1. |
His Father Before Him
06:48
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The same aches and agonies; disappointments and desires, Handed down from the progenitor of the Earth thru every son he sires, An object of Heaven’s ridicule from postpartum to postmortem, Trying to appreciate this beauty thru the haze of this soul stopping boredom.
Like his father before him he begets a son of these sins, But he teaches his own forgiveness and this is how he makes amends.
At the dead end of his days; the few shareholders of his life, Sons and daughters; friends and brothers and his widowed wife, Doing autopsies on their postmortem-regrets and funereal-groping, The devout with their better place; the despondent merely coping.
Like his father before him he leaves the world of himself behind, And they all wander in his wake with his make in their mind.
What were his living ruins; his stopped tongue can never tell, The dead look so peaceful because the mortician is paid so well, But I have seen the agonies that precede the mortician’s makeup, You were swallowed by the nightmare from which I can't seem to wake up.
Like his father before him he leaves a grieving son behind, And I make a shrine in this empty place left by this father of mine.
Jan. 08
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2. |
Waiting
05:56
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The good old days went by without us even knowing they were the good old days, If you really want to make something matter all you have to do is throw it away, The solvent of time will put the flesh to its base of dust, And spike the differential of what happened and how you remember it; as your memories start to rust.
I didn’t know this was my life; I’ve been wondering when it would start, The stars were laid before me like an autopsy but I couldn’t read that chart, But I have learned from the despotic now; you’ve got to live every moment like it’s gonna be your past, Because if you're building a bridge you better build it to last.
I prefer what I want to what I have so I bargained the swamp of my soul, And so the future’s born-again-chaos becomes the moment's device of control, I live on the feast of becoming; in a relentless cathedral of rain, Reality is an amalgamation of memory and moment fixed in the arrogant ache of this pain.
The clockwork-killing of the neo-nothingness that each day dreams up to dream down, Is the swim of the river; the source of the deep that will drown, And the apathetic motion of my allegorical little life; remaining, Draws sustenance from this nothingness and feasts on this famine; upon the time containing.
Everyday is just the heap of waiting; just the unwilling weather of this weatherman’s will, The static motion of this routine of ruin; make for an easy kill, But what can you really yield to this reaper; because this is not living it’s just surviving, Where can you really go in this hardwired nowhere; because this is just going; not arriving.
Oct. 07
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3. |
A Day Went By
07:30
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A day went by and the whole of the world lost the balance of its axis, And created the flood of feelings that find me drowning in isotonic oceans, Since you have been gone it may as well be a thousand years, For the distance is so impassable and instantly eternal, My words just alphas and omegas and the surrogate of my pain, I now face the world with a different face since you’ve been gone, When it used to take only your presence to make me strong, But a day went by and you were gone and now the world is an empty stranger, And I; who am so much a part of your being; am left without your laugh, Everyday I fall forward into the indifferent arms of this wicked guardian.
No longer creation’s darling; now just another mouth to feed, And numbed by my faculties of sense and their inability to process the absence of your love, Talk just bouncing of the walls of my empty rooms, Trifles of breathing seem labors of dead-language-mathematics, And though I too will someday join you in that lost civilization of dust, This is of little comfort to the agony of the flesh, Now the push of this self-serving river meets no resistance, As I’m carried apathetic; and emptied to its ocean of oblivion, While you are returned to that silence you had, Before a day went by and you were born, I will tend and tinder your unfinished business here, I am your ghost, I will haunt those regions of the world that you left undiscovered.
I think upon things casual and of consequence, And all bears the same fruit of smiles; sighs and world-giving embraces, And that is what it meant to have a father such as this, To be a man; to be fearless; to own the world, As my woes rattle for lifetimes and eons, And my thoughts live their anonymous lives and suffer their public executions, The intangible tragedy of my holy-host of feelings, Finds only tears for its true mode of being, And I still wait for that day to go by; that doesn’t find a tear in my eye.
Nov. 07
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4. |
Belongings
04:28
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The things in keep that nurse our secret souls, The props that help us act our unscripted roles, Loves and labors of definition that mock ruin’s yield, Some that bring us life; others for which we
may be killed.
A naked man may be clothed in his belongings, A covered man exposed by his longings, And the value not calculated by his need, Will be figured into his graveside greed.
The early morning statutes of the days to be done, Will end with the father’s belongings; to inherit the son, Possessed of sins and sanctities and earthly-moldings all, We will buy and sell his own used goods within the mystic-mall.
