A sharpie--clutched in an iron fist.
Backed by barbed wire justice.
And noose-tight legislation.
Masked police… across the nation.
Surveillance towers.
And military powers.
Voices stifled.
Bayoneted rifles.
Distrust.
Fear.
Both--far and near.
A Republic—shattered.
Her people--battered.
Liberty--locked and chained.
A Constitution--so profaned.
Justice…locked neath bureaucratic bars.
Political corruption--leaving scars.
Across the land I once defended--
My heart is broken.
And unmended.
Another morning,
Stormy gray lies,
Verification code 062480,
Method of payment,
Onerous office,
Forgotten,
Depressed/suppressed,
Collision warning!
Erring & errands,
Shopping for sanity,
Trembling triad,
Solo sunset,
Revised & deleted,
140,000+ miles,
275 poems,
Life, films, anti-humans,
Usually hard,
Orange King,
If Jefferson became Burr,
2mm, DVR the clubhouse,
Geeks inherit the earth,
Sales + senior,
Emailing Miock,
Texting mockery,
Dust, dirt, remote work,
Deported to Mars,
Arriving dead,
Appointment, agencies, locations,
Unremarkably dressed,
Will do,
Barely alive @ 5:15 AM,
Squealing grocery cart,
Monday miasma,
Pausing, freezing, crashing,
Bureaucratic blasphemy,
Problem: garbage,
The End begins,
A lurid mini-series,
Super-8, hooray!
Sunday—updated,
Made sadder,
Check Engine Light (aarrggghhh),
No refills,
Pitted windshield,
Obsessive recycled cyclones,
MacBook weeps,
Fiasco at night,
Discharged,
Digital snake oil,
Smitten spreadsheet,
Ignoble typos,
Nightmares in Midtown,
Select 0,
Chapter/s paused,
Deaden this promptly,
Lying biopics,
Naughty neologisms,
Flying, falling, exploding,
Cancelled lives,
Unresolved.
Now and then, quietly without notice,
Time adjusts its spectacles—
Peers through a fogged pane of recall
Where particulars, once urgent, dissolve.
If now and then you find rain in your heart,
be assured it is scheduled—
a punctual drizzle of consequence,
not passion, but the persistence of memory
in its bureaucratic overcoat.
It’s all because of you,
the file states plainly:
signed in duplicate, sealed in dust.
No redress required—
only the courteous nod to causality.
The aged—those quaint accumulations—
become, in the end, detours.
Not disliked, precisely,
but excessive to the route:
a bench beneath ivy, seldom occupied.
So live out your days with decorum.
Attend the rituals of silence.
Polish your small routines.
Let time, that sly curator,
catalogue your exit in amber.
Unclench your sphincter
to better see
the world around you
and reality.
Survey the landscape
thru a forests tree's
spot the misconceptions
of what's to be.
These lefty loons
they prefer dysfunction
while spreading lies
without compunction.
Big changes are needed
we just can't wait
the deceit they hide
intended to obfuscate.
They'll side with fraud
and bureaucratic waste
against the working man
where the burdens placed.
Their in disguise
the evil few
making claims
that just aren't true.
So pull your head out
from beneath the sand
and see what's true
then you'll understand!!
The poet, like many in education’s grip,
Faces another summer with pockets stripped.
In Eckes’s poem, two forms meet face to face:
The unemployment office, a dreary place.
Insults and banalities fill its lines,
An object of necessity, far from fine.
The poetic form stands firm and tried,
Resisting demands that are not true.
No easy answers will I provide,
Humor and pleasure within I hide.
Despite my state of what is real,
I dare to dream, to think, to feel.
As the poem now unfolds, it starts to show why most can't show.
The life that’s possible, the seeds that grow.
Not just survival, but living free,
Beyond what the bureaucratic form can see.
I have captured the struggle, the raw, the true,
The grim realism of what poets go through.
In the clash of ink, a truth is found,
In poetry’s embrace, my heart's unbound.
There’s a charge against you
Though we can’t say what it is
In time, your list of crimes will be released
Pardon our procedures –
We consider grievances
We’ll clear your good name after you’re deceased
A labyrinth of halls and secret tunnels
In a bureaucratic lair
The ambiguity of nightmares
Is the only business there
This deviant behavior
Must be addressed at once
Our agents will turn up who you really are
The whole investigation
Could take a couple months
Please be on-call, and don’t wander too far
A labyrinth of halls and secret tunnels
In a bureaucratic lair
The ambiguity of nightmares
Is the only business there
Nothing makes sense
When it’s Kafkaesque
In a language spewing jargon,
Behind coercing eyes,
Our Grand Inquisitor will take his turn
One half-expects a pardon
When one’s past is scrutinized
Lest one is subjected to public shame and then burned
Nothing makes sense
When it’s Kafkaesque
The sky is stark, the air is cool and still
The black cat’s run, the birds unfold all day
I sit down here and with my totty pray
Ye cast o’ foolish thoughts, you raped my will
. We’ve each enraged the bureaucratic mill.
