Best Cathode Poems
he rubbed his eyes
and said you just think that way
so you always have an answer ready
which may well constitute
a state of pure entertainment
with multiple jaw grinding orgasms
in a dog lick dog kind of world
at Cathode Ray's tanning salon
so what would it really take
for the union to lay down with the banker
I'm not sure high above the clouds
is the place to find anything
certainly not a mirror to be had
much less a cinema projector
with scenes of domestication
good god Reginald where
do you plan to put that thing
Reginald sneezed his false teeth
into his dinner plate as an augury
probed prodded palpated
looking for the intelligentsia
in the yellow pages
but they were yellow and didn’t stand out
their attempts to overthrow evolution
led to a cornucopia of calamity
at the crossroads of conundrum
traded their thumbs for a reliable statistic
the atmospherics garbled the transmission
and made anyone look like a prophet
left my friends hanging from lamp posts
adulterers heretics and infidels
cataleptics ablaze with legend
trained by biblical harlots
tending their hornet infested gardens
avoiding the irredeemably antique
and inexact to a criminal degree
in the war between belief and certainty
my script supervisor just pulled the plug
he's not from Sesame Street
he's from Bastille Boulevard
the artist is bait and accident prone
opaque as an 8 ball at high velocity
caroming through every nave and vestibule
bladder control found again
in the midst of bourgeoisie panic
a meditation of involvement
I'm going where
the disorder of discovery is tolerated
From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon
Artist Portfolio: http://walteralter.byethost32.com/
Categories:
cathode, how i feel,
Form:
Free verse
It all starts off at the anode,
where the electrons are lost,
they went bumping and shooting through the wire
and set the voltmeter on fire.
There's a huge crash-land in the cathode,
where the cations are reduced,
then the anions sprinted back through the salt bridge,
and electricity is produced.
Categories:
cathode, fun, funny,
Form:
Rhyme
There’s not two ways of talking,
Two different points of view,
Many different angles to deflect,
Crazy pavements, something new.
There’s not another teller,
Presenting a link or chunk,
Framing circularly the story,
To nurture any cell’s hunk.
There’s not a plus one man,
Chewing a whistler’s closet,
There’s only freedom’s red,
To validate the vouch offset.
If Christianity is just an opinion,
And if atheism is only another,
Then crease the distance away,
To note the claim that’s sour.
Truth is the centre of entropy,
With love as its pursuit,
Freedom increasingly appears,
When you love and newt.
Christianity does not stand,
It’s wrong, in between, out,
Jesus was not god, scream,
Hell evades the bible, spout.
Fundamentalists lack sense,
Extremists yell strict, plight,
Homes should not be broken,
By crusaders twisting right.
Wrongness equally parasites,
Upon the strict and the stead,
So let contradictions vent,
The people who nurse lead.
Theology is not an opinion,
Relative, proportional, relational -
And atheism is not just another,
Reflective, pseudo and corporal.
Atheism is true, not Christianity,
So Christianity is false, not said;
Theology is faith unleashed,
Pulling a negative entropy head.
Science is behind atheism,
Winking at the lips in method,
Meandering like lightening,
Through guesses of the cathode.
If you seek truth you will find,
But if you say Jesus lives today,
Physically, then you need to stop,
Saying I can’t say the other: nay.
Categories:
cathode, atheist, character, cool, discrimination,
Form:
Rhyme
Video shock treatment
got my thoughts moving wavy ...
why ain’t my fear of the future
dawn misty dissipating?
This mental picture is getting more hazy
Dr. Strangelove says
the other patients are nervously afraid
of my tin foil cathode crazy talking
Seems my current condition ain’t getting no better
Electric cult personality
got me screaming at the telly
As I try to warn everybody,
but it looks like nobody can see
those invisible mind control
piercing pulsating nano-needles injecting
Everybody around me
got a bargain cut-rate surgery
Government free lobotomy
Pinocchio politicians offering gift rubles,
handing out pet puppet lemmings ...
Lord knows, I’m not dreaming
Yet, Dr. Strangelove says
my cranial circuits are overloading again,
as I’m fighting to stop that invasive
satellite signal from getting patched in
Gotta leave this cuckoo’s nest,
time share eagle swift divest
However, I must be blood simple wise,
when there’s so many peeping eyes
Herr Doktor is a sly, smart mole
playing me dumb
But, I know an undercover G-man
when I see one
Dr. Strangelove says
my current condition isn’t getting any better
Then why are my spiritual survival instincts tingling wild —
Grim forecast: Expect nuclear holocaust bad weather
Categories:
cathode, dark, fear, horror, scary,
Form:
Dramatic Monologue
Life behind these eyes
This old body, harboured among so many artifacts.
