Day Late

Been thinking about a planned end to titles here so they'll stoop after this post and will switch on and off maybe when I think of something interesting to put there. Also went to bed before finishing these poems last night, so I'm going to try to get them finished by 9:30PM on the twentieth, but I'm not going to change the time and date from when I opened the file.


"Ceci n'est pas un poème."
This is not a poem
but simply an image of a poem
made up of lines
and concepts
that I decided
were not good enough.

This stanza
was about
walking alone on campus
with headphones in
shades on
ignoring everyone in the world.
And I backspaced it all out
because I realized
that I was saying absolutely
nothing necessary or new.

And there were
100 more words
about how
I'm a pessimist
and I don't like the world I live in
nor the person I am
but I crossed that out too

because it was boring.

"Justice"
Now I'm not one to support monarchies
but there's something to be said
about the voluntary action
that is necessary for political justice.

So I'd have to say
that George Washington
as a president
was not nearly as respectable
as Juan Carlos I.

These are the reasons I give
for saying that
just because of your position of power
as debatably the most powerful person in the world
doesn't mean I have to respect your viewpoint
nor make it perfectly okay to judge.


"I like the idea of it more than I actually like it."
Plato would agree
because you cannot get to the ideal
and Aristotle would perhaps as well,
but would say that the idea of it
is useless,
that we have to work from the real object.

There is a counselor
in the past
taking to a youth
about its presumed depression.

And that youth is not being entirely truthful
on account of the fact
that it does not want to be defined as mentally unwell
as something requiring change.

The idea of the perfect person
is becoming something we truly strive towards
through antidepressants and plastic surgery
but if you lack certainty of your own identity
then you become truly afraid of what might be the result when adjustments are made.

Because I do not know who I am, I am afraid of who I might one day be, and we all know that if you cut open my head and started touching little parts of my brain, you could make me do anything you wanted, and also a metal rod could very easily turn me into a different person, so I write poems like this.


"Maturity"
Cigarette smoke
reminds me of my father
and age restrictions
are clearly a cause
of the number of twenty year olds
that go out every week
and get so thoroughly drunk
that they don't remember a single Friday
for five and a half years of their life.

It just doesn't really make all that much sense to me
to create a law
that keeps certain people from trying something legally
in a capitalist society,
which therefore will have
some sort of subliminal advertising.

You end up with a conditioning period
as you look up to your parents
and your elders.

It's not about it being cool,
I wish people would get that,
it's about growing up in a country
that brags about its freedom
and being given some new
road to be taken.