The writings of Oddpoet

I like shiny things, I'm very superficial.

Death sil­hou­ettes

Dance melan­choly minuets

Accrued dust scatters

Face­less vio­lins sigh

Mourn­ers do not bother to take up the chant

Smooth­ing wrin­kled skirts and check­ing fin­ger­nail length

Bored and dis­tracted with parched eyes inca­pable of tears

Sounds wither and die

Vibra­tions stilled and uncaring

Set­tle in for the long sleep

Wind becomes breeze and breeze…

Lies motion­less upon the mound

It’s cold’s time

Calm­ing the whine of mean­ing and loss

Thoughts crum­ble and descend upon the sleep­ing earth

Lying beside por­tent shards of strange magik

It all goes away

Whirling down sweet silence

Leave me alone

Don’t wake me…

My face is blis­tered by the demands

The sug­ges­tions to free

Cut and cauterized–

They’ve hurt me.

Have you not heard me pleading

For the release of all that caresses?

His release.

Have you not heard me beg­ging to the presses

All these years?

I’ve done what was asked

Walked across acres upon acres of shards of glass

Passed razors through the maze of my soul

Dis­sected my heart with a mon­o­cle mirror

And I’m whole

I’ve for­given my fingers

And I’m whole…



But his release–

His release demands of my mind’s eye

His suf­fer­ing rakes the embers of my need

To sus­tain my high

Blis­tered and scarred

Ris­ing to an inferno I can’t disregard

And my fin­gers beseech thee

As my con­science screeches to me daily

Release him

Just release him so my sight can see

He lives with­out me

Sat­is­fac­to­rily

Allow me to wit­ness him serene

In the wild

Liv­ing out his most desired dream

And he will be filed under case closed.

I’ve done what was asked

I’ve inhaled the rose

And suf­fered each thorn as it passed

Licked the morn­ing dew from your boots

Uprooted roots I thought would never be free

And rotated eye­balls to view within

The bloody inter­nal mas­sacre of sin and debris…

I guess I just don’t know what you want from me



But you know what I want from you

Oh you’ve always known what I want from you

And you hold it close to your chest

Under lock and key and duress

I could kill myself, leave a sim­ple note of sin­gu­lar pleas

But you still wouldn’t give me what I need–

His release.

For his release is mine



And you’ll never let me go

Blis­tered and mangled

You’ll never let me go as such…

I’ve seen too much.



©Jen2010 1–31

Doth thy hunger seek redress
In
Sub­tle Death?

Con­sum­ing essence
best left for
Children’s innocence?

Wouldst thy shed skin
And life
for
a but­ter­flies
Errant Path?

Dance to a falling leaf
in Autumns pain?

A drunk­ards folly
in muted scream?

The flayed skin of truth
Cry­ing imag­i­nary sin?

Would it be
The Die
Rolls
For purpose?

That the Ran­dom Gods
Do so shud­der
at Happenstance?

Would it be the clenched tear
Finds
res­o­lu­tion
In
Linens gen­tle catch

Eat not thy Tail Ourbo­ras
Seek truths gen­tle caress
Let her dic­tates
love you

Seek her embrace
And know
The truth
of pain.

Wouldst thy tail
be
An
End
Unto
itself?

Bubbles…

How your per­fec­tion mocks me

Float­ing on gen­tle current

Adher­ing to immutable laws

As king­doms of men rot in dusty tombs

Ratios and pro­por­tions established

Before the Pharaohs were young

Before the ances­tors of man walked upright

Uncon­cerned with the triv­i­al­i­ties of the world

As kin­folk pop and burst upon the lilac scented air

Do you know the mys­ter­ies you carry?

Do you pon­der your mortality?

Ques­tion your purpose?

Can you plumb the depths of this world?

Pierce the shad­ows that claim the light?

See inside a woman’s heart?

Give mean­ing to the mad­ness I see?

I am flawed

A con­ver­gence of nucleic acids

Coded by uncar­ing mad­men at the the­ater of the absurd

I am the upside of the die

The tum­bling leaf tossed to and fro

by uncar­ing breeze

The spin­ning wheel whose destination

Yet deter­mined

You care lit­tle for the truths that drifts beside you

That affirm you

Spher­i­cal truths of an omnipo­tent God

Who taunts me

Bub­bles…

Only Bub­bles

The world was in chaos

Turns out

The mad­men were right

The Tribu­la­tion

The Rap­ture

The Wrath of Trumpets

And the almighty had spoken

His voice

Sound­ing a bit like Grou­cho Marx

Pro­claim­ing

“I’m flush­ing you all down the hopper”

Accom­pa­nied by Archangels’ on Horns

And the whole rhythm sec­tion was indeed

The pur­ple gang

Men of God

Gashed their Teeth

Unable to assimilate

They were right

All along.