My Spirit wanders the spaces within my four cornered rooms.
My Soul searches for meaning beyond the bars of my steel cage. .
My heart beats against the walls of my memories hoard.
Blood pumping, awakening the essence of what is stored.
My nights becoming the life what should be my days.
Slipping my mind into neutral, sound and electromagnetic waves carry.
Living vicariously through the eyes, imaginations, the talents of others.
Writers producers, directors, camera create and bring to the screen.
That one eyed monster, the cathode tube that carries one beyond.
Awareness of space time continuum, its linear journey lost to me.
Consciousness of times passing no longer has any relevance.
Seconds into minutes, hours, days, weeks months, years, a lifetime
One elongated stream, without destination, meaning or substance.
Carried off into the sun set, carried on the wings of solar winds.
Particles of time, connected, never seen by these tired old eyes.
Reaching, with both hands into the ether, the four corners of this universe.
Habits, rituals, routines dominate, no longer cognizant of times movements.
Days have become night, many hours spent in a bed of water.
Lost in dream land, where the subconscious brings to life ones history.
Stories told, be they positive, negative, indifferent or be they illusions.
A surrealistic representations of unfinished business, of desired unfulfilled.
On occasion, a vision, a premonition, something beyond a reflection.
For the most part, a desire to, once again, to experience the essence of.
Passions, desires, a life no longer afforded a disabled, indigent senior.
Only in the images played out upon the back of ones eye lids.
Painted upon canvases, woven into tapestries, displayed on TV screens.
Phantasmagorias that elucidate a life, some regrets, a life consumed.
B. J. “A ” 2
January 24th, 2021
Categories:
cathode, how i feel,
Form:
Free verse
In the museums we shudder
With vicarious delight
At the spectacle of the Aztecs -
A high culture founded on human sacrifice,
All the while not seeing -
Because we don't want to -
That the cult has never died;
Only the name of the god has changed.
Now we bend the knee in reverence
Within our private cells
Before the votive flame
Of the flickering cathode ray
In service to the great god TECH,
The Iron Form That Has No Face.
He sends his rain of bombs on foreign soils
That we may reap Renewed Economy,
Responding to their madness with his own.
He sends the check that our children may eat,
While those of others learn to scream at the sound of planes.
Yes - we see The Need.
Yes - we understand The Reasons.
- But we don't have to like it.
Our revulsion is still something we may call our own.
Oh, what of it? This time let's do the honors ourselves.
Let every mother, father, sister, brother, child and friend
Of tomorrow's "Disposable Resources"
Take the knife from the withered hand of one of TECH's High Priests,
Those Four-Starred Ones,
Plunge it deep and cut
To rip our own hearts from our breasts
Hold them beating before us in our hands
As we march en masse towards his temple,
Staggering down his sanitized audience hall,
As more and yet more come crowding to the doors,
To pile the bleeding mass before his feet.
On that day,
Let the heartless meet the faceless and scream to him as One:
"IS THIS ENOUGH? IS THIS ENOUGH?"
Categories:
cathode, angst, death, god, loss,
Form:
Free verse
60's Child
I found myself at the tail end of childhood then,
Coming out of its long sunny sleep;
The days and nights of pleasures, terrors, wonders
Strung together to make up the pitted landscape
Of being small
Still filled my world and made it whole.
Mostly i remember things like:
Summer crab feasts, "I Love Lucy" reruns
"Laugh-In" bits, the drone of ball games on t.v.,
Trips into town to my Grandfather's old store
For candy and comics
Back before my town became Yuppie Central.
Another child raised beneath the cathode rays' glow,
My mind absorbed images, words with only hinted meanings
- Like the smiling faces in the cigarette ads
The offhand reports of body counts
From a faraway, makebelive war,
i heard and felt the many signs of strain
Between the longhaired Bigger Kids and their parents;
But not for me their world of confused revolt.
That would come later, milder in my case
When I became one of their second, weaker, wave.
No, I stepped out of the close land of childhood
Just after it was all over;
Wondering ever since,
Just what it was I'd missed, or hadn't
By dint of being a kid of the fabled 60's.
Categories:
cathode, age, america, youth,
Form:
Free verse
OF THE NEW FLESH
A returned to open channels
Open to the unknown the beyond
Burning humming like angry hornets
Bottled in electric light and shadows
The whispers come through the void
Humming in the open channel
Of an ancient television set
Like a cryptic monolith, alive
The noise to signals, burning voices
Scream and chant arcane rights
That pushes n pulls the soul of things
Never dreamt of before, unseen
There in the dark the halogen arc light, bright
Blares its pure hot hollow holy light
Laying before me was a stark image of chrome
Of gears springs and electric circuitry.
