My Life Of Whispers

Stored up a poisonous rage and acidic resentment deep inside myself over external injustices

Bristled as the less timid squeaked out their shortsighted, greedy and furtive leadership deception

Lay in bed late at night and remade the world, got up tired and went tamely off again to my dull job

Grew hoarse deep inside from shouting out the truth, without even raising the slightest whisper

Too timid to open my mouth when it counted, too afraid to really stand up for anything at all

Too insecure to be a leader, too little self-confidence to try for even the second-best schools

Unable to push my way under the lights, wrapped up too tightly in my own silly phobias

Too often called a nothing when I was quite young, drilled on my inabilities, time and again

Too long alone with self-ingrained reproaches, mine was a life of whispers, no one else should hear

Too much time wasted on a foolish depression, overly attentive to meaningless internalities

Afraid to speak out thinking I might sound as stupid as them, yet poisoned by my own angry silence

Peeping shrill protests, but only to myself, shamed into empty muteness by my screaming insecurity

Too willing to just let them rape and waste, con and steal, defile and then righteously pontificate

Cowed into an uneasy and guilty silence by the deeply ground-in knowledge that they are my betters

Unable to be driven by greed and insecurity to back-bite, face-step and ass-kiss my way to the top

Railing only to myself in the empty solitude of long nights, but without releasing the smallest sound

Responding to atrocities, extinctions and propaganda with the merest shake of my head

Harboring secret plans to someday stand up for what I never actually stated out loud I believed in

Too happily turning over mind and senses to endless channel flipping and video games

Abbreviating my thought into chopped soundbite nonsense, constantly tweeting and texting

Never dared organize, distill and commit my complaints publicly for fear of a just ridicule

Jealously would not support others who spoke out, but kept my own words jumbled up inside

Too crippled by internal contradictions to ever get to my feet on my own and speak out at all

Too deeply mired in self-loathing to get beyond a mute mediocrity they treated as tacit acceptance

Lecturing, tutoring and even preaching, but only ever to myself, and just when I was alone

Able to see my own internal contradictions well enough to keep them balled up inside

A life of impotent whispering in dark halls that was never really meant for other’s ears at all

Forced to think in shouts over the idiot noise that gradually drove me deaf, even on the inside

During A Lucid Interval

During a moment that I realized much later had simply been wasted

I caught a glimpse of the endless futility in all of my efforts

During an instant when I saw a fleeting outline of what might have mattered

There appeared the lasting realization of my own eternal worthlessness

During the war I lost my bearings but still kept on obeying every order

I saw myself from afar committing those endless acts of horror

During an interval in which life forced me to stop and think

Besides you, I found but little that I could truly count on

During that time when I might as well have been underwater

I saw the surface from below, and it was bright with hazy detail

During the flash I was not sure if I saw at last or had just been blinded

Then came the worry that I had never really known the difference

During an era where I crawled from the baking mud to the steaming swamp

I often looked back with fondness upon the clear blue sea

During a meeting through which I sat as if in deepest torpor

I saw myself actually permitting them to bleed my short time away

During my recovery I realized just how often I had almost died

So I tried on other futures in front of that newly illuminated mirror

During a sunrise in which I found that I was tired through and through

It seemed an eternity to yet another evening without rest

During the long trip, all of my normal routines were broken

And slowly I realized how little else was left there, inside of me

During the springtime as I became older

There came the knowledge that I grew more slowly every year

During a dream I convinced myself to no longer be so sure..

