Nothing More Or Less

Millions of lives and souls untold And to account it all Words, lines, films Imagination trims A sliver of soft, scarlet ribbon Hollywood rounds Quills deliver Writers flare with passion so strong Filling minds with fantasies, reveries, histories Tragedies We consume it all like freshly baked bread We feed until we are engorged and fed A viral, universal mess Ideas and unmade memories Nothing more or less My eyes remain glued to the screen Living it all out Tears dare to flow—to doubt I should have thought of that Can I truly let myself believe, Someone else lived that! Pound away your directors, script-writers, fighters For miles and miles of stories remain unread While the unknown remain in the grounds of humble malnourishment Dead Careers for the mind with a twist of the fable Left us savage for the meal and the crumbs under the table I can never let the raw truth rest Naked, bare and empty—soothed Nothing more or less I cringed for originality Observed the world through the unedited scripts The very act, the poetry pact The wild animal drooling in the back I was slapped in the face by my boss who had cracked As the reviews bloated less and less They wanted something awful, something flaw-ful—something new And this empty brain in agony—HISSED I have lived in no epic battle of account Of the collateral sufferings of my brothers The stories the red carpet smothers And still I ache to create Before the other ones discover I returned with ‘‘oh me’s’ and ‘oh my’s’’ With a work of pure genius—a storybook of lies Nothing more or less Little have I lacked to dream Of contortioned pulls and dramatic fire Stories that rarely brittle or tire I fiddled with precious glass on edge Foully eager for self-damage As if it would trigger some legitimate spark Searching for creatures and features in the dark No one unlocked the passage that night For the starving idea-parched malice of right But all welcomed with open arms A pale mannequin filled with jewels and charms Consuming, fuming dooming All ghosts hoping, screaming, looming Hoping that one day they would find themselves on the big screen Their legacy real as it can possibly get Nothing more or less