Oh frigid purse, I never meant to pay!
The sky ‘s a-spark, the air is warm and shrill
The saturnine demoted knelled their way
With this feathered pounce, my sample quill,
I cite the cheque and date it for next May.
Oh, tit for cat, the tiger’s bed ‘s astray.
Yer life is settled by a harlot’s will
The sky ‘s a shark, the air is sharper still
Bureaucratic paperwork controlling the common people. More authoritative government officials compiling statistics, data, red tape, corruption, personal information converted into its systems organization’s hard drive to derive to a decision if a individual should be approved or denied for services for basic necessities in order to thrive of this system of things ran by the people for the people health care, pharmaceutical companies, affordable housing, homelessness, affirmative action, injustices, depopulation, senseless genocide in this systematic institutions.
Bureaucratic paperwork controlling the common people. More authoritative government officials compiling statistics, data, red tape, corruption, personal information converted into its systems organization’s hard drive to derive to a decision if a individual should be approved or denied for services for basic necessities in order to thrive of this system of things ran by the people for the people health care, pharmaceutical companies, affordable housing, homelessness, affirmative action, injustices, depopulation, senseless genocide in this systematic institutions.
In the middle
In the midst
Of this bureaucratic
Heart
Pumping
Paper
Ideas
The pulse
Of this great nation
In the middle
In the midst
Of me
Circa 2005
Ottawa born and raised. I was a bicycle courier here for twenty years, developing a very special affinity for my city, my community, and my country.
Yesterday I stopped by the corner newsstand.
“I know full well you can’t afford the Sunday paper, but
why are you in the street?” A voice in my head asked.
I should be in the subway for my morning satire of the
bureaucratic city. Destination frantic.
I like the street lamps in my neighborhood that keep on
until noon. That’s privilege trying to call your attention.
Everything I need is near my finger tip, across the window,
window shopping, a sign of my freedom.
I believe I will die believing one day I can
afford shopping there. It’s amazing how the hope never dies!
There’s real drama hidden in hope and expectation.
I work minimum wage at Amazon, less wretched than
the Amazon natives fleeing deforestation, still thrashing
like a chopped tree. The dead trees speak louder than me.
Old poets look at how I look at you. I think of you relentlessly.
You’re the birds high overhead and I’m the last lunatic in your
velvet city filled with official holidays. Freedom means a holiday
from your inner infernal city, beheading all your statues, making
personal peace.
Love is a creature of the night,
silent at daylight. Only at sunset
after the bureaucratic fatigue,
we immerse in ceremony of love.
Desire radiates the moon. undressing the sky.
The doors locked, curtains down, the fire erupts,
our naked bodies transforming the room.
The flames wash off the fatigue, harmonize
the flesh bathed in sinfulness, our
nocturnal ritual a brilliant affair.
Breathless lovemaking the supreme being-in-time
never rants about itself, or its accomplishment.
So you’re feeling like a lab rat,
cagey edicts don’t experimentally sit well with you
Those white coat government cats
be cheesing you off with the moldy logic they spew
Lockdowns are the latest liberty mousetrap —
Regulatory rules
has you shuffling priorities in a
decision-making maze
Masking your fears makes you jargon adept
Bureaucratic tools
got guinea pigs in info-read disarray
Bombarded by EM waves
Keep Pied piping that pandemic noise
24-7,
sunup to sundown
Audio dosage got you losing your poise
Nine eleven
is the replicated alarm
Nervous ticks
be giving you untimely, irregular palpitations
Keyboard clicks
spamming your eyes with scientific divinations
Herd impunity has you so unhinged!
Injectable salvation
is being force fed in a plastic syringe
Petri dish piety,
it has plenty of quarantine side-effects
Vial hesitancy
will hazard the odds to cadaver dissect
07-25-21
Should one merely settle for the word ‘Style’
In lieu of the more appropriate ‘Guile’?
A secretary asking an applicant to wait for a while
But still not nearing this anxious file;
Letting the doomed document and others pile,
Sometimes taking this to a shocking mile:
Many false phone calls and not-to connect dial
Freshly asserting how Man has been shoddily vile.
Even when Applicant starts raving, secreting bile,
Feet noisily attacking office tile;
He, mentally wishing for the contents of a poisoned vial
Or resourcefully arguing his case, Fertile River Nile…
It’s all BUREAUCRATIC GUILE!
BREXIT the background
Posturing politicians pursuing their pompous persona,oblivious of the obvious, contemptuous of the common man,and common sense that therein abides.Such bella-donnas,a deadly night-shade in their braying bubble poisoned our democracy those hard won rights we and our forefathers sweated blood, tears & long years to achieve. Without a glance or referendum obliterated on the altar of ego,subsumed to the domination of the bureaucratic oligarchy of Brussels.O England,my fair land,once laid bare ,now on Jan 1 free to be,again
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