Rant Because That Is What We Call It

[theirishsea]

Selfish----that’s it
I write because I have need
Do I listen?
Reluctantly
Feet down the hall
Voices discussing the nature of being
Small b
The Great B
As in Being way beyond my control
Or acquaintance
I pretend I write poetry
No meter
No irrational reveling
No mask and costume
No chorus
Chanting admonitions or agreement
And I go on too long
A song this long and with rhyme
Will get you locked up
The obsessive’s asylum
Looney tunes in looney rooms
Ah, this a digression
From the serious business of unloading
The accumulating self
On the wide-eyed bored ho-hum world
Of war and indiscriminate violence
Ah, a contradiction
Nonsense
The mistake of discourse
The playing child with his own language
And you are not one of the special groups
Of the moment
You can not be aggrieved or celebrate
You must be shamed for the course of WESTERN civilization
Civilalayshun
Yes, go to your room
Repent
Even for your religion
The seminaries were crackers too
Molesting any and all
And you trusted them
Well, briefly
You hated their TEACHING
And all you wanted years ago
Was to nuzzle up to Maureen
The best-looker in your class
Nice ass
But she wasn’t very pretty
Not Annette Funicello
The memory of Annette is fading like belief
In the civilizing of the British Empire
But you were Irish anyway
The British humphed their aristocracy at you
Or spat their pub biliousness at you
You were Irish
Poor
And that is a sin
And look, my God, see how far you have
Digressed
You think this is poetry
Not a rabbit in the warren
Not a twig with a leaf
Not a classical allusion
Or Ovidian illusion
Just a dumb progression of tumbling words
Little face value
And very shallow beyond the mask of reflection
And you would know many who would not be amused
At your self’s mirror
No, you are not important
You don’t really care to clamor for attention
Take your arrhythmia on the road
Reveal your heart to be a vine
Of much Hollywood and contradiction
Your love
Is like a tear
It rolls down the window
Obscuring
The fantasy you’ve made of life
The day’s blue sky is an illusion
It is night out there
In the star-spangled universe
And it ain’t democratic

[theirishsea]

I have a lot of catching up to do on the poems here. Next week I'll give it a go in between reading Isabel Allende's Island Beneath the Sea. and the Democratic Debates where they kill Election because they slice and dice each other and the only one left standing is the Troll of TV and Twitter.