I couldn’t under­stand the madness

The tears

The wrench­ing of hands

I always knew

It was a five ticket ride

A cou­ple of laps around the track

Then

Some­one else’s turn

I thought of the woman

I had loved

And won­dered

What they were doing…

I thought of love

How it never seemed to last

Eter­nal yet

Frag­ile, like hand craved China

And

How my clumsy fingers

Always seemed to break it

I could never glue those pieces

Back together again

Sad…

I thought of the rich

And how pissed they must have been

To real­ize

That at the end of all things

All the wealth they’ve accumulated

Didn’t mean fuck

I thought of the poor and the sick

How they must have been saying

About time

I decide to roll solo

No sense being a hypocrite

At the very end

I got a beach chair

And sat

A hot wind was blow­ing cold

There was fire in the sky

A young child

In tears

Was wan­der­ing lost down the street

I knew him

Appar­ently his par­ents couldn’t take the pressure

and offed themselves

I guess they wanted bet­ter seats

Self­ish bastards

I scooped him up in my arms

And turned him to face me

It looked wicked up there

He smiled

I smiled

We waited

But not too long

Will… the night…

Hide you?

Or

Reveal you?

For who you are



Will you always hide

In shad­ows?

Alone



A slith­er­ing hematologist

Lay­ing belly to sand?

Wouldst you deny truth?

Are you the apple that rises

When dropped to the floor?

The Tear

That climbs?

The bro­ken toy

Cry­ing for mend­ing?



Nay

You are none of that.

Yet you play your life

Like a trick shot in a cheap par­lor game

A used tis­sue in a coughs for­got­ten dream



You shine…



The night retreats

When you arrive.

Find your Dawn…

Lady…

As the bright Suns of sum­mer fade

And the incan­des­cent greens of sweet Silvan

Fade to brown

Sil­van retreats



The trees yawn

Prepar­ing for sleep

Release their children

Mother breeze envelopes them

In sigh­ing heartache

And caress them in majes­tic dance

To the for­est floor

“Hush my children

Sleep the sleep of death”



The win­ter of my life approaches

The chill of approach­ing mortality

Grips my Soul

I no longer hold on to yesterday

I dis­miss it fondly

Telling mem­o­ries to roam free

And seek suc­cor from dreams



The Soul fights

But years never lie

“But what of Love?

Was it only the Poet’s song?

Was it only a dream?”



Lady Death approaches

And embraces me

In cold warmth

“Hush Child”

“Time to take another journey”

“Your wars are over”

“Hush now”

“Hush”

The Cen­sus bureau defines poverty for a fam­ily of four to be $21,200.00, This, of course, means if you make $21,201.00 you bet­ter not cry poor because you will get your ass kicked. Add or sub­tract about $3500.00 per child and you can fig­ure the rest out your­self.



How did they come up with this ridicu­lous cal­cu­la­tion? Civil ser­vants! They assigned two guys to fig­ure it out and they were prob­a­bly pissed about some­thing (civil ser­vants are always pissed) Maybe they didn’t get over­time the week before so they say “frig it” (civil Ser­vants are always say­ing “Frig it”) so they get out the old dart board and throw the darts and BAM! $21,200.00 was the magic num­ber. By the way, all Gov­ern­ment pol­icy is decided by the dart board method, do you think they are actu­ally ana­lyz­ing this stuff? Please! I was a civil ser­vant and I know!



You guys do not remem­ber the dark ages when the Gov­ern­ment decided that peo­ple had 2.4 chil­dren per house­hold. Well as Amer­i­cans we could not tol­er­ate any­one hav­ing more than us so Uncle Sam was forced to chop up babies and hand out a .4 baby to every fam­ily with two chil­dren. It was heart wrench­ing. I lead the fight that stopped this bar­barous prac­tice and rea­soned with the peo­ple that instead of chop­ping every fourth baby up we could all keep two kids and send the odd num­ber over­seas where they could work eigh­teen hours a day in sweat shops mak­ing cloth­ing so Wal-Mart can sell us Amer­i­cans real cheap clothes. Yea, always felt good about that.



How do you think we defeated the Evil Empire dur­ing the cold war? Sim­ple, we found out they had more mis­siles than us and being Amer­i­cans that was intol­er­a­ble so we built ten bil­lion of the suck­ers and forced the Soviet Union into bank­ruptcy. The rest is, as they say, his­tory



Back to poverty.



Defin­ing this dire and heart break­ing “con­di­tion” as “poverty” does not speak ade­quately to the prob­lem. I pro­pose the Odd­poet chart; I believe it speaks more elo­quently to the issue. Here goes:



$21200——–Poor Fucks

$16000——–Really Poor Fucks

$12000——–Destitute

$10000——–Totally Fucked

There!



