190817A
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It is what happens
when you fall
into the wrong hands.
Ending up in a bad way,
as to getting taken,
care of.
The text is a container,
that you open
to extract
its secret messages.
The infectious organisms
that replicate in your psyche.
Comedian one liners,
thrown across a stage
explode into different meanings
to different people.
Some only get the shrapnel
from those grenades.
The streets are crowded
with carrier pigeons,
that have only one real purpose.
That is delivering messages
that they know nothing about,
and have no way to understand.
Do not worry
about travelling incognito.
They will recognize you
without reference to a photograph.
They make their deliveries
based on instinct.
Your real destination
is never on any of the maps.
More often you end at the places
you were avoiding having to go.
Someone has turned the signs
to pointing every which way.
They call that being messed up,
and nothing ever gets ironed out.
Seems you always get redirected
the wrong way down one way streets
to where you cannot turn back
to find that other way out again.
You try to go over the top,
having run out of any real options,
only to find it is a long way down,
with nothing to grab onto.
Nothing that would not brush you off
and send you for another tumble.
You might have had it once,
but you do not have it anymore.
They did not really like you,
being in on anything.
You are rubbed out again
before you ever get started.
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190817B
------------
You wait for the clown car
that fails to arrive
with that perfect solution
to all of your worst problems.
What happens
when you trust in clowns,
and other types of gods,
as to what lurks under the surface.
The ringmaster is another clown,
carefully disguised with a respectability,
that tends to disintegrate
when the make up peels off.
Clowns are like wood worms
having burrowed in under the surface.
Pulpy and meticulous bureaucrats
putting endless holes into arguments.
When they emerge
they prefer strength in numbers,
proving more clowns can dance
on the head of a pin, than angels.
You tried to find someone interesting
and all that they sent you were clowns,
all from the same laughing academy.
Nothing left to take seriously.
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190817C
------------
Love that is madness,
or madness disguised as love,
is all the same thing.
Love is always a sort of madness.
A word one learns to avoid,
along with learning the taxonomy
of other types of killer instincts.
It is something common and used,
having been utterly worn out,
to the point of becoming useless.
The dirtiest towel
that everyone has taken a turn at
wiping themselves off with,
until a rag man would not touch it.
If anything was clear enough,
it will surely smear it all out.
Same old dirt rubbed around
in the same old ways.
Its madness is that peculiar delusion
of smudges of cleanliness
obscuring anyone's real intent.
Once used it becomes soiled tissue,
to be appropriately disposed of
along with other sanitary waste.
You might have meant something else,
but once you made the mistake
of bringing the word love into it,
demons of misunderstanding are loosed.
The sort that can tear you apart,
and eat you alive,
literally, or in other more painful ways.
The sort of word that comes at the beginning
of a long, destructive war.
All that plunging in of hard, stiff, objects
into variant versions of soft holes
No one who is experienced at life
really believes that love really is,
anything, other than something dirty.
An army of lawyers would never save you
from any sort of lynch mob
on the subject of that specific point,
considering endless cases to the contrary.
Love is, in romance novels,
but it isn't for you,
and it was put there for a different reason.
Your forever marginal life
will never actually be on the same page
as any of the characters in romance novels,
and the screen plays are even worse.
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190817D
-----------
Playing hide and seek
in the pitched darkness,
until everyone else has left
and you find you are all alone
in a field of ghosts
hurling darkness at you.
All those search lights
that you thought you were seeing,
proving out to be a total illusion.
No one was looking for you,
and they had no interest in you
ever finding them.
Perhaps no one was there,
and you were only playing
with your overactive imagination.
The more probable explanation,
if explanations explain anything,
which they usually don't.
Ploughed down into a field
so many times that you imagine
something might grow out of you.
End up as wasted seed,
strangled out by the weeds,
wherever you started to take root.
That and slowed germination
planted where intent is purely fallow.
If only it were a joke,
rather than being turned over.
Fearing what might become pasture
and forage for sheep.
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190817F
-----------
You have to step back,
and then step back again,
until you go right over the edge.
The tangled mess you become
is what all the king's men
can never put together again.
A skull filled with scrambled eggs
that will never actually hatch,
much less discover anything further
of marmalade, butter and toast plans.
Even leprechauns and saints
have far better luck at rainbows.
Revisionism works that way,
and your promised souvenir hunt
comes to an abrupt ending.
You never really find out
what it was you were supposed to find
or why you had to look for it.
Following direction
is not invariably a good idea.
You get to put a dunce cap on
that might never come off.
Sit in the corner
until the spiders frighten you away.
Your breakfast meetings
were as cancelled as was anything else
that involved French toast.
You put too much faith in Montreal
and the whole thing threatened
to become a mushroom omelette.
It all becomes flat bread
flattened out to take a sharp dip
into vegetative petroleum.
Put it on a wheelchair,
and wheel it around and around,
in vain hopes as to any recovery.
Every night can become fright night
prime time players theatre.
Stay off that stage,
and keep your popcorn to yourself.
You will never gain a lead role,
and in fact you are not in that script.
Lower your expectations
as to any of those cocktail parties
that you would never be invited to attend.
You become an instrument
someone else used to pry the door open,
and then tossed into the hedge.
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190817G
------------
It leaves you breathless,
after taking you down,
a long way past crush depth.
You can spend a whole lifetime,
trying to swim back up
to what looks like the surface.
Hallucinations are common,
when you are that far below the line,
no longer able to fathom positions.
Anything that you run into,
that seems as if it might open up for you
merely takes your breath away.
Extinction seems almost preferable
to the suffocating boredom,
of routine lack of buoyancy.
You ended up in the deep end
pulled under by the lifeguards
as they warned everyone else away.
There are many types of sharks,
some being wolves in sheep's clothing
trying to shepherd you along.
Gills, fins, and paperback novels,
all end up meaning the very same thing,
when the punch line really hits you.
The survival rations ran out,
and the exterminator was called in,
to make a clean sweep of it all.
You find yourself being swept away,
in a dead cockroach undertow,
in one or another unrecognizable state.
No one cares if it is liquid, solid or gas,
as the effects are always identical
in terms of the actual practices employed.
Final farewells tend to function that way,
with everyone gathering around,
whatever was put into the coffin.
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