The Poetry Marathon

I never realized there was a term for my lifestyle

Guess they call it ‘social distancing’
I call it normalcy

Not that I’m misanthropic, I just don’t like people much
Especially when they congregate in large groups

Individually they’re ok I guess
But once there’s more than two or three I tend to look for some way to escape

Give me a backpack and a lonely peak
A desert
A barren wasteland
A deserted beach

The joyous cacophony of morning birds
Howl of wolves
Bark of coyotes

Rustle of leaves through trees
Scent of evergreen
Pristine mountain streams with water so cold it stings when you splash it on your face
The open ocean stretching to meet the sky at the horizon

Keep your parties, bars and festivals
Your silly groupthink premanufactured dreams
Your trends, fashions and popular fads
Your pandering and posturing

Apparently it’s the new normal
But it’s the old normal
Just with more masks,
More suspicion and paranoia
And extra hand washing

Don’t tell me to stay inside,
But I’m happy to stay 6 feet away and not shake hands
Happy to keep to myself and not deal with traffic
Or wait 5 minutes in line
Limited access to supplies can be a pain
But social distancing is just fine

Pink and orange light percolating through wisps of pale white

Salt spray and sand caress the skin

Crash of surf harmonizing with seagull squawk

Clunk of coconut dropping on jagged rock volcanic

Smell of surfboard wax mingling with drying seaweed stench

Eyes squinting against sunrise reflection off glassy head-high sets

This is as good as it gets

Squinting through the canopy, she looks for the sun

Leaves falling like dry brittle tears

Crunching footsteps through cracking twigs, Unaware of mycelium network underfoot

Each towering tree once a sapling she nurtured from seed

Individual unique perfection

She caresses the bark of each, calling them by name

Oblivious to their interconnection

Almost 20 years ago, got my first taste of tear gas
Never thought it would be so intoxicating
Back then so idealistic, thought the war wouldn’t last
Knew it was revolution we were inoculating

A few years later got a face full of pepper spray
Running in black bloc on the streets of New York City
Watched comrade’s head baton-cracked with a sound I still hear today
And realized revolution ain’t that pretty

When Occupy hit I picked up the burden yet again
Cautiously optimistic we could really make a change
Facilitating GA’s as a grizzled veteran
While the nature of oppression remained the same

Systems of control updated and modified
The chess game evolving ever more complex and intricate
The concept of revolution slowly getting commodified
The collective attention too distracted to give a shit

Standing Rock, Ferguson, exposing more brutality
Trevon Martin, Philando Castile, so many undocumented calamities
Can we ever overcome, or is this really Armageddon
There’s gotta be some escape from this insanity

Because now they’re shooting bullets, whether real or rubber coated
And these pandering semantics don’t do shit, it’s pathetic
Flash bang soundtrack on a backdrop of COVID
The change we really need has to be systemic.

Watch the night sky start to illuminate
Illuminate darkness of collective misunderstanding
Illuminate the truth obscured by darkness of confusion
Insight dispelling delusions of a false conception
Hope giving rise to a new concept of freedom
Freedom from the defilement of understanding

Enlighten everything

So much information and so little wisdom
Appeal to emotions instead of rationality
Pander to base instincts, knee jerk reactions
Polarized perceptions and preconceived notions
Shedding thin-skinned superficial rhetoric
Pathetic attempts to shift blame away from the real causes
Attacking the symptoms instead the system
Radicalize, grasp the problem at its roots

Enlighten everything

Recognize the solution is a grudging acceptance
It is what it is, not what we wish it could be
To live in our illusions is blissful, sweet comfort,
Ignorance and holding on to a defiled mindset
So no regrets, open mind to terrible beauty of the infinite
Adapt to the ever-changing flow of energy

Enlighten everything

Recipe for Societal Collapse and Authoritarian Restructuring

1. Start with a foundation of slavery and greed, create rules to allow rich white merchant class to maintain and gain power, wipe out native population after demonizing them as “savage” and “uncivilized”.

