The Poetry Marathon

NEXT
For You
It’s yours alone and everyone’s too

reverse engineer broken fundamentals
Years are just a human timescale
Count the days, pretend to be sick
IV drip
Lights in a screen
5G
What can you see?
Blurry

Rot in your imagination while conjuring playlist ghosts

Nothing left to say
unless I say everything
like an exhibitionist for voyeurs  – bleeding

Freedom = nothing to lose
they say
not true?
Nothing – trapped
Eyes closed – black
red – retina
Faces – imaginary

Face- the last thing
you see
before death, and then entropy

Perform inward
No

No phones
No Cameras
No Posts

A machine doesn’t forget
(until it breaks, of course)
and the hinges snap
an engineering flaw
succumbs to the inevitability

of time
at the point of weakness

or the data iterates
within itself into
final nonsense

or the delicate
chemical
production
methods
get lost

in the war, or better yet, replaced
by something new, better,
exponentially more destructive.

A machine doesn’t forget and I can barely remember.

Repeat
emerge from algorithmic slurry
one day out of the year I relearn how to talk
Repeat
rote gibberish for the content scraper
the overmind that changed everything
tomorrow
Repeat
for some reason

It claims to be new
it’s not
so you can
Repeat
some people use distraction
some use fear
hunger or pain
so they can
Repeat
no matter the method
Tomorrow
the world continues to turn
as I observe intently
so I can
Repeat.

No grand statement of purpose or profound wisdom
just an observation:
Life goes on and we deal with it.

ooooo
Seeing things through to the end – my only useful trait
borne of being accustomed to waiting.
Waiting is also a vice,
and inaction a sort of visceral thing, conservation of energy,
a kind of gluttony.
I’m intimately familiar with vice and gluttony as well.
But at least I have a useful trait.

delete dis!

Repeat

Water falling from the sky is almost enough to make me believe in miracles.

The percussion sings when the electric fractal neurons travel into the ground,
the whole world shudders to the rhythm,
and everything alive comes to life
with the fragrance of soil and ozone.

I remember clearly once, years ago,
after a rain storm
the air was so clear
I could see how high the sky goes.

Content

call & response
contrast

variations on a theme.

Faces moving left and right, up and down,
the universal human pattern.
Eyes and mouth, curled up, curled
down and the various shades
of meaning.
An immediate thing- instinct-
it does not occupy the same space as words.
Paired with words
the signal gets confused.

A pale yellow light plays against the white walls
and the ghosts stand empty or open.
If every moment is a waking dream,
there’ll be plenty of time to sleep.