Carcinogen

I

Hallowed tables and chairs
Fabled paintings and drinks
Mythic bohemia and rebel
Will soon be swept away
By the tsunami of paper economy.

Sixty years of culture
Desolation's supper
A prayer for it's survival.

Bearing loss to painful
Forgetting will be cancer.

II

Six years of slow poisoning
A comatose and a cry for help
In bed ravaged by bewilderment.

To get up at dawn and find my future healthy and well
Still holding on to hope, with nobody's blessing but mine
A world ends in nostalgia and hypothesis.

The possibilities frayed, a break in
the Chain, renders the Chain broken,
and gridlock the river
Dam the flow at the mountain.

A flood, in an area
Where glaciers flame
And flora just drown
And the only outcome
Open to the flood
Is to freeze full
And no more river.

III

I hope that time still remembers me
And hope they had got my letter of love.

A time of the plague is
A good time as any other
To break the silence.

Silence is fool's gold
In the aqua regia rain.

Phantasm of the Past

Think blasphemous thoughts
Tell convincing lies
Read any manuscript
Hear any cacophony
Fight losing battles
Have frightening dreams
Think of you
And try to explain.

We fell apart
Pieces of shattered mirror
That could show us
What cannot be explained.

Stabbed when I hear
The insects' flutter
They know our fears
They know our stories
A knife to the heart
That gets it pumping again
And on with the show,
But I still cannot explain.

We only have the phantasm of our past
To comfort us when lights extinguish
And eyes close with peace of mind
And the heart starts to bleed.

The Man By The Wall

A free fall from
Common sense
Crash landing on
The assembly line
Moving at breakneck speed.

Demons follow me down
Cloud my perception
Of manufactured mind
Of banal swearing
Inducing me to embrace the process.

A chequered existence
Leapt over and bypassed
Thus doomed I wait
With the glee of resignation
My turn to be fed to the machine.

Gulag Soundscape

I

The merciless grind of the motors that drive the rotating guillotines above

Gunshots in the wispy wind as the writing is on the wall

Ethereal sparks from throats on fire escalate, recede, escalate again

The damned propaganda Machine fervently holds Mass

II

Recess
Blink and miss it
Forget about food
Relieve
Clean up
Get back
Look around
Most are elsewhere

God Bless 'em

They return
Boisterous
Vibrant with life
Talking slander and loving it
Energized
They Enter
Glimpse forward
At the Machine
See evil
See their fate
Shoulders drop
Eyes drop down
Drained souls
Dead

III

The Booms echo far as the Squeaks of the feet of the Hustlers' become louder as they attempt to outfox the Markers and make the Score under the leaking roof

The clang of the plate on wood as the Catch of the day is served and pounced upon by the Starving while the Wasted entertain the Smoke amidst the jingle of round metal scrape of cotton fibre

The doppelered high F and the atonal rumbling of the Choo Choo as it passes by heading Southward towards the rain clouds and the future and a world devoid of chains and nooses and shackles made for the Soul