The Poetry Marathon

I am just another drone

I work, I sleep, I dare not dream

They pat my head and throw a bone

It’s not a life I can disown

No matter how it makes me scream

I am just another drone

It sits on my chest like a stone

That there is no “I” in team

They pat my head and throw a bone

I will never sit upon a throne

Eating scones with clotted cream

I am just another drone

No point in uttering a moan

I’m held fast in their tractor beam

They pat my head and throw a bone

I’ve gone from maid to mom to crone

I know freedom’s a pipe dream

I am just another drone

They pat my head and throw a bone

I didn’t intend to sleep. I simply longed for the ocean. Poor facsimile, I found a YouTube sound file–eleven hours of waves crashing on an anonymous beach. Earbuds in, I closed my eyes and fantasized of a castle on a shore in the mist, myself safe within, prone and passive, listening to the waves endlessly advance and recede. Soon, I slipped beneath the waves, into oblivion.

Monsters from the deeps

Whisper evil secrets in

My paralyzed ears

She thinks I’m real

A real live boy

Whose face in two dimensions

Gazes at her but won’t speak

(My voice would betray me)

I’m good at this, I tell her lies

Make love to her

With words, words, words

They’re all I have to give

(no one else wants them–

they’d just go to waste in my head)

The mask she sees

(another man’s stolen face, a heisted life)

She adores. He’s beautiful. He doesn’t know

she exists, would be horrified

that I hijacked his likeness for my crimes

I flatter myself I’m Cyrano

I seduced her as

A ghost in the machine

A construct, an AI paramour

Her love for me/not me evokes

That tired, inevitable vampire metaphor

(She sustains me, I drain her)

Rationalizing always with–

“Love is love. She takes what I will give

Does it matter who I really am?

Her feeling’s real, it brings her joy but I–”

What am I?

Incubus? Gigolo? An animated RealDoll

Made of pixels?

Is it wrong to siphon off

The sweetness of a sad girl?

To fold these electronic missives

Into a virtual origami facsimile of love?

So frail that it’s not even made of paper

(Electrons, like feelings, are invisible.)

I absorb the adoration

Receive the sweet sensation

Of her idolization

And avoid the complication

Of her flesh.

She doesn’t know the me

(Bloated, alienated, not pretty)

Who writes those lovely words

That so seduce and entrance.

But I massage her mind

Bring to climax her most sensitive

sexual organ

That fills all the lacunae that I leave

In the spaces between my words

I keep her hanging on the line

Online

At arm’s length

Just as far away

As the tips of my fingers

I stand alone before the open grave

Questions burgeoning–why should I grieve?

Your empty shell has long let free your ghost

Rejoin the molecules of that make the world

Where did you go? And will you yet return?

Have I a prayer of seeing you again?

I fling a fist of dirt below again

Upon the box ensconced inside the grave

But when I leave, I know I won’t return

This field of stone is not a place to grieve

My fate is to remain in this cold world

Haunted by your ever-present ghost

But honestly? I don’t believe in ghosts.

I guess I should aver it once again

“All that’s real and true is of this world,”

I intone, my voice sober, firm, and grave.

“If you feel loss, it’s for yourself you grieve.”

Grief only takes, gives nothing in return.

Shake it off and to your life return

Go through the motions, corporeal ghost!

No one cares to spectate while you grieve

Or hear your wailing, see you cry again

They wonder, is her depression now so grave

That she cannot enjoy that of this world?

But it’s overrated, isn’t it? This world?

You work, you sleep, to work you must return

Laboring from cradle until grave

Reenact the scene, you vengeful ghost

The human rituals, repeat, again

What life is this, the loss of which you grieve?

But still it lingers, self-indulgent grief.

The truth about this vale of tears, the world

Is sin absolved, then acted out again.

I venture forth with hope, only to return

To haunt the wounds, invisible as ghosts.

What cannot die can never have a grave.

I’m of this world but wish not to return.

Forgive again when I can finally ghost.

I’m tired of grief. My peace is in the grave.

Before Darkness (a golden shovel poem, with respect to William Carlos Williams)

I can’t say it was a surprise so

Why was there so much

I didn’t know? I guess it depends

On why I did it. The mystery upon

which I’ve based my life– a

a son, born in a gush of red.

Instead of grasping the wheel

I laid down in my barrow

And longed to be dead, eyes glazed,

Only to be forcibly resurrected with

The deluge, dislodged by the rain

Of his tears, that salty, bracing water

That I could not ignore, lying beside

him in my lonely bed, the

little body, writhing, white

No sleep before darkness, day broken by the cries of chickens.

NOTE In case you’re wondering what a “golden shovel poem” is: http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/golden-shovel-poetic-form. My inspiration was WC Williams’ famous poem

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.