Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I'm a street philosopher of nothing
I walk to and fro pondering existence
as I contemplate the lies we live out lives by
the excuses we use to go on
taking another breath of rare air
I observe the human zoo
the obscene jester, the laughing madman
on the city corner

the grotesque sideshow of everyday pathology
the absolute obliviousness of the multitudes
and anything that passes for sanity
a real culprit, the priest of the hallucinating god
our savior the image of a nailed naked truth
and what really happens to the revolution
of the revelation

why the prophets are all paralyzed by paradox
by doom and a cheap hotel room
a needle of junk for a pen
I wander through the hurlyburly of early risers
never stopping to decipher the psychobabble
of the rabble who dabble in arm chair who do
never seeing the writing on the wall of history
that the mystery behind is never the same
the end game played against the center that
cannot hold a lamp up to the middle road

I became a poet out of desperation and need
my mind that I did not own began to bleed
a deep creeping dread rode on my back
like a monkey king holding up a human skull
the irony is lost on all but those who know
the origins of things are in our grasp
of the universal predicament

the way thought really works
is in the language that you seize
when the dark bird flies over head
casting a fleeting shadow over the ground of being
I am a beggar of words begging the question
for a spare dime in the art of the obvious
for its own sake of repeating it until it sinks in
consciousness masquerading in the morning of seeing

this is superb.....the mind of a poet as he ponders the scenes before his eyes, his forced confession you might say....forced by forces beyond his explanation......like the movement and word play....this should read well aloud at open mike.....particularly fond of stanza 3

i actually think that stanza is a good poem all by itself

maybe it's not what you say but how you say it, how do you say, ah,life out of balance.

I became a poet out of desperation and need
my mind that I did not own began to bleed
a deep creeping dread rode on my back
like a monkey king holding up a human skull...

Favourite lines of this fine poem