Random poems

A Poem by Irony Is King

IRONY IS KING

Irony is king

So cower in fear

When a clashing situation

Comes stalking near

When a broad moral rupture

Looms dead ahead

As a walking contradiction

You should stay home in bed

BRANDING KISS

Those who have felt the lash

Of love’s cruel steel

Flee like hunted things

From passions feel

And live in deathly fear of the bliss

That lurks behind the branding kiss

For a heart that beats

Can also bleed

In passions embers

Lies destructions seed

All succumb to those lips of fire

The branding kiss is pure desire

Then idle want turns to need

Those who were cool, content

Are consumed by greed

Crave forever, forever crave

That branding kiss until the grave

TONIGHT

There is no need to worry, for all is fine

There is only tonight and tonight is mine

I walk with the stately grace of kings

Though my fingers are light for want of rings

I don’t need riches, fame or glory

Or a mundane role in the same old story

The moonlight beckons, I heed its call

There is only tonight and tonight is all

BORNE

As I fight to rise above the masses I realize I belong to a ridiculous number

Of souls so bent on not conforming that the pedestal they are after becomes encumbered

I step back and consider the road ahead

The well traveled, sunlit path of the peacock

The dismal grey, heavily marched path of conformity

I now stand with a clear head and open mind

And see that the road is a shepherd and its sheep are blind

I laugh as peacocks pass along with faceless suits

So bent on nothing that nothing is everything

I disregard the road and begin anew

I walk towards the sun where angels once flew

EMISSARY TO THE GRINNING END

A sight for sore eyes lies in the solace of sleep

A rest for my mind would be a promise I keep

A night to remember would be a night I recall

What worries me most is I’m not worried at all

I crave poison in excess, just change my water to wine

Oh why does punctuality have to steal all my time

I see miles of longing in your furtive glance

And I can only ask the question why

I am from a den of thieves that are living the same

Bishops and kings in this most dangerous game

You would see the night lights of Cairo if you looked in their eyes

Fearlessly asking why

We deal with the questions to which the answers sting

If we talked you wouldn’t listen so we have to sing

The slime of the gutter has taken form

A subtle black cloud is becoming a storm

Oh the things I know, the things I know about you

The grinning end, the human zoo

I have all the bombs I need to sound the alarms

These things I know about you, the things I know about you

Walking down the road that we have known for so long

Full speed ahead, dedicated to “wrong”

All the things forbidden as a guaranteed threat

That is where our feet went

It is funny when you finally open your eyes

And see all the terror that successfully hides

When you hold all the great knowledge you finally found

You want to crawl six feet underground

Until then there is so much more to do

With these things I know about you

These things I know about you

MURDER JUSTIFIED

Run

He’s got that look in his eye

And he’s gone so gone

His whiskey trigger is pulled

His meters full

A walking tombstone so stoned

She locks herself in the bedroom and she picks up the phone

The line is dead because he’s ripped it from the wall

He says he’ll leave her face alone

But he’s lying

As he kicks down the door

And now my baby wants a gun

She wears his ring but I know she’s mine

Because she calls me every time

She says she needs a pistol to make herself a widow

And I tell her she can borrow mine

She writes her alibi when he leaves for the bar

Watches the clock, wearing black in the dark

The only sound is the beating of her heart

And she smiles when she hears his car

A murder justified is a murder deserved

and now my baby wants a gun

With a show of cries and wails the case was won

The jury cried self defense and the trial was done

She wears her black veil low to hide her smile

Because she knows she will be happy for awhile

A murder justified is a murder deserved

OUTSKIRTS OF CHANGE

You’ve got a lot to say but what are you going to do?

I want to see some progress, I want to see something new

All across the world people are wide-eyed with fear

The population is the vessel but who is going to steer?

I want to see all black sails unfurled

I want to shoot the next shot heard around the world

What sound does the top make when it hits the bottom?

How many lies can big brother spew when he’s face-down in the gutter?

