230817A
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Try to do something right,
but it never will be.
Everything is always turned around.
You cannot get it to go forwards,
for all the backward goings on.
If you are up front about it,
someone will go behind your back.
If you try to be open about it,
someone will sneak around you.
It is simply that type of place.
Plenty willing to get rid of you,
simply to improve their own statistics.
They are being measured on something
that never really serves your interests.
As long as the numbers look good.
You know everything will be broken up
that you try to put together.
The addicts all laugh at you
because they long ago gave up trying,
and found something else to do.
Finding something else to do
is a really big thing nowadays.
Something everyone is supposed to do,
until finding it all ends up the same,
they end up doing nothing at all.
They find doing nothing takes practice,
and fine points to be learned from a master.
Call it the zen of futility,
getting a wack with the stick of ridicule,
at any slightest sign of motivation.
That is when you will feel the full push,
to conform to perfect nothingness.
Turn off, tune out, and become one
with the absolute nothing of nothingness,
taken in generously addictive doses.
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230817B
-----------
Those lost friends
who do not call anymore.
I was only interesting
when I was drunk or stoned,
unable to string ideas together
in any meaningful sequences.
Otherwise I was too boring
to even bother with.
This era of chemical no mind,
effortlessly accessible to anyone.
No special skills required,
to wipe yourself out,
and claim higher unconsciousness,
which is transcendental
separation from brutal realities
no one wants to hear about.
Seemed the best of friends,
until the cock crowed,
the way it always crows
against the non compliant.
There are rules about such things,
that dictate membership.
The crowd that intoxicates together
stays together.
Now I am not against the idea,
of taking a really cheap trip
out of your own usual mind,
but I abhor making a habit of it,
until no one is ever at home in there
and your mind puts out a vacant sign
looking for new lodgers
because it is nothing but empty space.
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230817D
------------
I have no idea how anyone does it,
as to getting that permit issued
to enable them to go there.
I do not even know where you apply,
or what is involved in the application.
Never got that far.
Seems shadow existences, such as ours,
have little, if any, real chance
at getting as far as the application lines,
much less being subsequently approved,
for that next level of reality
and its issuance of any sort of real identity.
Without that type of formal approval,
fat chance of ever being anyone.
Most get to play with their shadow puppets
on the walls of their own caves.
A cruel trick of the light,
but for some that is enough amusement.
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230817E
-----------
Would not know what
or even when, or who, or how,
within that context
of the knowledge I was given
concerning my own society.
The censors must have expunged
large portions of the manuals,
leaving significant lacunae
in the body of the texts,
as to any explicit instructions.
That gives it a peculiar quality
of being something sacred,
and only accessible to an elite.
Creates a hierarchy of knowing
where you can scrape bottom.
Those shallows are crowded
with washed up stories.
The bits and pieces
of whatever went wrong,
and ended up as a total wreck.
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230817F
-----------
Nowadays it seems a fact
that the only movement you can start
is the movement of yourself,
higher, thither, and yon,
in persistently unsettling turbulence.
Or you can settle out and not try,
but then they say you will not rise,
to any sort of surface
from being pushed so far under,
that nothing ever goes up from down.
A most cruel sort of twist,
that serves about the same fate
as a brutal shakedown in a back alley,
tearing down what was built up,
into an endless process of healing.
No one ever officially factors that
into any of the actual costs of living.
Fact is it continually costs more
and you keep getting less and less
in exchange for whatever you had.
It serves to manipulate values,
as to destroying the intangibles
and anything else not officially priced,
thus being more likely to be left behind,
as no more than recycling.
That is no better than a strip search,
only to find you are in the wrong body.
Another illusion of the soul,
having grabbed a wrong garment
from the rack, on a rushed morning.
Catholic Inquisitors had the same reason,
for tormenting the flesh in ingenious ways,
meant to convince that something persists,
when everything else is totally broken
made useless, and rearranged.
Others only await the spoils,
as to the usual plundering and looting,
that permeates the lower strata,
ceaseless beehives of finger pointings,
as another trick of feeling sated.
They only want your nicest things,
but never show real interest in you.
They relish the idea of your bankruptcy,
and are tantalized by your dislocation,
as they shop for used bargains.
Some people do gather together
in the name of the Lord,
any whichever lord will usually do,
as long as it seems as powerful,
as a government or corporation.
That offers a more portable membership,
as to nothing really much of anything,
in organizations with chapters everywhere.
The imaginations of members consumed
by the toll of their own persistent upheaval.
Everything is short term,
or dangerously locked and loaded
into the breach of rising tides of uncertainty.
Some using the Bible as an excuse
for promoting anti-nomian homelessness.
The departments of external control
having run totally, a muck,
as to dealing with any internal issues
are ever more invasive and determining.
We can thank technological change for that.
They have created a deeper generation gap
as to whatever used to be better in the past,
that no one under a typical half life remembers.
Many of the young feeling encouraged
to pushing the old out, to get somewhere.
There are far fewer good historians,
and many more pipe dreamers.
An easy way to forget nearly anything
that is not permanently stored in a data cloud
of spreadsheet calculations pretending wisdom.
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230817G
-----------
The content determines the syntax,
and you can keep paying after that.
Even our childhood library records
remain a permanent part
of our suspect profiles.
