WORLD WAR COVID
Poems, mine and theirs
I Hate You
Good God, how numerous we are!
With too much time on our hands,
But not enough to make good.
We slave away at doing nothing.
Our ample skulls
As school marm stuffed as their attics
With musty, loving-tended junk
And not very much more.
Not much more to contemplate
Than ancient lies and empty curses,
Archives set alight and blood under the bridge.
Nothing better to offer,
Nothing important,
Nothing better on offer.
Imagine how stale that makes us:
With nothing better to offer
And the sacrifice of what’s better?
Set to criticize what no-one has read?
From lack of time and even less goodwill,
Squandered instead on trash,
The way ants would scour a garbage can.
Orthodoxy crash-dives sickening,
More or less leisurely.
While we sit on our hands,
With a mouthful of what’s told most often.
Don’t talk with your mouth full…
Confounding mere repetition with the truth.
For oft-repeated folly must make us wise.
Right? Peddling the alchemy of shit to gold,
Obeying silverbacks in gold-embroidered silks,
Who make error sacred.
Insofar they’re ignored,
My words gain wisdom.
Anything so unwelcome must be correct;
If held to be fitting, obvious poison.
No dreams, only cravings.
No heroism, only nightmares.
No concerns, just a well-stuffed ego.
Two out of ten voters favored Nixon, Bush
Even after those guys were exposed.
Twenty percent of voters
Unworthy of the vote?
(http://www.nyu.edu/its/statistics/Docs/scandals.html)
What machine would function
With one part in five defective?
Unless it were twenty-five-times redundant,
Asleep at the wheel from its many safeguards?
When we need switch-blade speed of thought,
Both nimble, tireless and elegant ?
I cannot fathom this gap
Between what is and what should be.
Without a way to solve the puzzle
Without you, your say and your inspiration.
My thoughts evolve from other peoples’ takes.
Your insult, from out of the blue, took me aback
And I lashed out in a vacuum of thought.
Your insult honors me, so I must recall,
That hate is the prize for truth-telling,
The assassin, this planet’s herald of honor,
The Cross, the race’s homage to its Savior.
We don’t torture to learn,
But because we love it.
Go ahead, call on your psychobabble,
Guess what drove me crazy enough
To spit on your revered mediocrity.
Psycho-analysis: the last refuge of the second-rate.
The label paranoid reflects someone’s fear,
The label “crazy”, mainstream craziness
Your search for my weakness shields you from your own.
Well! How cunning we’ve become!
Like scorpions in a bottle
Sealed in by our lack of imagination.
Go ahead, insult me!
Me, at least, I’m still trying.
You gave up before you started
And deserve in spades the hand you were dealt.
Stop. That is not right.
My judgment revives and takes over,
But not before I struck back at you.
The acid you released burns my guts,
It flares my eureka into caustic ash,
Gnaws me into my next crumbling grave.
I made our grudge blossom.
Our dreams come to naught, our wisdom rust.
So tenderly gathered, shattered instead,
By loathing your defiance as much as I prize my own.
A lesson for us both …
…
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