Talk about something more than nothing at all

We need a new solution

I want a full scale war: political execution

Burn them down, rise us up

You’re going to feel the pressure drop

ANCHORS AND WAVES

Never let a living thing become your emotional and spiritual anchor, especially a human being. Anything with a heartbeat can die, and not everything with a heartbeat can care. Stranded, marooned and unfulfilled is the result of such indiscretion; such carelessness. The wise use wisdom as an anchor to stay the current, because people change like the seasons, with the seasons, and to cling to spring or summer will leave you in bitter tears in the end because winter is right around the corner…

Treacherous waters

Make your ship falter and sway

Foam crested deceit

The anchor is key

In sea and soul, but make sure

It has no heartbeat

THE ETERNAL REMEDY OF WHISKEY AND WINE

In the meanest of times when the moon-drenched wolf howls in victory

Serene as he is mean

The young men and women enjoy the promise of their dreams

And the cold bleak earth seems green

Not a thought is spared by those with sunlight to spare

For those hell-bound lost souls who, in dreaming have been made lean

The stars hold no solace for those left behind

In the embers of their chaos that made life so divine

The sun holds no warmth on them scarred by eternal winters wrath

The past is passed, but it is that they yearn to find

Cast out amongst the garbage, the ugliness, the trash

The only remedy for their heartbreak is whisky and wine

This recipe for oblivion, this immortal curse

With outstretched arms so sensual in sin

Makes the old bleary eye see life as a game you can win

Skeletons and ghosts of things never come to be find smiles again

For a spell, for a time, and see so much youth in the liquor

So much gold in the tin

All the time that was lost seems so hugely at hand

And dreams unfulfilled take their place on the dawn

The anguish and horrors of these lives of the lost

Forget it all with whiskey and wine

POPPIES

Repetitive as a sedative

Thick chains with wings

Sow poppies in my garden

The end, it sings

If only for a moment

Make these bleak walls shine

Enjoy the warm delusion

That what is mine is mine

They call it liquid courage because irony is king

And I am right there with the worst of them

Green foam on the sea

An open sewer to the viewer

With the right kind of eye

But I am just one of many

Just your average guy

What a thing to crave

Poison at the end of every day

Dreamless sleep

There is always hell to pay

Yet that is when I feel so civilized

That is when I always realize

That in this beast state I am a man

I have a line

I have a goal

You could never tell because I dance so well

No, you could never tell because I dance so well

But I am a corpse marionette

A puppet on a string

It burns that I yearn for something

Beneath those gleaming city lights

Goddamn those gleaming city lights

Sow poppies in my garden

I have given up the fight

INSIGHT

Picture, if you will, a scene; the aftermath of a party, looking as pitiful and ugly as the carcass of an antelope two days after being torn apart by a pride of lions. There is not a single inch of this place that does not have a beer can or bottle, and some lucky inches have empty bottle of liquor. Most have cigarette butts in them, some still swirling wisps of deadly poison smoke into the stagnant air in oddly graceful swirls, making the atmosphere something anyone would gag when introduced to. Stale, stagnant and indecent. This is my home.

I open my eyes quick, startled by some nightmare in which I am drowning at sea and some hand jerks me under and in the abyss a monster brushes against me. Once awake, I feel relief at first because it was only a dream, then , as I survey my reality, I almost wish I was neck deep in the briny abyss oof open ocean rather than the mirky mess that surrounds me.

The monster that brushed against me in my dream felt so real, I see, because there is someone lying next to me; naked just as I am, breathing heavily and immersed in the sodden sleep that is paradise for any guilty conscience. From the last hour you treaded that line between the blackout state and good, honest drunk there is nothing but a great black void of sleep; there are no dreams in this limbo; you forget you exist.

I smile. Not from warm memories of how we got to this place, because I remember nothing, but because of how beautiful whoever this is when she is asleep. Mouth slightly parted, hair fanned out behind her, hands folded in an almost praying position beneath her pretty head and body arched towards me; the perfect picture of bliss. It is interesting how all pretense and conscious personality and feature composition is forgotten in sleep because it is impossible to remember all that when enjoying this simple act. The polar opposite of this with the same effect is the panic state; you revert to your true self and your will has nothing to do with it. You are revealed.I am enjoying this phenomenon in the girl beside me; seeing her true to the core while everything else is lying, like her black dress, in a crumpled heap at the foot of the bed.

