The Tower of Glass Impressions


I went to the mountain and prayed with tears;
They mingled with the rain 
The rain was the answer; 
The mountain was old and full of tourists,
Archaeologists, hippies, seekers and the curious.
I was hurt,
My heart had been shattered into a thousand pieces
 From a thousand bad choices 
Made from a lifetime of bouncing back,
Fighting back.
I went to the ocean when I lost my battle against the Alter of Democracy,
In the hall where I strove to save my own flesh and my own blood 
to keep the innocent eyes innocent;
But robes of Solomon do not necessarily denote wisdom,
It's only another uniform in a crazy urban guerrilla war;
I was once a warrior.
I believed in the system, which tried to kill me.
When I was younger I was fearless;
Invulnerable;
My feet soaked with the blood of my enemies
On different mountains and jungles,
Bathing in the arrogance of young manhood,
A lone survivor against the onslaught of domination;
I walked the streets;
I knew the dangers but I took a big bite of the rotten Apple,
Chewed it up and spit it back into the face of fear;
I glared back at the homeboys looking for any reason to vent their rage against the machine;
I faced down the probing blue eyes of wannabe Napoleons in their bitter government posts
They also looking for any excuse to dominate over those they resent;
It was all old familiar ground.

And now I face new struggles;
Trying to overcome the onslaught of demented witchery,
Trying to beat back the hordes of despair unleashed by their Mistress of jealousy;
A nuclear bomb as silent as a whispered incantation,
As deadly as a virus,
 Aware that my world could end in a whimper.

CRIMES OF THE HEART

I am so lost.

Crawling my way back from the rubble
Trying to make sense of the crumbles with half-assed efforts to make things better;

I'm sitting on a vast treasure
On an undiscovered island
Wishing I can believe what I can see
And wondering why no one else can;
I took a giant step clear across the big water
Like Rod Stewart on the Atlantic Crossing album that I listened to when I was 16;
I did it, too.
I learned to put a bit of the old stick about;
Now I am back here at Ground Zero
I keep losing the chess game/set/match

I am so lost.
Like Joan Jett at a Mariah Carey concert,
Cringing before the bold yellow orange
Of New World Disorder,
Bowing before captors like a Hanoi POW.

Maybe I have to return to childhood to set myself straight,
Just sit tight and wait for the next window of opportunity
Like on the sci-fi TV show I watch;
Sick & tired of watching
 from the side of the arena.

GROUP

Inside the arena of the mega-crippled,
Scrambling for scraps of small talk
Like rats to rubbish;
Inside a room full of misfits,
We attempt to leap through therapeutic hoops
 Placed by systematic ringmasters
Like the blind leading the blind,
We'd fallen through the cracks of normal society
We sick, lame and lazy  

I cry about losing my son and the first time in his life he called me a liar
Because I didn't come for him
Again
To save him from the onslaught of evildoers,
Leaving him a prey to the Los Angeles County Wolves,
I make more feeble attempts to build him a home made from jackstraw.
And we both know he is right.
I don't call that much
I don't show up,
Trying to avoid the ambushed  battle that brews each and every time with his mother,
Like trying to negotiate a prisoner of an 11-year war;

I don't have the money to invest in his dreams;
He slipped through my fingers
Into the boiling despair of my nightmare;
Whilst I wandered for 10 years
Dancing the great façade,
Living the TV movie
And amounting to nil.

SHOCK WAVE

Shattered.
I always come to this place expecting the expected
That I will never get the real help I need to carry on;
And there is always the small part of me that thinks that maybe this time 

it will be different,
That there will be empathetic nurses
Or someone to give a flicker of hope,
Or even just someone to talk to;
But the reality always covers me like a gaseous odour;
The reality is Club Meds,
A B&B with prescribed drugs
like the prescribed "must-see TV" for the general mass.

My insides are a mess.
I'm too pessimistically pragmatic to believe that my son can come to London,
It's a lovely gift sealed in a box in my head wrapped in blood red bureaucratic ribbons;
A gift never received 
Confiscated by official exclusion
And refused upon delivery.