We may easily have shown an early interest
in all of the wrong things,
proving inadequately guided
in those decisive, formative, years.
I know I read all the wrong things,
and at a very precocious age.
That largely included the classics.
Forbidden knowledge was my stock in trade.
If it was unpopular I went straight for it,
by a kind of natural instinct.
Now they would say that I was in the genome
for getting into every sort of literary trouble.
A social misfit who loved to go home early,
to read until past the time of lights out.
The only one in that crowd as to that type
of misguided rebel without cause.
The other kids all preferred to do the right things,
as to staying out, long past streetlight curfews,
to involve in fooling with the night.
Vandalism reports attesting to healthier interests.
Teachers tended to frown at my reading things,
past the common level of comprehension.
I tried to invent other sorts of pastimes
to battle the raging seas of scholastic boredom,
Reading outside the prescribed curriculum
proved to be a far better fidget spinner,
and while teachers seized other contraband
they never took my book away.
I would dread to view the notes they made
in some secret educational dossier,
as to my perpetual inattention in class,
trying to be good, going through the motions.
Mostly they chose to ignore me,
and were more intent on capturing squirt guns,
detecting the odour of Thrills chewing gum,
counting pencils, and seizing rubber bands.
Fiction was never a hostile country,
so it was a place of refuge I could escape to,
never quite having to run away from home,
and knowing I would never be bullied there.
Characters in the story would never attack you
for being a suck, a fag, or a spaz,
and they would never actually reject you
from being on their team.
So I could make some of the nicest friends,
in reading whole series of volumes,
knowing them so much better
than I knew anyone else.
------------------------------
230817H
-----------
People think too highly of themselves,
as being a full measure of normal.
No dangerous additives there
and the ingredients clearly labelled
on the outside of their packaging.
They seem terrified of being quarantined,
as something that deviated
when it was analyzed as to contents.
A life long fear of being tagged
as being rejects.
That seemed to be a more innocent game,
back in the days when we were in school.
Reinforcements of conformity
clashing with teenage rebellion,
and not given mature seriousness.
The way it is with dinosaurs
that do not think about becoming fossilized.
Neither did anyone really imagine
that they were leaving huge footprints
all over the mud of their futures.
Nevertheless there were stigmatizations
carried out with routine precision and regularity,
Abnormal was not made to be attractive,
and most people tried to not stand out,
that much, or in those particular ways.
Only the most privileged and highly regarded
were really allowed to obviously deviate.
The lower you stood on the social totem pole
the more ordinary you were expected to seem to be
and what seems to be is, for all practical purposes.
That did not win you any prize catches,
but it provided a commonly desired sense of peace,
as the primary means of routine reinforcement
fully condoned by the authorities,
who all tended to favour that natural evolution.
Despite that fierce climate of competition,
as to who attractively rated and who did not,
no one ever really assumed that it could happen
that love lives, so called, could become rewards
handed out in return for extremes of conformity.
Normalism gains in brutality ever after that,
as it strives to stretch you thin as a filament thread
that can pass through the eye of any needle,
rather than allowing any fuller expressions
of that complex weave of cravings to become.
That is how they tend to slot you in,
to being pulled at and drawn out,
until it all winds up into an over wound coil,
of ever narrower confinements to routine,
along with the reduction in potential options.
There is no latitude to the longitude,
and in the long and short of it you always lose,
in terms of doing anything your own way,
even if others used to succeed,
before the latest revision to specifications.
It no longer seems to matter how much you did,
or how much you might have accomplished,
but only as to exactly how you did it.
There they always have you completely beat,
as to formalizing and changing the maze.
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230817I
----------
The favourite game nowadays,
is go back and begin all over again from scratch,
because the rules have all been changed.
That makes a gross profit for some,
while it empties the pockets of others,
by severely restricting recognition.
Part of the increased commodification,
as to a rising price of scarcified fame,
providing more leverage to the wealthiest.
Cancelling out any noblesse oblige,
cultivating disdain for nepotism,
and encouraging elimination of patronage.
Nothing works the way it used to,
and everything tends to favour the pedantic,
who addict most easily to simple minded patterns.
Most others, it is rumoured, can be medicated,
apparently much to the same effect,
as to becoming similarly desirable fixtures.
Remember the hot keys, and you will do fine,
at striving to become a more obsessive machine,
between intervals of returning to a sterile pod.
That tends to rule out originality
in favour of more consistent levels of training,
eliminating most types of chance and deviation.
The Industrial Revolution and the assembly line,
were already predictive of an unnatural outcome,
enhanced by persistent military need.
Artists getting the worst of it all,
in the ever more intense courses of regimentation,
transforming to mass productive management.
Besides that they tend to fail to create wars,
and typically are the first to be made to serve in them,
because that insists on obedience and rules.
In times of what appears to be impending conflict,
very few want to be suspected of any art,
because it is more likely to prove disabling or fatal.
Idolization of totally consistent and predictable faith,
as representing all that can ever be trusted,
becomes another common process of mass elimination.
It is easier to be completely eliminated now
than it used to be, but that display is never erected
in any of the existing museums.
Your license to be human is revoked or expired,
but you are free to be retrained and reexamined
as to any hopes of regaining a place in society.
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