2. Institutionalize exploitation of the working class, whether slaves, indentured servants or serfs in the name of capitalism and progress.

3. Create false conception of freedom among the general population, obscuring systemic racism and economic control systems.

4. Divide population into 2 groups, use rhetoric and media-driven narratives to pit both groups against each other, continue stirring pot to increase polarization and further separate groups, increasing emotional reactions until nearly every topic under the sun becomes divisive.

5. Use tragic events such as acts of terrorism, war, school shootings, environmental catastrophes or global pandemics to enact further authoritarian policies and limit avenues for dissent.

6. Use orange-skinned political figurehead to incite one side to violently attack the other, using rhetoric that appeals to ingrained systemic racism and xenophobic fear cultivated by generations of passed down ignorance and hate.

7. Use falsified and/or misleading media narratives, public school system and disinformation campaigns to create confusion and general distrust of any institutions trying to promote truth, equality or civil discourse.

8. Isolate and discredit intellectuals, revolutionary ideas and anything else that might threaten the status quo.

9. As civil unrest and chaos inevitably start to rise, use provocateurs to provoke violence and allow conditions for total military crackdown on fractured and polarized population.

10. Enact orange figurehead as supreme leader, round up dissidents and activists using anti-terror laws and place in work camps, providing free labor to build new authoritarian dystopia where rich white men once again have complete and utter control over the country and are able to do whatever they please.

Enjoy!

Once more under black velvet pinpricked by cosmic light
Once again conduct muses to give voice to this silent night
Once again sculpt from Eris’ random form into ordered lines
Once more into the depths of infinite Mind…

She stirred my depths to percolate what I thought forgotten
Made fresh the parts I thought decayed and rotten
The long-suppressed emotions I had tucked away in hope of my own safety
The demons that I thought no longer chased me

The tidal wave of passion nearly drowning
The loss of my self-discipline astounding

Ever wanting more

Ever wanting more than what I could consume
The way the world would fade away when she was in the room
And soon I lost all sense of self in rabbit-hole of who she was
The razor edge between infatuation and what I thought was love

But flowry words are cheap when gestures of affection unreturned
The fire of physical connection without the mental left both of us burned
And as both of us yearned for more than the other had to offer
I felt my heart inch closer to the slaughter

Lesson learned

Now months have passed and painful throb has faded to a half-forgotten ache
I look back at the times we spent and don’t see them as mistakes
Just another step in both our journeys, maybe in the right direction
For all else she shook what was asleep awake

Here we go again…
Feels like a lifetime ago since the last Marathon. As the world spirals further into uncertainty, I find solace in poetry, using words and lines, allegories and metaphors to try and describe my state of being in context of the chaos that surrounds us all.

In these crazy times, creative expression becomes ever more important to try and make some kind of sense out of the all-that-is.

I’ve always been inspired by society’s upheaval and radical culture shifts, from the anti-globalization protests of the early 2000’s to Occupy to the present day the collapse of the American dream has always been a muse, for better or for worse.

I think there’s a beauty in the transmutation of pain into art, and I’ve always been inspired by those who are able to take personal and/or collective passion and express it in a way that makes you think, makes you wince, makes you feel.

Passion can be love and happiness, but sometimes it’s righteous indignation and uncontained rage. Sometimes it’s anguish and sorrow at generations of oppression. Sometimes it’s hope, sometimes it’s hopelessness. But for all that it is, I think it’s our duty as poets to express it in this form.

Good luck everyone, see you in the trenches. Hold nothing back.

Attention muses on 3rd shift,
My sanity is slipping
Inspiration fades into the mundane

Brain sweats
In search of lost momentum
Meaning of the words are all the same

Sleep deprived and nonsensical
The Muses must think I’m mental

Too tired to ressurect rationality’s remains

Sonoma wildfire
Frightened feline runs away
A friend gone too soon

Missing companion
The young boy searches the streets
Hangs flyers handmade

A call from stranger
Kitty purrs on telephone
Friends reunited