Roll Call of the Lesser Devils 115-119

115.
Expressionism

While in good graces
The beauty flows savagely.
Bestial claws leave scratches on blank walls.
Drug addicted Bohemian posers,
Musicians and artists, dancers and actors,
All crave the feeling lost
Moments after feeling it,
In vain but bold
Utopian contradictions beholden,
Or abject ignorance of truth.
To idealize things, objects, materials,
Ethereal wants for tangible lies,
That which they do not have,
Desire for in darkness cries,
But when in darkness beauty flows
To genius grasped
Brightness clasped
Tightly in a coat of only few colors
Designs fit to a graying world,
The soul is freed from tangible need,
Invisible bonds and broken
Links of hidden chains,
Subjections, objections, dwindling
consciousness,
Mind's eyes glorify
What's seen inside, magnifies,
That which no one
Will never really own.




116.
Echoes of the sane
In empty marble halls,
As the temperature drops.
It gets so cold inside.
Wasn't there a movie
About the big chill?

Why do the spirits come?
The sane are unwelcome here
This is my place.
Go. Away.

These halls exist to hold
Only myself,
And silence,
And maybe pain.

All I hear
Are
Echoes of oblivion
They sound
Much better now
With frozen walls
To draw out what little life
They'd left.

Soothe burns, release
Grudges, at least,
In this, my place,
Where slumbers this beast.
Go. Away.




117.
Do not touch me.
Yes, I know.
The inside never,
Never grows.

Love me now
Or walk away.
I have no time
For idle fascination.

Love me now
Or walk away
I have no time
For tears
Or unhappiness,
Youth wasted and
Innocence passed away.

Love me now
Then walk away.
I have no time
To see more.
I'm a coward,
And less poet than whore.




118.
Working for an end to come,
I work to an end
Where work is done,
But my goals goes unachieved
When I seek the end of need.

I work to end an empty life
But the end is only work,
Or toil, or sweat, and nothing else,
Boo-hoo.

My goals disappear, all washed away,
Hidden by sorrow,
And tears, if I may
Just tell the truth
About It All.

Born to suffer, born to lose,
We swim against an uphill stream,
Like fish swim on,
With little else to choose,
Fight the rush,
The sweeping current's gush
Of loss and sweet rhapsody
Farewell.

Fight, there it is, that word again,
It's something of a must
Before the end, we all fight on
And new life begins.

Life begins in the stream of consciousness,
Beyond only fatal shores,
Or a float downstream
And upside down
To gelatin pools
Under science's critical
Questioning eye,
Where only tiny, small things die,
Microscopic happy, swimming,
Sigh
We must fight on
Just you and you and you
And I.

Give thanks
To live another day,
To Fight or fade and decay, or worse.
The stream doesn’t care.
It just keeps rolling along.





119.
On the other side of knowing she waits for me,
Just beyond a whisper.
What is left but a sense of age
As the earth spins on,
And though I yearn to take to the skies,
My flight will never be.

Words never captured the infinite moment,
But rather enslaved the names.
The flames have always been awakening torture,
For wax melts,
And at the gates of hell
The beacon has always been a lie.
It lures proud ships to rocky deaths,
And urges the foolish to fly.

Come inside, hurry, for love never waits.
In the priceless world of misty reality
The music of my heart is a lullaby
And my sleep is a passionate surrender.

On the inside a world waits openly.
Behind her eyes and mine the sparkling dreams come
And none can ever hope to own them.


[Notes: The truth is that on some of these there are no originals. I remember a lot of them, but others I don't remember much of. I know how I did the revisions though, and so I'm reverse engineering the changes. The number one thing I did was attempt to make all verbs active voice, and do away with gerunds.

I studied Russian under a woman who graduated from Harvard. Her last name was Rutherford, so she was Ms. Rutherford. I don't remember much else about her except she really got under my skin critiquing my poetry. She made fun of the gerunds.

To give you an idea of how thin skinned I was about my writing, 14 years later I set out to change every gerund into an active voice verb. Curse you, Ms. Rutherford! You got your revenge on my inattentiveness and dozing after all!]

[LOL]