Less Than Zero
With glorious primordial certainty
the sun will rise, the sun will set;
likewise you languish knowing what you're about,
you know what is and isn’t so;
yet, ultimately, you don’t.
Chained to the chromium railings of
a sterile value system,
some terminal, addled suffragette,
hollow to the very core, quintessentially
punch-drunk by the ghost fists
of what you do not know;
sometimes you can dream, more often you won’t.
This is all you wanted, surely,
way back when Homer was a pup;
this thing you worked for, this cold material cocoon,
this anaesthetic cult to which you belong;
then again, maybe not.
All your wild beasts are chained and in cages
you painstakingly banged them up;
now you act surprised in a wrung-out
monochrome way
at the quiet death of your protest song
with the former self you have forgot.
Just as a virus will seek out a host,
just as water will find it’s own level;
you’re a schizoid, new age, careworn dolt
with no limits to how far your mind will sink
in unfathomable depths of self delusion.
Wrenched this way and that, going with the flow,
serving both God and the Devil;
but where now is the rebel heart,
the hedonistic happy fool,
the keeper of the demon drink?
no more than a crumbling memory,
the feeblest illusion.
Once burning with such crucial fire,
a quiver full of arrows shot with telescopic vision;
now all that burns no more, doubted by the rain
spat from black clouds of self denial;
no remnant traces of an ex-antihero.
Servile to the whims of children,
and an emasculating harpy
who regards you with derision;
you are alone your own executioner
self judge and juror at the kangaroo trial
self sentenced to figure less than zero.
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