Tick-Tock
August 2008


My mind is going
Buried under Tokyo lights
I feel it changing
Strobes flashing off in time

I want information
In my hands with no delay
Staccato thoughts
won’t stay, won’t stop
can’t seem to read a book these days

Feel your mind going tick-tock, tick-tock
Think you’re right, but you’re so wrong, so wrong
And though you try, you can’t understand it
And you never really planned it at all

Midvale does his counting
Motion measured, locked in time
Life’s mechanical choreography
Say when to eat, work, sleep, and rise



Hyper stimulation
Give me information
Transister moonlight
Subatomic spotligh
Electric perception
Divine misconception
Evolved cognition
Chrome and efficient

Familiar Pull

Familiar pull
Midnight needs
stronger as the hours get shorter
warnings unheeded

Implanted code
Genetic blueprints
To populate the land
(Or at least my hand)
A hundred thousand replicas of broken heart

Watch, watch
Watch me explode
With Iniquity

Going back again
To the end of the beginning
Of the end

And ashes fortify
Up,
Underneath,
Beside
Twenty-five parking lots and unplanned twilights

Vacancies, vacancies
Truant children wait upon exit wounds
Pulling the chain up

Bitter green vines
Choking the illusion of new life
As a dollop of breath
Sinks into the deep brown underground.

A Poem...

Speak, the Voice

Did your
voice, calling from eternity
penetrate the pallid skin,
moving the tiny, dead bones
of the world of sound?

Did the
command, flying through reality
incise the shadow,
splitting the curtain
that divides?

“Come out,” you said – and still say,
coaxing us out of our freshly dug
graves,
that hold us gentle, faithful,
and insidious.

Will I wake?