Poetry - Eric Shapiro
Untitled #1
There are angels in the stands
And devils in the dirt
Wrote a sonnet in his head
But he could not speak a word
He wouldn't run the bases
Cause his head was in the sand
Songbird struck dumb by calculation
All the songs he sang were canned
You Were My Greatest Invention (Corny Break-Up Poem)
Here I lie, in a cesspool of self-pity
Haunted by your perfume ghost
How I would prefer the stench of death
To your flowery fumes
Oh, my build-a-bear!
I should have known
That you could not bear
The weight of my expectations
I should have known
That love cannot flourish
In the thin haze of mutual self-delusion
Now
The veil has been ripped away
And in the aftermath
My mind is a broken tape
Replaying our conversations in a loop
I can’t help but dwell on your precious fabrications
Precisely tailored from the material of my deepest desires
If only I could stitch them back together
Into a patchwork reality
For a beautiful lie
Is much preferable
To a disappointing truth
I would gladly gouge out my eyes
To see you again
Writer's Block
His flight of fancy
Can't take off
It's grounded in
A nihilistic bog
Floating in space
A static log
The watcher declines
To lift the fog
Chemical hounds
Have digested his tongue
Pumped his brain
And stapled his lungs
It’s getting old
The night is still young
Can't remember the days
When he did this for fun
Celestial Dance
Drugged up and lazy
Gathering up the praise of his elders to forge life-sustaining delusions
Every poem, every song
Birthed from a manic desperation
A mutt chasing cars on the edge of a cliff
For he can feel time’s encroaching shadow
As it bears down on his fragile mind
He fears his wall of delicate fantasies are on the verge of being shattered
That he will be dragged into a cubicle by the force of his own mediocrity
He envies the stars
He dreams of transcending his carbon-based, carbon copy life
Of rising up to the heavens to join them in their celestial dance
Rendering his experiences a constellation
A second-hand dream
And then, to detonate in a blossom of light
Burning himself onto mankind’s retina
Wanna Be Aborted
Stuff them full of vitamin pills
Because you know they won’t eat vegetables
Keep them slogging through the muck
With a syringe full of parables
Whip them in advance
Because you know they’ll misbehave
Castrate them with words
Before they’re old enough to shave
Teach them not to try
They’ll be happy when they die
Don’t you dare stand up
Because he’s watching from the sky
Life of the Lover
Lovingly lifted out of his warm cerebral tunnel
By the mind-child’s midwife
Prodded into the replication game
By chemical slave-drivers
Endless collisions
With interchangeable set pieces
Only one constant companion
A restless hitchhiker
A well-dressed psychopath
With magnetic appeal
Love is not a gentle lover, he learns
In the wretched aftershocks of passion
Its kisses soaked with the undiluted nectar of life
The Rebel
He sticks it to the Man
He’s just a spoiled little boy
Only hurling rocks through windows
Instead of smashing toys
Thinks that he’s real special; he just don’t understand
In the end, he’s just a boy in a band
A part time existentialist
A trust-fund-baby communist
Dips his toe in murky waters
Then on to a next philosophic tryst
“There’s no bigger loser than a winner”
Wears his B- average as a badge of honor
A half-hearted rebel
God forbid he get in trouble
He’ll be damned to let hypocrisy
Burst his comfy little bubble
$100 dollar skinny jeans
A Che Guevera shirt?
Why have a revolution
When you can shop at Urban Outfitters
Isolation Block
Finally some unstructured time
A brief respite from the daily grind
On borrowed time my mind is mine
To dredge up some intriguing lines
To reflect for just a minute more
On an empty world that I deplore
With its seismic emotions and petty wars
Always I keep my eye on the door
Perhaps I should search for what it means
Unearth the dirt under the polished sheen
There’s nothing to gawk at when the surface is clean
And so tabloid literature reigns supreme
I scour the landscape for muck to rake
A horrifying snippet of news to break
To prop open their eyes and keep them awake
Even as they have money to make
This seems to be my lot in life
To dissect them all with my surgeon's knife
To reflect the glare of their daily strife
With my coat of mirrors attuned to the light
An Accident
Winding road slithering under his wheels
A treacherous tar serpent
Its back slicked with black frozen murder
The pending scream of metal billowing ominously in the distance
Two intersecting roads
At the center, a stage
Wheeled in by the fates
The metal box approaches
The curtain ascends
And the scene begins with a bang
And his life ends without a whimper
Ode to Facebook
The contortions of my body
Might as well be a dream
Because the contents of my life
Are transposed onto a screen
Reduced to a slideshow
A casual click away
Nothing worse for the neurotic
Than constant display
The prying eyes of strangers
Probing me for cracks
An invasion of my privacy
Technology’s torturous tax?