I carefully get out of bed to avoid rousing this beautiful creature and curse silently as I kick over the drink I took to bed. It smells of stale beer and tobacco as it pools upon the floor and seeps into my clothes. How fitting. I say to hell with it and clean up with it before throwing it on a pile of dirty clothes near my bed and grab an old Cramps t-shirt. I hear a hiss as the cat (Lucy-Fur) struggles to free herself from the soaked shirt and, once free, jumps onto whoever is on the bed before running across the room, throwing a resentful look at me along the way. I swear cats are the only animal in the animal kingdom that are born with sarcasm.

She begins to stir, this lovely thing, but just rolls over and continues to sleep while I try to bring myself together and clean up. It is impossible to feel bright, cheery and optimistic with my brain filled with all the toxic vapors issuing from a sea of empty bottles with cigarette butts swimming in their flat dead remains and I am wishing there were windows in this cave to get some clean air and sunshine in here to combat this ugliness but there is not, only cruelly bright gallery showlights illuminating my walls covered with records, newspaper clippings taped over newspaper clippings, random thoughts, poems and strange rants on post-its; I cant make heads nor tails of it at the moment; just a shade of the man I am and it all looks like the work of a madman, a stranger, though I know it is my work and the me that did it is somewhere deep inside, poisoned, twitching, beaten and bruised and gasping for air while I blink and cough and stare around stupidly for something that will help me focus.

This is my life: music, poetry and prose, woman, parties, shows, work and whatever else I can stumble across along the way. Part of me likes to think I have immersed myself completely in the worlds of entertainment, philosophy and words and come out unscathed, but I know full well that I am so far gone that I cannot look back; just hit the gas and fly at top speed into the darkness ahead and pray I don’t hit something that will stop my crazed momentum forever. The horror of it all is that I fear that I have strayed too far from my original intentions; to better the world I live in by utilizing words and music, and become a parody of that, a burnt out caricature of a human being, a fake doing just enough to receive praise, beer, and an ex-girlfriend from time to time.

No one can tell because I dance so well. The shell looks good at present and I know how to speak in such a way as to avoid suspicion, yet here I am again with a massive headache and a sea of empty bottles around me and girl whose name still escapes me fast asleep on my bed as I dive down this introspective nightmare I have grown so familiar with lately. “Living the dream,” Says Sarcasm, rising with the bile from my wounded liver to make the breath catch in my chest; “Living the dream.”

Yes. The Dream. In a culture of excess there is some argument to be made for living on top, though the other end of the spectrum would call it the bottom. It is all relative. It just comes down to how many smiles you can extract from your days, but my smile is a bitter one at present; I bare my fangs and they are stained. Huxley said that familiarity breeds indifference. He was right. You spend every day doing something, no matter how great it is, and eventually it just becomes routine. Work. Everyone hates routine. Everyone hates work. I find myself looking at normal people that work terrifyingly normal professions that need long explanations whenever they take their whoever to T.G.I. Fridays or wherever to ‘cut loose’ with jealous eyes because they do the unthinkable to me: merely exist; yell at televisions on weekends because their favorite team of strangers dropped a little brown ball or do nightmarish things like plan weekend trips to IKEA to find the right linens to really ‘define themselves’. These are the crème of the crop in this world. They went to school like you are supposed to . they stomached all the bullshit so that other schools would pay for them to come and stomach their bullshit all so they could be qualified(?) for some weird job they never really wanted in the first place that pays well enough for them to afford all those things they will never need. Meanwhile, their wives cheat on them with real people and their kids are addicted to opiates out of sheer boredom. This is success? Sheep and rabbits, weasels and snakes; woodland creatures bowing down to that all-mighty shepherd they call The Dollar.

Yet who am i? I am sitting in my loft above an art gallery surrounded by my sea of empty bottles and cans with a woman whom I will name “My Conscience” because she is there, naked, in front of me but fast asleep and drugged with liquor, leaving me to start this new bleary day on my own. I wrote something when I was a kid: “the dreamer sits and plans heaven on earth, the drunk says to the dreamer ‘what is it worth?’” I guess I saw this coming. This double vision and duality in my nature but here I am scribbling in a notebook on a Thursday afternoon, some vague sort of figure in the counter culture doing the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do: Art, Music and Creativity.