Conveyer belt love

Conveyer belt love

You nearly ruined me

In the shallows, near the swamp

Where if it didn’t work out?

You dumped and moved on

What a horrible way to live

Nothing redeeming, nothing eternal

I was told; you’re born three centuries too late

For nowadays people are impatient and demanding

They throw away more than they earn

We’re The Plastic Generation … hell we’ll be buried in plastic urns

In this fettered landscape, it’s no easy thing to find

Something left beating, whole and strong.

Conveyer belt love began to make sense

A logical response to an unfeeling era

Where being let down could be replaced by a clone

If you are lonely, buy yourself a Japanese doll

When you are sad, blow something up, or put batteries in

TV for the masses, turn on, tune out, get an i-phone

Be tracked by faux Politicians and told how to vote

Go to sleep with unconscious messages trying to sell you more

Who cares about love, it’s a sham, a fait accompli, an overgrown child

All notions thrown out, along with 24/7 Porn

Your husband is jacking off as you think you’re meeting for your anniversary brunch

Your wife is screwing your boss, even the dog doesn’t love you, it’s all programming

Pavlov will surely tell you that and what about Skinner and his box?

Aren’t we all lab rats in fancy colored clothes?

Maybe the thing to do is join in and stop wanting real

Because real hurts when it turns out to be false

And plastic outlasts us, polluting the oceans it stands sinful testimony

On the beaches in India you find Starbucks straws and CocaCola bottles

We’re international now, the big conglomerates boast.

Conveyer belt love

You nearly ruined me

In the shallows, near the swamp

Still I think about ideals once in a while and imagine

What if, it were all different and we found our way back?

Would Cathy let in Heathcliff? Would Anna Karenina still jump?

And Diane Keaton in Ms Soffel? Would anyone be alive to understand?

Why we lived once for love and it meant the world

Even as it was so often an empty house of cards

What if

We got the Queen of Hearts?

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eventually even the hypochondriac will be right

odd for the child

to fear drowning

when his life now is so long

stretching like taut ribbon in sun

he imagines like plain moths who drown themselves

in light emanating from dark

his own lifeless body buoyant on chlorinated pool

why he thinks of his death is anyone’s guess

perhaps the morbid humor of an intelligent mind

or the broken mosaic of life, beginning its downward cycle

once he asked his father, if the river levies bust

will I know I am dead before I am drowned or

will I wake in heaven first?

His father, a man who only worried about

whether his mistress was going to leave him for a younger man

did not spend time assuaging the boys fears

and he grew into a frightened soul who possessed

no mistress to sooth his night terrors

eventually even the hypochondriac will be right

maybe not this year

as she palpitates her breast for the forth time

crossing nervous fingers over heart, half prayer half search

malignancy her code red, flashing with every terrorizing headline

who invented social media? she mumbles beneath her breath

it was so much easier when we didn’t have access to all the maladies, we’ll one day die from!

Her hands cramp in late Winter cold, immediately she thinks

MS, MD, Fibromyalgia, the beginnings of CJD, maybe Parkinson’s

isn’t that a tremor? Or just too much coffee?

Her jittering nerves remind her, we are unable to compute

the exact day, hour, minute of expiry

all we know is our eventual death is an assured event

it’s the torment of those who are self-aware yet still ignorant

spinning in place, every migraine a brain tumor, every

sudden sharp pain a sign of pancreatic cancer, when a friend

discovers he has Multiple Myeloma (and he never touched asbestos his wife decries!)

she flicks through medical journals online searching for similarity

it’s not her wish to die, but a desire to live, control fate

keeping her on false tender hooks like owl without prey.

His life has been one of quiet dread, each day he inspects

the parts of him most likely to give out, checking his irregular heartbeat

the soft pounding of worry causing it to skip, feeling for swollen glands

skin cancers, lumps and bumps different from the day before

he knows his is an obsessive ritual, even as it soothes imagined

terrors, he sees the absurdity of living in fear bound to a wheel

perpetuated by hours spent researching ways of expiring

did you know you can develop throat cancer from invisible HPV

who knew love was such a sentence? He tells his eye-rolling neighbor.

If he counted the hours he took from his life

contemplating how he will die, when, what it will resemble

it’s quite mad

yet when he is lying in his childhood bed alone

impending dread crawling up his flannel spine

all he can hear are the waves calling

and then, a strange longing in him occurs

urging him to be done with bloody charades

join the onslaught and be carried out to sea

along with every child’s nightmare

and the stifled hiss of adults pressing their knuckles

closely to anguished mouths

for the pale mint waiting room seems

entirely too silent

an earie unsettled fog about it

waiting …

Thin skin

Selfish is vanity, thin skin needful of blubber to resist the freeze. For years in the future, what will it matter, if you were plain?

Some of the best people have warts, kankles, pot bellies, their radiance is not in exquisite feature.

So Freckled Girl, wishing you had fuller lips, higher cheekbones, darker skin; remember … when the lights go out, we’ll all have to learn brail.

Touching our way by coral reef, they said, things of love couldn’t live in the dark, without spotlights and balster.

Yet I suspect you couldn’t love me more if I were every kind of gorgeous creature, for the dream we inhabit began before we found shape and color and calcium.

When we swam informed and feeling, in warm soup, passing by the delight of one another, as rubbing softly, life is evoked from so little, as branches create friction and in time, fire.

Anti Club

Who is that girl?

standing polishing her shoes

surely it is not me

who will mount the steps

open her mouth

speak the words

I am not afraid of commitment

I simply do not seek it

which could be selfish or disinterested

not all wish to affix

nor the involvement of cliques

groups and movements

especially trends

a month of this a month of that

they rush like birds caught in a net

to the sound of the next buzz

no original thought

whosoever a tide must push

nearer nearer to becoming as

everyone else strings a merging

I wish not

to join in

become part of

subscribe

affix membership

lead or equally

devalue

humanities need to run in pairs

groups and marathons

crowd fund the day

and I

who matter nothing in any way

irrespective of in distinction

long to hear the turning tide speak

go your own way

and if that way is opposite

to the herd

so be it

you will find the going

tough

sometimes empty

but for some

this is the taste they need

to keep purpose or

sanity

afloat in

the debris

of afterward

 

(This is an internal debate, highly subjective, that I often have with myself. The irony of posting on social media that I find social media unhealthy for the majority. Yet I stand by it. I am only on FB to increase book sales, FB stands for everything I don’t relate to. I am not judging anyone else, but sometimes I look around and wonder, how many people don’t want to socialize versus those who seem to need it like a drug. It makes me feel like I am not normal because I see my closest friends literally jump out of their skin unless they feel validated by others, affirmed by socializing, and as I get older I need it less and less and never ever “need” to go out and socialize. Then again, if we are social animals, is this natural? If it isn’t, why does it feel natural? As for ‘joining in’ that has been an anathema my entire life, I can’t stand the ‘club’ mentality though it is so pervading especially in the US. I find it an interesting subject especially as those who are less social are very condemned by the majority as having something wrong with them).