Gracing suicidal insight
wickedly sharp blade
Mad for flesh and bone,
blood baptize in its righteous
fury for the masses to cut the cancer, away
Of the new flesh
this covenant of mechanical arts
And malice
A calculus of angels and insane
The insane idle smiles hide the dark shame
covered in a thin facade of normalcy
They hide lies that drip from those smiles
The hate so deep it blinds the eyes of tranquility
The secret lives of the damned
Burn, blares the new blade of silver
Bone n gears; the product of death
As the mechanical heart reimagined
ruminates and redefines
In heaven hollow facade
Silence of the holy realm
The static of Valhallas Halls
Sits a cathode ray tube
Full of angry hornets, fiery angels…
Humming into the sacred night
a blade flickers in delicate light
Dancing into shadows
from burning sacraments
A holocaustic humanity
Mad for flesh and bone
Baptize in blood
Born of righteous fury for the masses
To cut away the cancer
voices whisper
scream
call and demand:
“Long live the new flesh!”
Categories:
cathode, allegory, allusion, analogy, anger,
Form:
Free verse
Cathode Rays in the Darkness
Thelma Todd is on the Late Late Show,
Brought to the us by Kent cigarettes, which refines and
Refreshes with the exclusive Micronite Filter.
Her still tragic life in the steaming suburbs knows no past.
It is a sucking monster to which there are no survivors.
The holy TV in this house prays with its face on the floor,
Screaming its way through backyards under the parallel clotheslines,
Illuminating with cathode rays, the fragile test patterns of existence.
Lloyd Thaxton is on at 4 o’clock before the news.
Dressed in a Van Huesen shirt with skinny black tie,
He sashayes under those hanging dangling long plays,
Like a finger person jittering across the sea with magic shoes,
Igniting the twisting dance floor with blue-eyed soul.
He is the coolest of the phony-star dance mavens,
Lip syncing with panache and moving lips through album slits.
He ghost-dances now Slauson style to the beat of the dancing dead.
Baxter Ward chews through the nightly harbingers at 6,
Brought to us by Marx Toys; Do you have them all?
He sits behind a square jet black table with head pointed south;
The Great Garloo warns us to beware the Industrial Military Complex,
The insidious Cold War chatterings of Nikita and Jimmy Dodd;
But Baxter Ward assures us he will be there when the Iron Curtain falls;
When Thelma Todd mysteriously dies again in her Lincoln Convertible,
When Lloyd Thaxton lip syncs one last time Unchained Melody in Vietnamese.
Categories:
cathode, memory,
Form:
Free verse
At the museums, we shudder
In vicarious delight
At the spectacle of the Aztecs:
A high culture founded on human sacrifice.
All the while not seeing -
Because we don't want to -
That the cult has never died;
Only the name of the god has changed.
Now we reverentially bow the knee
Within private cells
Before the votive flames
Of flickering cathode ray tube
In service to the great god TECH,
The Iron Form That Has No Face.
He sends the rain of bombs on foreign soils
That we may reap Renewed Economy,
Answering their madness with our own.
He sends the check, that our children may eat,
While others' learn to scream at the sound of planes.
Yes - We see The Need.
Yes - We understand The Reasons.
But we don't have to like it.
Our revulsion, at least, we can still call our own.
What the hell - this time, let's do the honors ourselves.
Let every mother, father, sister, brother, child and friend
Of tomorrow's "Disposable Resources"
Take a knife from the withered hand of one of TECH's
Decrepit four-star priests,
Plunge it deep and cut,
Rip our own hearts from our breasts
Bear them beating before us in our outstretched hands,
Marching en masse to his temple,
Staggering down his sanitized audience hall,
More and more crowding to the doors,
To lay the bleeding mound of them at his feet.
On that day,
Let the Heartless meet the Faceless and scream as One:
'IS THIS ENOUGH?"
'IS THIS ENOUGH?"
