Break

Brain Alteration
Friday Night Tune up
Away goes the week
All of work is forgotten

Now who I be
Without a job title
Just a plain old soul
On the weekend path

Numb and fry
Distract and absorb
The back yard barbeque
Prevents further introspection

Dancing, spinning
Letting it all unwind
Fashioned for a whirlwind vacation
Just on a two day break

Chores await
Back to labor
Right around the corner
But, for now, it’s just free time

The Likes of X BOXES

War Games
Video Wide
Minds are sucked
Right through the screen
Never to return the same

Exciting is Enticing
Escaping is the oldest trick
To mankind
And this is reliable

Another world
With friends from far away places
Even though
They never show their faces

In Control
With power tools
Equipped with a brain
That can best assist

Talk about addictions
Is this the modern Zen
Oneness with nothingness
While thinking to have it all

The focus is enormous
Especially for those
Who otherwise live in a blur
Why not package it and sell it from the pharmacy.

Excerpt from a poem by Charles Bukowski

The balloon pops and I walk across a kitchen
On a rainy day in February
To check on eggs and bread and
Wine and sanity

(1969) from his book “The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills- check it out, great thinkers then!

I Pray For The Sick

Alone in a place
That cannot be described
Constantly in a state
Of unknown wait

Questions so important
Fade to other degrees
As new issues present
An ever more complex Picture of health

Breathing easy
Is only a bogus façade
Of assembly line pills
And generic, clinical trials

Hours of isolation
With preoccupation
With the most basic and mundane
Of physical functionality issues

People really don’t know what to say
And the “patient” is identified
To be separated
To avoid the news recipient’s guilt

It is a dark room
Blaring with giant, white question marks
Life and death
Now seem to have but a hair line between them

In the ominous depths of winter
A sprig of bloom Has to be found
Or the cave leads to a cavern
That never lets the light come in

The pride, the hidden fear
The radical change in persona
Internally and externally
Leaves the personality and identity to start anew

Run to western, molecular medicine
Or run away to the jungle mystics
The whole of existence Radically contemplated
Based on a tiny, culprit invader.

If only it were Off to normalcy
A road so less traveled
Hand wide open for a miracle
Heart embracing every humorous sonata

Motherhood

Drenched in awakening
From some kind of womb
Where life had only been imagined
From inside the room

Bright lights
Time for a debut
Enter the outside world
To a new view

Mother and father
And whoever else cares
Trying those lungs out
As they begin to stare

Let’s hope they find you beautiful
And able to properly care
To provide you with nurturance
And a life that is fair

May your parents be there for you
Tragedy and drama free
Able to put their needs aside
To be there for thee

A Visit From The Panic Attack

The panic attacked
Attacks at will
Without warning
The adrenaline spills
Over the body
Invading the mind
Superseding volition
In a way so unkind.

What are the beliefs
That trigger the body to misbehave
Rendering one
A slave
Powerlessness
Has a power of its own
An investment in feeling less

It seems so opportune
To pop an anti-anxiety pill
Praying beyond prayers
To keep you still
Running like a fox on a hunt
Anticipating ill.

All those trauma memories of the past
Stored deep within the amygdale catacombs
Securely trapping the long inhabited
Isolation, abandonment tombs

When the burgeoning fountain spouts
All the anguish of the past comes forth
Traveling rapidly to the frontal lobe
Intellectual neurons of self judgment fire off

The most unlikely thought-
To stay and embrace the fear
May foil the ominous
and leave the mind and body clear.

The Ring Finger

It is the annual anxiety
Of the wedding anniversary
The day of the year to really reflect
On “What the heck?”
How did it all begin
Was it a gust that fools rush in?
Maybe hormones at first sight
That aren’t enough to continue to delight.
Was their pain-staking time
To pretty much know the rhyme?
Did it change so drastically
When one grew while the other just fleed.
Is it such a beautiful pretense
While your ass is chain linked in the fence.
Was it patiently growing
In a field of unknowing?
Marriage devotion
What a potion
Legally bound
Making you wish you weren’t found.
But left alone to cope
Still engorged in dream and hope.