Excerpt:

The world’s story is a palimpsest:
an array of undistilled, unfiltered, kaleidoscopic monologues
layered and congealed -
despicability and courage intermingled
spanning infinite volumes
in an unavoidable parable

A confrontation with absolute realism
that concludes with neither
a thirst for utopia
nor misanthropic flailing
but a willful receipt of the mantle of consciousness
a lucid absorption of each season of existence
willful transmutation

While in
the valley of the Locust
eager to convey and shine
in a gutless, satirical pilot
the fifth-rate auditioners
summon cultural offal
that’s doomed to obscurity
trading stabs in a feud with
inevitable obsolescence
posing coyly on the gangway
exhibitionist runts
with tailored mystiques
defiling the peaks
of creative endeavor
self-aggrandized, networked
to a hollow apex
bejeweled in trinitite
premiered at the gala
of human folly
each pathological lackey
kneels only at the feet
of fellow counterfeit magi
fellow propagandists
fellow adept peddlers of diluted catharsis

Je lepšie zarobiť menej spevom, ako zarobiť viac potichu, len počuť zvonenie mincí.

[Translation: “It’s better to earn less singing than to earn more in silence, just to hear the coins ringing.”]

Immured within this absurdist maze
where “lies are made into a universal system”
the true work’s inconspicuous
unassumingly tenacious as water
eroding Ozymandian monoliths
a samizdat outpouring of candor at the risk of death
flares of solidarity across time
immortal; spared extinction.

Excerpt:

A sun dial hammered into mutilated contours
marking yet another earthly turn
yet another mortal flash:
histrionic scripts and stimuli
unfurled to catalyze and provoke
waves of pock-marked, ambivalent murderers
denuded of humanity
to thrust bayonets
through the ribs of their mirror image
until numbness is achieved,
though the alternative suffices -
thermonuclear detonation
in the seat of the soul

And those who coax and goad
acts of obsequious barbarity
can only
burrow in the twilight of existence
in a feeble scramble
to outpace condemnation
and a limitless, wailing plummet
down the chasm of eternal recurrence
where their mantras
“the very fabric of the world is up for grabs”
“the flesh is mine to command and butcher”
are intoned by their casualties
as calaveras literarias
backed by a scordatura trio
by a fortissimo hacking of strings
sealed in this echo chamber, the domain of those
too depraved to relent

Excerpt:

Above them presides a double-sided icon:
a split, withering, iron pyrite face
the totem of our age
Before it they prostrate, implore and beseech
“Who can I become to please you?” or
“Grant me purpose where there is only woe”
knowing that one should be all one can
knowing that one should whimper, brood, then quip
in the depths of willful vacancy, “malignant uselessness”
Another drainage ditch is dug
sporing dignitaries, cerebral prostitutes,
mercenaries, traffickers
rabidly clamoring for access
to the advantageous crest of the tidal wave
to a cache of burning currency
to an island of maiming rocks
Chained, immolating Ixions
cursed with eternal, unquenchable longing
Beneath the veneer of flesh and ego,
they are feeble, emaciated thieves
weeping in a reverberating canyon
in the lobby of a gutted skyscraper:
the price of cultivated deviance, the abdication of life
the narcotic allure of entropy

The silver dove
It beckoned me
to a burning reel
of expired dreams

“Pull a tab of my
Saturnine cyanide
and sleep.”

The mourning dove
a timbre rich
awakened me from my penultimate ditch
To an anodyne
a panorama: a feeble sign
of the wellspring

While strangers on a train
in a pastel dream of bliss
preen for each other’s
wry grins, then slip
unconsummated
to the dining car
lusting for
mutually assured destruction

Excerpt:

Each faction gazes at the solar eclipse
projecting sacred meaning
or lauding uniform meaninglessness
And in the burning of retinae
an intimation of validation appears
The argot, gestures, and shibboleth
of each deluded faction are
confirmed, vindicated, sanctified

A walled-in track of confirmation bias
Devolution from venial to cardinal scale
In the attempt to pierce the veil of the
Unfathomable, unleashed is
unfathomable simplification

Serenade the wretch again
Entangle him in ignorance
Cast the inert figurine
Impart regression to the mean

And the salve of quasi-meditative warmth
accompanies a litany of platitudes
that praise “a mathematically infallible happiness”
for those who can escape
to secular, materialist compounds
Prefabricated hovels for prefabricated minds
Silo-dwellers, applauding legislated enlightenment
where Fragrance is sprayed from the sky
to obscure the smell of rot
while urban trees with plaques
capture the beneficent acts
of institutional philanthropy

All permutations of the same pathology
grasping towards coherence
all meaning delegated
All strain of interpretation outsourced
to the engineers of human souls

Consent request to kneel and grovel
Shepherded from the wickedness
of life’s inherent suffering
but once extracted from the murk
so perishes all dignity and autonomy
the cold clarity of a curated Potemkin tomb

All cumulative potential
reduced to a choice:
Which tablet of stone best subdues my restlessness?
Which pablum of behavioral dictates
thus and forever, steers my nature?

All that must be and can be possessed
is already possessed
and the desperate striving
for external consolation
defaces the
one paradoxical template,
which cannot be replicated:
the autodidact’s pursuit of total freedom

Cowards can only perceive the rejection of nonbeing
as a lack of comprehension, an unrefined palette
a lack of morbid sophistication
failed cultivation of the thirst
for the fentanyl of one-dimensional
schemes of fulfillment: whether pious or depraved
It’s preferable to wander accursed in exile
than to abide in permanent self-revulsion
indebted to any cult: a languishing receptor
pacified