A wretched man my find peace in his belongings, A contented man may find pain in his longings, And the happiness beyond the gauge of his actions, Will be summed in his unknowable satisfactions.
You must command your destiny or accept your fate, You will dance to the disappointing coda of your wait, Leaving behind a few humble tokens of your time, Remembered only in one couplet of eternity’s rhyme.
A man’s soul cannot be saved by his belongings, A man's body never healed in his longings, He can only want the things he hasn’t got, And he will have only to become a have-not.
Jan. 08
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5. |
Pain Pills
04:41
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A mythical creature rides out of the breath of rain, Its bloodshot eyes fixed on the carrier signal of my pain, Like a rainbow-cancer that numbs the wires with electricity, A stranger's kiss that kills so erotically.
These pain pills are killing me, But they're doing it so painlessly.
I’m a gunshot wound in the side of the thunder, The missing link in the pseudo-science of wonder, The fits and jerks of the traffic of my substance-shaping, A doomsday device thru the metal detector of my miracle-making.
These pain pills are helping me, But they’re doing it so helplessly.
It has come to pass that my soul has a heartache, But this heliocentric reality leaves me in its retrograde wake, And so meaning finds its mate in oblivion’s arithmetic, And like the weatherman of the gods I remain so apathetic.
Can't blame the doctor for your addition, Can't blame science for all this science fiction, Can't blame yourself for what you can't control, Can't make your pain the warden of your soul.
These pain pills are healing me, But they’re doing it so hurtfully.
When they’re gone there will be no refill, When they’re gone maybe I can begin to heal.
Oct. 07
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6. |
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A slave to the furious wheel of my miscellany of want, I question the logistics of the limp of my logic, Wonders escape my senses without being milked of their ecstasies, So lost am I in the folk and familiar of habits in motion.
My agnostic attitudes, The world's prolific platitudes, So alas something about everything feeds me sorrows, And blank revelations forecast blank tomorrows.
I flounder and waste time working trifles, And sulk upon all natures most common themes, But the alphabet can misspell any Omegas to Alphas, And shape sense into the raw materials of any construct of words.
My agnostic attitudes, The world's prolific platitudes, So alas something about everything feeds me sorrows, And blank revelations forecast blank tomorrows.
Even the bounded world is swallowed in a boundless universe, As one man is swallowed in the miscellaneous mass of mankind, All knowledge on pawn of the soul and sift of study, And the butt of history's sardonic sense of humor.
My agnostic attitudes, The world's prolific platitudes, So alas something about everything feeds me sorrows, And blank revelations forecast blank tomorrows.
The beauty of all things falls victim to my blinded insight, Chilled in high-summer torched by winter in perpetuum, Marked in this myth; the bread of Able is the feast of Cain, The honey poisoned in the ipso facto sweetness of taste.
My book of agonies, Edits the world's ecstasies, So alas something about everything leavens my doubt, And minutes to memories; days to eternities merely prolong my pout.
Dec. 07
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7. |
The Meaning of the Moon
05:54
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Despondent beyond all reckoning, I sit here in the world's-end-throne, I don’t know why this suicide hasn’t killed me, Seems my weightless will is not my own, The moon is my only friend tonight, The only empathy I can gather and feel, A train’s cry puts ages in this moment, Divided by the fiction's hope of the real.
The whole history of the death of fathers, Puts all sorrow to song and season, But in folk-tongue I want to sing, This book of agonies in its grudge of reason, There is no mercy in this cold moonlight, Only the slow dissipation of wonder's fault, And meaning is never implied only inferred, Truth just a subject of this action of thought.
Why is pain the only compensation, For this survival; this defeat of days, And this raging heartbeat; rhythms only proof, Of the syncopation of the river’s ways, This inarticulate hurt that haunts the eyes, In every one you meet like a moon in a pond, With no ocean to empty this ache, We all share of this birth-right-bond.
Memory outweighs the moment ever, By sustaining the boneless bulk of the past, And I visit the graveyard of everything I never did, Now is the mold that was then cast, If I could match the symbols to the moods, I could put the light to the hauntings of Leo, And this agnostic astrology that I moon over, Could be known by nonsense-neo.
Oct. 07
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8. |
The Little Picture
08:26
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From his eyes; the light that pities the Earth; enters a man’s being, All he knows is informed by this hallowed heat of Heaven, His way untold; the burden of his concrete singularity; incommunicable, Born of Adam’s star; to walk the street of his days in songs of ecstasies and unsung agonies.
