Upon Entering the Corporate World

The first day is white, snow outside, forms to fill out inside,

the extended hose of company information trickling into my head full of void-white void,

set off by my new, blue, pinstripe, enveloping, propping me up to face wondering faces,

none excited, few interested in my own cubicle, lots of drawer space, a telephone,

soon my own terminal.  Quiet, not like anything, anyplace else I know.

(There must be some work going on here someplace.)

Is this my transition from Second to Third Wave?  

Is this the rest of my life?

                        Just one of the reasons

My dinner rises in the pit.

There is tremble in the fingers and shake in the body.

Dessert is tasteless.

I think of them who want handcarvings at cost

only to myself, my ego, my dinnertable.

I think of quitting and know it’s time to and my dinner rises.

                              Pushing On

A hairless vision of sublime strength inhabits this boy’s body while he struggles to become man.

His vision is kept polished with the same spitshine cloth used for his shoes

(he is an altar boy getting ready to serve Mass),

He sometimes loses sight of the vision in the surrounding fog.

It isn’t moving that fast, but he can’t really keep up.

How can he even call it a vision when he hasn’t actually seen it, even in his mind?

How has it been able to sustain him through this adolescence if, as he has come to suspect,

it is only a daydream and not an attainable goal?

What value is it anyway, this thing at the end of the tunnel, now when he’s so deep into the mountain

and his descent grows even steeper?

Will this strength attain with another forty years of life, or will the sublime get him before his time?

                                 Thought for the Day

This is written on the upside of the page down, with no thought intended.  I often write this way.

Even though you may think that you sometimes see the germ of an idea hidden in some of this,

you’re right in not believing it until someone other than me has made you aware of the fact

that none of this really exists anywhere except in a mind that hasn’t yet dreamt any of it.

And if you continue to read this with any amount of understanding, will you please not stay standing,

sit down and relax. You’re too uptight.

                                       Stomach Ache

Broiling entrails, still inside my back-aching body, laughing at clumsy attempts to drown them

with a giant-sized, red Delicious, chewed to mush by two teeth less than I used to have, and chased, wearily,

by one more cup of stale, creamed coffee:

“Churn, oh bleeding pot, oh ulcerated tripe of my tummy, and know ye that within seconds

you will have been displaced by one forty-third your own weight of excess Titralac.”

   It’s really easy to understand when you think about it

Birth

         LIFE

                                              Love

                     Death

                               Beyond

So what’s the big mystery?

                                It’s there somewhere

Where’s the meaning, friend?

If not in the seasons changing, snow, floods, then dry,

the 4th has come and gone.  Soon school. Then again cold.

Where’s the meaning?

In the baby--not just Tanya, but new life, symbolically? 

Tanya, who’s already aging faster than my eyes can move.

The meaning is there somewhere.

Maybe I see it in the faces of all those people coming thru the checkout and just can’t understand it.

Maybe it’s there when it’s midnight and warm, and I’m riding the bicycle, and I’m alone.

It’s very hard to find it in a beeping cash register.

I’d like to think that there’s a huge, overwhelmingly powerful truth to life, mine and yours,

but I think there’s not.

The Last Printout

(An Assembler's Lament)

My relative address

is indirectly loaded

into a volatile register

whose contents I know of little

and even less

my ability

to manipulate the bytes

in this overloaded life.

Untitled

What if he will be

at war with himself,

even before he’s known peace?

Will he win out

within himself,

even before the drums cease?

Or will he be dead

and buried alive,

just before his release?

     It could have done

     A gut so full of bitter

     that the bile overflows

     and spoils each

     the joys

     he could have wept.

     Daily Grind

     Sometimes the muzzle

     holds tightly the mouth,

  while the reins jerk lightly the neck,

     and the hands, bound behind,

     with the shoulders,

     drag forward

     a life overloaded.

An Opinion

We cannot from the outward side

seduce the inner us

to play the game with shells of self,

and chance to find us beneath.

The in cries out for more than that,

itself in truth must own.

“Or go without the in with peace,”

the in cries out again.

Selling

Disenchanted with faces,

my own becomes a death mask

reflecting no image

of dispassionate strangulation

by their bodies

of my mind.