Abstinence suspicious
You must have something to hide
So join them in their vanity
Normal 0 And conduct yourself with pride
Better not frown
Always smile
The cameras are watching
And they brook no denial
Was that you on top of Sally?
Trading saliva on the couch
The strands will hang forever
You’ll never live it down
Peel off their plastic faces
Look beyond their tinted eyes
Expose their wizards to the light
You’ll be surprised by what you find
These elaborate-looking beings
In this disembodied age
Simplistic machines
Sniffing out their mates
Darwin’s Disney World
Give some credit to the man
A brand new spankin’ venue
The same old master plan
Hiding
Obscured by masks we mistake for our faces
Straddling genders and cultures and races
You can prod the illusion but you can never break it
How could we live if we saw ourselves naked?
We hide in shame from the beast we tamed
But behind our cosmetics we’re all the same
Bundles of glands with no souls to be found
Birthing chemical vandals too lead us around
We can sculpt and paint and read and write
We fall in “love” just out of spite
Trying to hide our natures away
With wedding trinkets and fancy displays
Ripples
To ascend the ladder is to drop down the chute
Swaying in rhythm to the snake charmer’s flute
Only the snake is the man and the man is his pet
Try convincing the world they’ve never met
He hides the worm in his apple away
Beneath justifications and shades of gray
Still who you are is never you
Not the brain in your head or the foot in your shoe
Nor the perfectly reasonable excuses you spew
Nor the works of art that you channel through
It’s in the ripples you send and their concrete effects
Driven by logic’s constant neglect
Whether you bear no malice or hold a grudge
The jury is out and there is no judge
So uncover your stripes, the black and the white
And let circumstance label you wrong or right
Intellectual predators uniquely mine
Bulging seeds in my promiscuous mind
Scorch the earth and leave me behind
Confident they’re gone just in time
Stillborn notions compelled to escape
Left in the sun to rot all day
Umbilical scraps chewed up by strays
Lie in a heap until the end of my days
Secure in Insecurity
Cuddling with pretension
To keep despair at bay
Justifying life
With his credentials on display
A tacked on identity
An acceptable price to pay
For the sense of superiority
That gets him through the day
Defines himself with t-shirts
Dictionary words
Sings the praise of bands
He’s barely even heard
He’s a suffering artist
Hacks out chords on his guitar
Content that his talent
Won’t get him very far
It feels so good to fail
Gives him reason to despair
He’s entitled to their pity
And he’ll be sure to grab his share
Behind the Glass
Out of reach behind the glass
Across a digital morass
She flickers in and out as fast
But obsession’s die is already cast
In the cotton contours of her face
Reminders of a past disgrace
That time refuses to erase
The cause of all the time I waste
Every day at half-past four
I thrust my key into the door
So I can gaze upon her just once more
My one true love, whom I abhor
Self-perpetuating lust
Embeds itself in ego’s crust
It never dissolves, nor does it rust
It only continues to fill with puss
A persistent whisper that travels years
Has exhausted all my blood and tears
It preys upon my doubts and fears
And leaves me depleted, sitting here
Looking for
A turn of phrase
To justify
The rush of days
If money buys happiness
I need a raise
Or perhaps I’m slogging
Through a phase
In the aftertaste of past disgraces
You never know what time defaces
Filling in the empty spaces
A revolving door of plaster faces
In the dark she hears an absent voice
The lingering shadow of a choice
Her life’s a blanket of white noise
In her tortured mind it cries and cries