Becoming a reckoned wonder; abjuring the abstract resources of fate, A man baths in his tenuous gathering of motions and musings, In hopes to conduct the nexus of his flesh to his fantasy, And in the wandering thereof he is every stranger’s mirror and a fixture of god’s focused hunger.
The emptied oceans of his love; testimony of his drained benevolence, He builds upon stone; labors upon thought; in keeping with his will, His works and aspirations nurse and bleed his exponential cravings, The wending of routine avenues offers the dialectics of his own particular puzzle.
In the vast backyard compendium of his glorified vision; subsumed in simple sight, He is the bones of the atlas; the tilt of the un-massed Earth, All things that swim in the eye of his canvas and break from the song of his brush, He is artist only; despot; god of all design by passional fiat.
Breathing antinomian; he contains the chaos and order of his own figured cosmos, With no reference to calculate the fragile frame of his soul, In the daily gestation of his bread he construes no divinity in his own demise, Put to the heat of suns he will burn in his instant; despite their eternity.
Written into the machine language of waiting; is the wholesale disconnect of days, This is the dowry of his soft equilibrium; the figurative continuity, Elemental mercy graces every constructive tendency of his motion, One solar spasm in a star a million light years away and he would carry a different soul.
The euthanized eons of time’s dreams suffer his brief waking, The trifles of filling empty time and bills to pay; all he owes is what he is, The sum of his wishes an investment on what he could be; but where there are bills there are bill collectors, All he does will some day be dreams for the dust to dismantle and distribute back to the dreaming.
The history that is built in his day may not notice nor mark his little life, All he knows and feels feeds the captured animal of his unknowable soul, The intimate voice of the god of his consciousness; only he knows its music, And the empire of his senses erupt and erode; moments to memories to decay then dust and nothingness eternal.
Jan. 08
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9. |
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Committed by the standing traits of my being, A set of eyes that do more looking than seeing, A component expatriate of my routine route, Aspiring minions block the light of my doubt, My nerve endings strain to feed the soul of my nerves, My will is whored for every John it serves, This makeshift-machine creates its own fuel, Its pragmatic dogma is dogmatically cruel.
Emotionally derelict with an acumen for aching, Embarrassed at your own pain, Weak kneed Atlas with a penchant for breaking, Weathered by your own rain.
Luxuriating in the self-silence of my apathy, Pondering the wholesale collapse of the death of me, Schools of thought and dropouts-divine, Know the water is still the kiss on the lips of the wine, Though a parcel of this automated urge, A distinctive protagonist in the plot of this scourge, The histrionics of the sensational age, Just serve to stoke and vivify my rage.
The habitual numbness and its latent effects, Politeness of a stranger’s ego, Anomaly so subtle no one inspects, The poetics of what you don’t know.
With the compressed dynamics of an outsider on the inside, I walk the ways of the world with only one place to hide, Escape is just a hollow verb; void of conjugation, So leaving its subject obsessed in mental masturbation, And the days are left stacked in some homunculus pile, I suffer the death of my elders the live long while, Unable to write the definitive study my woe, Illusory persona and requisite lies mask my simple soul.
As time is transplanted from motion to moment, I the observer from the moving train; outpace my own salvation, And in seeking purgation in the obtuse verse of my being, I flounder in the distance created by my dependance.
Jan. 08
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10. |
Telling Time by Clock
05:43
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The chisel on the stone, Inevitability; the ghost that haunts the bone, And horizons lit of a false dawn, Slowly sink back into the patient night, The burden loosely falling from the back of the dawn.
The scheduled feedings of the day, Directions in themselves being the way, And the traffic moves to the stoic rhythm, Of a god on narcotics manmade plan, To steal the life from the dead motion's dream.
The circle of birth surrounded by, The pain of death and the wondering why, Time is a part of the elemental bliss, But the clock can't tell what time it is.
Desire and the knowing of the river, Does the sea deposit or deliver, With astral meanings unread by man, The stars clock and climb the heavens, Until the innate doom defines the soul of the song.
Driven by the numbers painted face, We can't tell our time from our place, And the world is a graveyard for the dust of the universe, The electric dust of our making, The charged and woeful being of our flesh.
Turned an ugly duckling into an ugly swan, Measured here and now; not the great-beyond, Time is a part of the elemental bliss, But the clock can't tell what time it is.
