New Poem for Revision

Utopia

Enter a seamless world,
Fresh unfurled, and spun into utopia.
Every weakness—skillfully sutured
Into a flawless future, a race blessed
With no less than Perfect Tens.

Every man, each bourgeois—
            An Alpha.
The other Greeks—
           Perfectly extinct.

But in a world filled with poreless appeal
And stainless steel smiles,
In a world whose biggest threat
Is androgynous etiquette, there lurks
A silhouette of secrets.

In a world of breasts born perky, toned,
Where silicone is synonymous with skin,
In a world stuffed full of clones
With ephemerally manicured fingers,
There lingers anomaly.

In a world where males adhere
To genetically engineered scruff
And perfectly proportionate dicks
Just thick enough for criterion width,
There ticks a time bomb of sin—

              —Take another look within
The tin cubicles of sheep so sublime.

Beneath the paradigm of conform,
Behind the mammoth rose-colored glasses,
Below the masses of withering brains,
There remains buried under the soil

Ticking minds
Mushrooming hearts
Blossoming tragedy.

Below a perfectly manufactured world,
There lies reality.

revised poem 1

Acid Tongues

It’s inevitable.

Dreamy eyes peel open,

Rose-colored REM cycles—fleeting.

All that’s heard is white noise           

From a nearby television set,          

Its short-lived limelight now faded to neglect.      

Slatted daylight greets the stench

Of stale beer and cigarettes             

That permeates the air. This air        

Is the by-product     

Of good times forgotten.       

The corners of our dried lips are     

Crusted with remorse, slobbering orifices           

Addicted to sucking in this                                 

Atmosphere mottled with teenage pollution.          

We are surrounded by dirtied, crumpled              

Clothing: Remnants of egos won and lost.           

Our mouths taste of stomach acid,              

Our skin reeks                                          

Of stale beer and cigarettes.                       

Damp hardwood and damp spirits              

Play souvenir to lost memories,                  

Each intoxicated account                           

Differing                        

In detail              

And details.

It’s inevitable.

We realize that we act the victim,

Our past—the star—held hostage 

By pleasures plagued with amnesia.

Our days are stale and fruitless,

Our nights

Recuperate us.

Prose Poem

There is nothing intelligent to say about this. They say
it’s just another phase you’ll grow out of.

Well, I’m waiting.

You think you know what it feels like to have been hurt
until you are hurt again. That agonizing ache in your chest,
that inward pull—no, the word pull does not come close
to doing justice—that inward drag, simply refuses to cease.
Picture an adolescent black hole: inescapable, unstoppable,
and so damn out of control. This is the kind of damage
that makes you want to tear yourself apart from the inside
out; the kind that pushes you to gnaw on your knuckles until
raw is a thing of the past. Heartache doesn’t mean a thing
until you’ve experienced it first-hand.

I quite enjoy writing in prose form; I feel like it's the one poetic form that gives the writer the most creativity. With prose, there are essentially no limitations to stifle the imagination: no feet or meter requirements like sonnets, no requisite for a rhyme scheme at all. Most importantly, there is no need to search for that synonym to replace the perfect word, that synonym that is only necessary due to the constraints of a poetic form. In essence, prose form gives you complete control.

I've also noticed that with prose poem, it is much easier to tell a story. Perhaps something about the ease of writing in this form--ease that comes with freedom--allows the writer to express a plot easier, whereas in other poetic forms, I feel the tendency for description and analysis rather than ideas.

Vector Poem Link

Vector Poem

Vector Poem

Caught in the act. The only audible note,
The bead of sweat trickling down my temple.
Unholy night, no axioms in sight.

Red-handed is such a nasty term.
The only red here is chanel No. 5
Corpulent lips as glossy as sin.

Timing is everything
when you’re spewing false maxims
to cover dirty tracks, as soiled as God’s Earth.

I open those red, red lips and out pours
A Thunderstorm of ugly lies.
My noose is spun from self-pity.