Pragmatism Failed

I hate this place and God

Myself

And all the artefacts of rage

Suppressed and rearranged

To look like smiles

Genuinely forced across my face

And thrust into the world

Of eyes and lips

With their endless perceptive

Thirst for fiction.

Pleasure was evicted

With a promise

And regret.

Self-containment

Reawakens every shard

Of broken spirit

Every scar and

Every mask I built to

Hide them.

And for what?

This mobility is static

Stuck in one direction:

Down.

Assembly Required

Pop another Tic-Tac and salivate,

Wait until the taste is gone and kiss it on the cheek,

Betrayal of the inside,

Smiles spilling out profusely

Just to crush them underfoot

When I am finally alone.

There’s a minty fresh odour in the voice,

Critical pressures in the air

Trudging through the mud

In the space between,

This transformative zone is where it happens,

Where You and I is You and it,

Where once there was a face,

Now a mask.

Often subject to erosion

And a family of other metaphoric geology,

Like fault lines and quakes,

Not eruptions.

Buried just below the surface

He survives,

In this self-made cinematic prison cell

Oxygen is not the breath’s foundation,

Inhalation thrives on freedom,

Expression,

But with every desperate gulp

He’s one step closer to repression,

And he knows it.