woman straddling
    a duffel bag and myself confused as a peripatetic.
    She ascribes her presence to my footing
    and from where she left off, I take form
    of her expired movement.
                     Found strangeness is that space
    is what happens when remembered. But hold no
    bearing and rear contrivance,
     trying to be bold by definition -- space solicits
     the in-betweenness and then transmutes
     an occurence,
             say the volatile shape of a hand when
    clutching and releasing, the fugitive manner of
    feet when avoiding puddles, the unsolicited
    reticence of a troubling question.

IV.

            A man carries a take away and is now
     amongst the populace, waiting under a shed,
     housing a familiar language. Home.
    
      But first, trivialized. Haggles with the cab driver,
    trying to transact a being angled towards home.
    They agree to a fault, money's perfume clinches  the fingers and is given to a calloused hand.
             Air once stale, is now succulent with the
      resonating memory of a child's excited laughter,
      and is now presumably waiting behind a gated
      home. Like the palm of the hand, the number
         of times the vehicle trundles within
     the nearby avenue is the force it enkindles
        with rest. He is home,
     unloosens his clothing. Like a fine specimen
          freed from a vitrine.

I take these sleeping pills, awake hanging from the ceiling by my feet like picture stills, this redrum, this darkroom, my bedroom, it's my free will, mentally ill, mentally I'll devour you cowards and oafishly fish for guts in this cesspool with your backbone, backwards thinking, I'm reversed through life, unnatural, confused and abused, subdued and unglued, if they can't drown an ocean alone, why the **** do I always have this feeling sinking?

I'm a tantrum, a **** hand slammed on a dam like it was a wave's drum, a GI Joe ***, hypocrite lite, a hoplite, tip of the genetic spear like bubblegum, wages of conscience break unevenly, I'm sin, the son, five family's and one sum, a giant fee, fi, fo fum, killing myself to stay alive is the only way I know how, life backwards, that's redrum

Shining, not kings, never royalty, they don't know the meaning of loyalty, sell their own mother, countersue and bet their babies for a king's ransom, love is a price tag that haggles down the value if the right accessory is handsome, ******* them, hand-me-downs, wearing another prince's crowns, being laughed at and lauded for dressing up like fancy clowns, these get-arounds, bury them, up to the neck in dirt mounds, up to here with the vocal chord strumming their tonally familiar sounds, they're ghosts and can watch in silence, because I put them after my life, at the bottom of a boot you wouldn't scrape dog **** off of, housed like a jackknife

I hallucinated the full body apparition of someone that I always hated
a blurry figure before my eyes, I could feel him just over my shoulder
I'd been awake going on four nights, hearing noises, seeing strange sights
shadows that weren't cast from lights, the isolation of being in this place called home
and I was paranoid, probably high, dosed on sleeping pills, and wandering alone
I carried a loaded handgun into the hallway, cleared every room, checked the locks,
because I heard people through the walls, muffled like they were just out there
my own dog looking at me like I'm the one who needs to go outside,
I was scared half out of my mind, the other half already preoccupied
with crazy thoughts, I thought I saw myself, like a smear appearing through a rainy windshield, or a foggy mirror
and I couldn't feel anything real, a small jolt of alertness, forced to register as self-preservation, translation- fear
I was so numb, that it took days for the skin to break
and when it finally settled in, my muscles and my bones began to ache
I know how I felt about that hallucination, once I was rested, grounded, and awake  
how I always feel, why it's always too late
it crept up on me that week I had to completely isolate,
and it was inside of five days, my mind playing tricks on myself, the one person I truly hate.