okay, huston, we’ve got a far more immediate problem here

what the hell do we care
whether there’s life on Mars
when we got kids down here
scavenging scraps off garbage tips
towards their next square meal
it’s so surreal the effort we waste
on exploring space when so many
members of the human race die
starving for want of less than a hand-
ful of change (a pittance compared
with an astronaut’s pay)
it’s criminal, it’s insane but still
you fold up your money and put
your wallets away as Hollywood
tells us everything’s a-okay ’cause
we’re ready to launch ourselves
out past the stars, ready to bury
this painful shame from our pasts
and severing at last the ties thereby
of our shared humanity.

Missing Zero (Book Review)

Another fellow blogger here at WordPress reviews Missing Zero! And, no, he’s not on the payroll…yet. 😉

agenbite of inwit

once more I find I have
recourse to consider
Mr Joyce’s agenbite of
inwit, while lying here
close to tears, regretting
such heavy carousing
of the night before
I nurse this self-afflicted
sickness languishing upon
an unforgiving floor

it feels again to me as if
the bite of insight eats me
from the inside out
oh lord, inwit it chews into my
soul like a weevil through
an anvil if the anvil were only
cast of pain and the weevil
of the very cruelest steel

yet pity me not, I beseech
of thee, for this world of misery
I inhabit as both martyr and
apostle, this being the cost of
happiness I bought in the guise
of a hapless red wine bottle.

insomnia as an article of faith

it’s a sacrificial tendency to
want to save pillows/people
from their feather-down fates
for what is it worse to be? the first
or last of one’s kind who retreats
into sleep, perchance to dream
so as to feel the teeth of the felt prowl
wolf pack who feed their master while
they eat their young or to rather be
the god that failed or its creature
that lives with its head in the clouds
of nostradamus’s oily scrying bowl
prophesying the future harvest
of souls right before the very eyes of
our disbelieving four-shadowed race.

the manifesto of the incommunicado commando

well, I got me my 3D HD TV and
life just lost a little more of its mystery and
I got as well as these, as a kind of therapy
some wifi hi-fi electronic mood-modifying
pacifier earphones to blanket out the noise
of all those other humans who be forever
breathing too close to me and my blissful
virtual reality which I got streaming directly
through my replacement eyes supplied
courtesy of that same company who’ve
made a name for themselves out of ogling
us and everything we do as we navigate this
ever-shrinking stinking planet (both online and off)
but hell I ain’t no cynic still ’cause even
if it’s a con next year I’m seriously
thinking of upgrading to a cerebral
implant pack so as to save a bundle
on isp fees and score a whole shitload of the
latest zeitgeist apps like direct speech to text
translation services so I can do away with the
actual contact of having to speak to my real
analogue family or friends choosing instead
to send them this shared message off-peak:
gr8 2 no u but I can’t b reached I’ve
run away to b a cyberfreak.

the death of a comma

nobody cried at the death of
a comma not a single tear
oh sure there was some minor
distress bordering on mild panic
as the pedants and pundits warned
that all clear communication would
now be dead between us also
but it soon blew over as well you
might imagine that is apart from the
uproar caused by the lawyers and their ilk
who later at the funeral hysterically
began to babble about restrictive clauses
and the proof of corpus delicti
as the coffin bearing the sadly
deceased sank from view
however in a statement prepared
for the press afterwards a prominent
member of the punctuation police
in attendance on the fateful day
is quoted as saying there was
absolutely no sign of foul play in
the demise of the dearly departed
and that he would therefore ask
everyone in the community to show
their respect for the much-lamented
mark in the most appropriate
of fashions by observing
a brief pause for silence…

still life with nostalgia

each day brings me
one poem closer
to 50, which is fine
with me, i guess
because i’m still not
there yet, being nearer
to the other side of 40, but
what the hell? what the hell
happened to that young
man i used to be, what-
ever happened to his
wide-eyed ignorance?
oh, sure, he was a bit
of a fop and not so long
before that a total milk sop
yet i miss his passionate
intensity, his surety of purpose
(when i lack all conviction) for
although i am the poet he so
longed to be i would swap it all
to re-live his dreams and
guileless naivety.

Going, going, gone AWOL

my junkyard love

my junkyard love

my junkyard love has got about
an acre of rust-colored hair but
I don’t care about any of that
can’t you see it’s her staying power
after all these years that keeps me
from strayin’ too far and that keeps
me still hangin’ round the yard

yeah, I know, plenty would say they
ain’t got no time for a fixer-upper
sure enough, but she was built tough
believe me, so as to last through
the entire length of a good man’s life
so she’s still got some rubber to burn and
I’ve got such a mind as to make her motor purr

good lord, you can bet nobody’s
gonna trust their eyes when they
catch the sight of her and me
racing towards infinity waving
our goodbyes to the sweetly infinite horizon
and the look of pride I wear upon my face’ll be
all any who still doubt amongst you can recall.

the happiness of a half-lived life