Of all those things I was seeing when I thought I was awake

During my illness I finally had the opportunity to ponder

At last I was cured, but my time to act had come and gone

During my short trip there was so much new to see

Arriving back home my eyes quickly closed up, once again

During the morning a birdsong captured my attention

I was quite aware for a moment then fell back into dull normalcy

During a lifetime spent always looking forward to now-forgotten non-events

Abruptly came the instant that would have to last me forever

During my trial I made up no new lies

But parroted the adopted truth of others as an armor of my own

During the time that the sun grew ever hotter

The sandbanks grew too warm to shelter my clutch of eggs

During the snowstorm things were perfectly clear

Then came the next day and once again I was no longer very sure at all

In the light before the dawn it seemed as if things could actually make sense

Then slowly everything dissolved back into that dusty chaos beneath the hot sun

During the stage where I was forced into thinking, I could not sleep

Mercifully it was decreed that I should not have to be so alive forever

During the executive speeches I felt an alienation tinged with anomie

Returning to my cubicle I re-donned a simple but protective cynicism

During the excitement I saw the expression of the pitchmen

After the sale, both parties were drained as if by hot sex

During the future things always seem to go faster than before

Luckily the past is not exactly what it once used to be, anymore

During this moment I tried hard merely to pause

I had planned so long for this instant and it was gone in a flash

During these thoughts both our minds wandered off

Now you stray farther taking some part of me with you

During the entire period of my personal devolution

I helped emit photons which must travel on forever thru space

During a particularly comatose and vegetative recreational interlude

I felt I was partially restored by emitting CO2 to make manly noise

During my blindness my hearing became quite acute

I heard you smiling as we lay in each other’s arms, quiet and still

During hibernation from critical thinking I slept-walked with all the others

Like most, I was never called upon to actually awaken

During the war only simple thoughts of our home could sustain us

Meanwhile we strove to exterminate just those same things of our enemies

During an epoch in which I browsed the floating plants of the ponds

There came the notion that things might not be what they seemed

During a commercial I merely glanced at the time and then went quite blank

Later in hospital I wished I might have thought of something better to do

During any form of beat down there was no ambiguity

Then came the might-haves, would-haves, should-haves and could-haves

During that instant as I flew through the air

I thought perhaps there awaited a transcendent moment

During the full moon many things moved around

At that time it was easy for me to happily scuttle about, quite unnoticed

During the celebration of that final great victory over our satanic enemies

I was struck by surprise at how little we actually knew of them

During a briefing I noted the officials appeared quite cheerful and optimistic

Up tempo despite the obvious and unstated facts quite to the contrary

During the monsoon as I sat watching everything washing away

I saw at last the wisdom in this new way of life

During years of study I realized how much smaller my knowledge appeared

So I grew more and more wary of all those who prattled on so very glibly

During the night I was awakened by some terrible unknown inaction

I lay for hours uneasy and then came a merciful unconsciousness

During my so-called career I was silenced by pretexts of professionalism

Yet no voices were raised against the many useless, backbiting, lazy suckups

During the end of anesthesia I remember swimming ever upward

I was trying very hard to hold my breath to the surface, far above

During the time when the icicles grew longer by the day

We worried about the pale sun as it kept coming later and leaving earlier

During early June we knew things would always keep getting better

I was convinced I was never meant to grow old like my father

During my last years I tried to remember what I had always wanted

Finally it seemed I was merely waiting for the last thing I would recall

During the epidemic I helped gather children’s bodies

Soon they began to wave to me from all their grotesque positions

During my first prison sentence I learned from the real masters of crime

Back on the street I vowed never to be apprehended again

During some party function the vodka finally got the best of me

Three days later I began that long train ride east in a cattle car

During her flight from the conflict she often slept in untended barns

To get a bath she might well have to bargain her wretched self

During his trial the old women hissed and spat

Fatherless children looked to the court for some explanation

During the bombings we huddled and the blood came from our ears

Later we saw that our only drinking well had been totally destroyed

During the long march they lost all contact with their homes

Thusly, was it easier for them to burn distant villages to the ground

During his lifetime our great leader always pointed out the proper way

Without his strict guidance we quickly fell into a savage ethnic cleansing

During the fire it grew dark and the smoke tinged all of our thoughts

Reports from far away hinted of a vast destruction

During my pregnancy I was raped and then kicked by the partisans

Later they returned and left me toothless but with child once again

During the hottest part of the day I could find no hope as I toiled

Still, when the merciful clouds brought gentle breezes I felt spiritually uplifted

During my lifetime I always tried to imagine those billions of years

But in the end, my 3 score and 10 still seemed like the larger part of forever

During my father’s slow passing we stood carefully, forehead to forehead

As if after long head butting we might at least part in peace

Unprotected Vision

Naively I peered beneath the lovely thin veneer of bullshit with my naked eyes

Destroyed both my retinas having neither proper guidance nor protection

Took it straight into my brain for reasons that I could not explain

While you stayed safely in the shadows and always asked me why

Ingested the potent images which harmed my inner workings

Stared straight at the radioactive glow emanating from the blistering center

Remained unaware for years of the accumulating damage

the pure whites of my eyes grew yellow and their clear lenses fogged

Gazed fixedly at things you had the commonsense to just ignore

Blinded for long periods by the searing after-images

Stumbled about as my eyes readjusted and you thought me drunk

I never understood the hazards of my unprotected vision

Could not stand the thick dark blinders which might have saved my sight

Dismissed as cowardly those who did not peer as deeply into the flames

Scorched my rods and burnt my cones until dark and light were just the same

Shorted out my optic nerve on impulses that others painlessly avoided

My visual cortex smoked and melted down from the overly-bright, chaotic flashing

Processed too many inputs that normal folks had the sense to turn aside

Stared long at harmful emissions from which they quickly looked away

Felt the grotesque images they never saw become part of my nightly dreams

Was driven by my visions into a rant that was incomprehensible to others

Finally tried to look away, but by then it was far to late to matter

At last I could no longer see even in the good light of simple daytime

Then, I illuminated everything with the rays that had made me mostly blind

Crawled off into the depths but could not be soothed, even by the empty darkness

Took to cursing your protective lenses which were broken when I got them

Stumbled more as I grew older and my sight narrowed to tiny points

Seared in vain, my eyes could not share the visions that supported you

Unprotected gazing made me blind but what I had seen would not then sustain me