MINIMALIST SYNOPSIS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION
WRITTEN IN A MILDLY PEDANTIC VOICE
Limited by this pompous human speech
lolled around our diseased mouths
spat with a serpent's mercurial tongue
forked between persuasive enticements
and gentrified untruths;
inveigling bodies undraped
in their seashell pink innocence
devoured with haste; oysters and pearls
digested the same in bellies of lust.
By day we tell humorous canards
embroidered about our public affects
worn like seventeenth century masks.
__
Philosophy throughout history
rails, woos and reasons with awe;
science longs to own and patent it,
dole it out for a price the way Catholics
pawned eternal promises and reliquaries
to mud spattered, dung-scented peasants
indebted to their feudal lords
both near and afterlife afar.
__
Ideas strewn about midnight mine fields
illumined briefly by the irony
of explosions.
Epiphanies burn alarums
when awareness straddles tenuous
wakefulness and its antithesis.
Monies wasted on puerile desires,
polished coins--honed phrases of pith
chiseled above graven pits.
__
Wading into dusk lit dreams
uncertain where the subconscious
depths of violence and vendetta
rest: these unmentioned nether places
secure in daily reticence now encountered
as one treads above penumbrous denial
half way between vaulted ideals
and the nadir, the unmerciful,
the sociopathic cruel.
_____________________________________________________
Refurbishing sundry stanzas written
while under the influence recollected
and renamed: "Society and the individual"
"Shit, money, and the world, the three American truths,
powering the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to
the country's fate. But they did not prosper… about all they did was
persist."
--from, Thomas Pynchon's
"Gravity's Rainbow"
One:
Culture wanders for centuries across continents
carried on dirty, unmeasured feet;
soles calloused by necessity
trekking into stoic
preSocratic highland stone
shrouded in moon fog
and elusive truth draped
like a gray veil over
everything that's obvious.
Skies streaked with pleasure missiles
predicted by Tyrone Slothrop's erections
…watching war on cable TV
embroidered with loud propaganda
--porn for draconian xenophobes.
Two:
Feral roams destiny
without flinching
brave as Achilles.
Geology dates our hubris
in an age when machines
circle gravity's spine.
…sociopaths who relish
orgasms more than life.
Hurling forefather skulls
at outmoded ideals;
learning how to be modern
though our motives are ancient
and engorged with hedonism.
Attempts at sublimation,
quelling wicked desires
by releasing my protean seed
into phrases that impregnate meaning
spilled like multiply drizzled ellipses
across the page and its purity.
Highlights from last night's dream
You wander an empty room
the color of a breathless lung.
Tenuous elasticity of one's diaphragm
seesawing between past and present;
tempo keeper of consciousness
ever attempting to sense itself
--sentient conundrums that unfurl
into vibrant fractals… mapping
locked quantum realms
without a legend or key.
Wake up from a somnambulist's saunter
in jaundiced supermarket aisles
jawing with a mathematics professor
about Hiroshima at 2:18 a.m.
while Toccata and Fugue plays
in the background as muzak
piped in for the weary eyed
post midnight inquisitive.
The acoustics of frozen foods
acutely resonate doppelgänger
trebles and deep throb bass
clefs shaped like ornate, oversized
commas or happy clitorises.
Mistaking ice cream for ovums
…cyanotic blue lockers stocked
with vacuum sealed embryos
put on long term layaway by corporate
interests or high echelon contractors
operating with the Department
of Defense for a future
Aldous Huxley intimated.
Janitors bathed in harsh florescence
shuffling big brooms down tiled thoroughfares
broad as ostrich wings…
Employee of the month resembles Liberace
though the store manager remains Mr. Smith.
Requesting Soylent Green
you deal with the disappointment
that they've sold out in a world
lustfully cannibalizing
its embalmed self.
__
Incurable male diseases
of either the body or mind
Emptiness entices more than given knowns
culled from our collective discoveries
maintained in annals and owned ovaries.
The untouched page I lustfully mar
--flutes of a random female pelvis
fondled and widened with a song
unfinished until the sanguine fullness
ripens into fruitful promises
at the voodoo nine month's moon
gibbous as a clean-scented fontanel
pressed serpent-mouth-wide
through saline-slick womanhood
with an exquisite pain I envy…
Boldly dumb masculinity thick
as it is Homo erectus
defining itself by absences
it plunders with brazen fantasy and sex
or like dandelion spring fields of misconduct
wagering war and kingly conquest
on anything it cannot tame
or lucratively enslave.
__
[PHILLIP MATTHEU ROBERTS]
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