We bleed not by measure but by blood, All rivers run lost in the loose milk of the flood.
Now; is all time set for the mutiny of the motion, In the gravity of daily-dogma divided; distended, In daily-bread actualized and focused in the nucleus of being, And then stultified in this telling time by clock, Until the welcoming of the world's end breaks this rhetorical-rhythm, And the clockmaker proves to be a dream-taker, So god’s own tic and toc and real rhythm by rhyme take the dance, And the work of day labor is so; graced by the work of ages.
We should be telling time by star, Living time by kiss and scar, Time is a part of the elemental bliss, But the clock can't tell what time it is.
Sept. 07
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11. |
Playing Hamlet
05:24
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Who’s there; for I cannot tell by that softly burning moon, Is it that ghost of the rest of my days come again so soon, If so I wish you’d scare up some sympathy from these skeptics beyond belief, That I could grow as old as the world and not outlive this grief.
It is the sorrow in the cradle of creation, That drinks my tears for its libation.
Pay me the homage I seek for my life is distilled from the rain, Give me the doomsday mercies for there is nothing that dies not in vain, And if the heavens truly take our spent souls to their graces, Then why stop the senses with the vulgarity of these Earthly places.
The death of fathers is indeed a common theme, I cry not the sleep; but the dream.
Softly turning is this world in the palm of my hand, As I regard every cloud; moon; river and sea that shapes the world of man, And I sink to the morbid depths of my mortal philosophy, And its particulars in application to my own woe-born biography.
Let me crawl to this wretched tomb of my grief, Take a knife to time’s throat; stop this thief.
My savaged soul lives at the mercy of this breathing machine, Studying the mortality of motion and what it might mean, And how the vivid moment turns too soon into the vague memory, With your future feeding off the past and its epic inventory.
I cannot cure but only learn to live with this pain, So grant me my storm; tender me my rain.
Oct. 07
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12. |
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I saw a falling star on Christmas night, I kept it for myself; told no one of its brief brilliance, Though maybe some other star-gazer witnessed this wonder, My thoughts had been touring their sub conscious emporium, Forging the soft sorrows of my first Christmas without you, And my life and the shapeless heap of moments, That have sharpened the present one to its pointless point, In the tangled trance of this mystical misery I saw this wreck of heaven spend its light.
I saw a falling star on Christmas night, I thought of omens and epithets of starlit oceans of bottomless design, And the night is a metaphor and the night is real; it's the bones of god, And time was a blank canvas and I a starving artist, In this infinite moment that seemed a gateway to eternity, I lived out the span of my sober ghost of sorrows, I tried to divine some meaning; tried to believe it was you, And for a moment I felt the peace that passeth understanding then resumed my former brooding.
Dec. 07
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13. |
Port Misery
06:36
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The horizon is gathering omens and unshed tears, In the sky that breeds its rain with lives and years, I stand in shadows of shelters trying to re-chart this dream, But the sleepless sea is just an agent of the unnamed stream.
And that ship that just cleared the harbor, Off to some new world or some ancient star, Its destination is a requiem for me, For my stop and stay here in Port Misery.
The telling of all thoughts abide the hearing of mortal reason, Every wish its moon; every man his season, My life my own fault; my own stupid creature, And the soul’s radio where there should be the song of god we just get a preacher.
So these shipments of goods and god's own labors, Sail for foreign ports to enrich the living there, And I’m left here with this sump of the sea, My date and doom in Port Misery.
The untold mercies of the sea wait for ship and sailor, Be it the sea beds sleep or the port of call’s sex, But the land locked Captain can beg no mercy from this dirt, Only the rain fed harvest can he reap.
And these goings that leave scattered the seeds of these makings, Are worlds left with undocumented dreams and wakings, Suns that spin onto a new axis to create the milk of light, Suffering sleepers anchored to the bulk of endless night, So the lien-holders of grief collect their Earthly revenue, Be the mines of Heaven stripped for this debtor's due, And all of tomorrow's yesterdays will make an endless work of sorrow, For the river has no excess of wealth the sea doesn’t borrow.
And so these ships sacrificed unto the seas endless hunger, Set sail to the unmade lands of life, While I try to outlive this death in me, Right here in the tear-swung tides of Port Misery.
When will this hateful sea, Send my ship back for me.
Sept. 07
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Michael McGuire Nashville, Tennessee
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