Categories:
cathode, death, god, may, sad,
Form:
Dramatic Verse
Raft branch buoyed in canopy crossroad
Ocelot pillow paws rail rainforest rotunda
Yataghan claws trail trunk, track cathode
Assailant arouse pounces, stiff tail rudder
Lithe, while night looms, lightspeed silent
Ogling exotic shores - she yanks anchor
Centipede nimble Queen needs her tiara
Evermore adorned, baubles bean arabica
Lustrous pearl dozes on dark décolletage
Opulent moon mother of tides, sly tyrant
Tortures subordinates to claim her island
Iridescent iris treasure hunt sailor ocelot
Spotted sea captain keeps snake for halo
Lapis lazuli exclusively steers royal yacht
Asphyxiating prey, Casper crouch lay low
Navigating her way to throne, puss pirate
Drapes cashmere ears in conquest crown
Nautical Nineteenth November
Categories:
cathode, animal, beautiful, character, dark,
Form:
Acrostic
There is not a day
Not a day goes by that storm cloud do not accumulate, gather in the deep recesses of my throat, and choke off my life’s breath – that do not rage on, behind these sorrowful, doleful brown eyes, just waiting for a chance opening, that will let out a deluge of pain, pain that has rained down upon this tired old soul for far to long, cutting deep groves into my spirit, leaving thick scares that may become the walls for another to try and tear down as I have tried to do with your walls .
Acceptance will let me know - finally – that alone in this world, I will walk, alone in my room, were the bitter sweets, sound waves of music, dance along the acoustic meatus and beat upon the tympanic membrane on their way into my brain and were the rays from the cathode ( boob ) tube light up the gray matter ( that sits in this stark room ) with it’s illusionary images of imaginary lives with a thousand stories that feed my – and so many more – empty moments. Alone in my bedroom, I lay, were darkness and dreams fill my empty nights, alone in my bedroom were preparation of energy feeds this old body of mine, alone in my bedroom were Mother Nature’s embryonic fluid flows beneath me, surrounds this tired old body with the heat of her life giving essence, her mysterious forces submerging all my cares and woes- for a few hours anyway .
Alone in these rooms, my heart lays, alone in these rooms may be my fate, my destine and alone in these places may allow me - along with all that I have written and written to you – to be able to grieve for the loss of someone and something that was never mine to loose in the first place and would never have been in the first place, it seems .
B. J. "A" 2
Janurary 11th 2008
Categories:
cathode, angst, grief, loss, old,
Form:
Free verse
We sit in our idle houses
plugged-in to the world wide web
of digital madness and make-believe.
We text tweet posts from on far and shadow fight in elections streams but hide our eyes in the burning light of day. We crawl in the muck of media social septic sycophantic discharge.
The immaculate ejaculation of simple minds
lost in hate inspired by a buffoon's fury for the masses of a race at war with no one and everything.
We are the spoor of an absent absolute adolescent god.
The degeneration of a nation.
Walk on the left side of what is right.
Daggers to the left brainwashed, irrational.
We are the lost souls, shades of our former selves.
The whitewashed out wasted youth of a once-great nation that never was, and is only in the wet dreams of gun-loving, militant, mutant myopic ‘mericans.
We are the last bastion of some mad American empire that once never was and will be ever again from sea to shining towers of righteous jaded glass that reach to heavens zenith only to come down as men with destination if deaths deeds conspire to bring down.
An airliner of 767 designation demolition by design a government conspiracy that conspired to kill and to procreate war for profit and malicious malfeasance fester in flight of a mind at war with truth and a god at home of the brave land of the gun.
We are the product of our dysfunctional family that plugged us into the cathode ray tube, the wet nurse of the damaged damned and demented delusional diluted and dangerous.
We sit in our idle houses
plug-in to the world wide web
of digital madness and make-believe.
Of some mad American empire of crumbling crimson and cobalt blue fluids of stars sliver bright raining like falling embers or wormwood, blood, and sky and white light influx we are the offspring of some mad American empire…
Categories:
cathode, abortion, abuse, age, allegory,
Form:
Free verse
She turns on the tv:
Death smiles back at her again,
Cannily, comfortably.
The face of the so-called expert on the tv screen
Suddenly breaks into a ferral canine smile.
He is momentarily bug-eyed,
His tongue lolls
As he laughs along with his fellow so-called
Experts appearing on the warmongering, corporate,
Mainstream, so-called news-gabfest panel.
In another world, it would, just as easily, be me there,
Would, just as easily, be almost anyone,
Instead of this all-too human man,
Shamelessly running, for cash and fame, pitfalls against
Humanity, through deadly cathode trees
Invisible for the deadly cathode forest.
Categories:
cathode, image, peace,
Form:
Prose Poetry
Deep in coiled chambered hearts
mortal designs conspire
in arcane chamber hearts
pump isometric drugs
the cathode ray desires
as electric images expire
what are the strange
things that toil in the Dark
idle thoughts and brittle bones conspire
like ancient snow graced by divinities
of apathy in oblivion
cast in shards of cruel inner demons
accessing cathartic chambered hearts
pump isometric drugs as photons collide
reside as something coils
in mortal minds deep chambered hearts
as electric image expire!
Categories:
cathode, abuse, addiction, allegory, allusion,
Form:
Free verse