Every­thing in life is a con­tin­uüm and we as a soci­ety need to address the degrees of poverty, I sub­mit:



“Jim, how’s it going man?”

“Not good Odd­poet I am a poor fuck.”

“Stop cry­ing man, I am totally fucked.”

See…big dif­fer­ence.



The prob­lem with the typ­i­cal American’s view of poverty is: IT’S THEIR FAULT! You know it’s true, never try to bull­shit the Quas. It is not that we are bad peo­ple; it is the bull­shit that was incul­cated into our brains since birth. The Amer­i­can Dream, work hard and you will suc­ceed. Maybe I was pre­co­cious because I never bought into that bull­shit. Sure there are Bill Gates, War­ren Buf­fett and a whole bunch of self made very wealthy peo­ple. How­ever, the over­whelm­ing major­ity of global wealth is inher­ited. Yea, peo­ple are born into it, which takes a lot of hard work.



If poverty was a cho­sen con­di­tion it would require the fol­low­ing mind­set:



“Honey, I was think­ing, who really needs a car, nice house, vaca­tions, ade­quate heath care, edu­ca­tion for our kids. Babe, that shit is over rated, I think we should shoot for being Des­ti­tute.”



If you believe it’s their fault you can not run from that logic. Sure you see poor peo­ple on the street cor­ner drink­ing and it appears they do not want to par­take of the Amer­i­can Dream, but it is only that they have had their hearts ripped out of their chests, and they sim­ply no longer give a shit.



Briefly, world hunger:



Ever see those poor beyond poverty peo­ple from third world Coun­tries wait­ing in line for hours for a frig­gin bag of rice and the frig­gers are grate­ful! If I was hun­gry and had to wait in line for two hours and some dude handed me a bag of rice, I would say:



“What the frig am I sup­pose to do with this?

“Go to a wedding?”

“Give me a burger and a bev­er­age of my choice or I will kick your ass!”

Well, I am an Amer­i­can.



I never do this but I will step out of char­ac­ter.



THE BIGGEST CRIME OF THE LAST ONE HUNDRED YEARS IS NOT THE HOLOCAUST, NOT THE LACK OF CONCERN ABOUT THE AIDS PANDEMIC, IT IS THAT AS A GLOBAL COMMUNITY WE ALLOW ANOTHER HUMAN BEING TO GO TO SLEEP AT NIGHT HUNGRY. IN THIS TIME OF THE UNPRESEDENTED ONCENTRATION OF HUMAN WEALTH AND TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT WE ALLOW THAT CRIME TO GO UNFOUGHT DEFINES ME AS A PIECE OF SHIT! YOU DECIDE FOR YOURSELF. I GUESS WHEN WE DECIDE TO LOOK AT ONE ANOTHER AS TRUE BROTHERS AND SISTERS, MAYBE THEN WE WILL RISE AS ONE AND SAY NO MORE!



Till then, fuck you and give me a burger and a bev­er­age of my choice.

I kicked the Jester’s man­tle aside

It balled up

In a corner

I almost laughed

At it’s lone­li­ness.



Make me laugh!

Sorry not tonight

Got no time for smile

The clock be tick­ing



I slid through the sul­try sum­mer night

Naked

All bull­shit

Packed, pack­aged and labeled

In alpha­bet­i­cal order

Of course

That be Tomorrow’s game



Tonight

I stare at the stars

And will them brighter.

I feel the life of grass

Against my back

As it envelopes me

Makes love to me

Who could want a bet­ter lover



Crick­ets sing

Fire­flies flash cryp­tic code

In the light starved night

I know

They speak the eternal

The lan­guage of Poets and Lovers

Saints and Sinners

Mad­men

Mur­der­ers

Gods

Dev­ils

Tonight

There will be only tears and awe.

Tonight

There will be magic



Will you take my hand?

Please

No words

Tonight

We sim­ply

Be

A

Part

Of this divine tapestry

I’ve been forged in the white hot heat of pas­sion
I’ve been annealed and tem­pered in the fur­nace of Despair
I’ve been honed and sharp­ened by teacher Pain
I’ve spent time amid the home­less
And writ­ten poems with the insane



I am the cylin­der that mis­fired
Pointed at my head
I am the bro­ken rope
Wealed and con­gealed
Upon my throat
Even Death rejects me



I am the scarred man
The imper­fect crea­ture
Fun­nels run down my cheeks
Home for famil­iar tears



While you are edg­ing your lawn this week­end
And putting down the weed and feed
Know we are out there



Watch­ing…
Wait­ing…
Feel­ing
Cry­ing…
Know­ing…
Liv­ing…
Dying…



We are the imper­fect Crea­tures
God’s aban­doned Chil­dren
And we are everywhere