poems by James G. Piatt

And Reality Vanished

 

I’m dreaming…

Or maybe not:

 

rhetorical firestorms causing

My mind to burn,

 

and ebony yesterdays

are sinking into today,

 

dull untruths,

cover my

absurdities,

 

wolves sneering,

footsteps faltering,

aromas of death

slinking into noise,

 

broken promises,

discarded coffins,

and I am walking

through time,

 

all the

thunderous lies

trick me into a

guileless absurdity,

 

rundown minds

complacent in

ignorant simplicity,

 

lies floating

haphazardly in a

sky

of contradictions,

 

throw me into

abject anxiety,

causing reality

to vanish.

 

 

 

Unreality Beacons

 

Thoughts,

crumbling

inside walls

of emotional instability,

bruised and beaten,

pause on the threshold

of the imaginary.

 

The tired faces

on a homeless seer’s

Tarot cards, waver

like pages of prefabricated

untruths of a demented clown

pretending to be a politician.

 

Thoughts, rattling

like steel pellets

in an oratorical tin soup can,

enter my consciousness. They are

coated with illogical symbols

in a tattered copy

of Agrippa von Nettesheim’s ,

De Occulta Philosophia,

and for a brief moment,

my world stood still.

 

My thoughts,

frozen inside screams

melt in the toxic atmosphere

of today’s rhetoric,

forming delusions of political

unrealities.

 

I see politicians drunk

with self importance

sitting like pompous ravens

on telephone lines,

shining like yesterday’s

pale breath of death.

Where can I escape

to be free of this

ominous present?

 

Yesterday was too short

today is too long,

tomorrow could be nonexistent.

Memories like spinning

images of forgotten hope

live in the darkness of today’s chaos.

And today’s existential chaos,

is smothering reality.

 

 

The Brutalizing of Minds

 

Minds awakened

along shaking shelves of salt,

listening, unbelieving;

mesmerized with

lies.

 

A mouth full of blistering pain

in an acidic pool

of burning thoughts,

eardrums not believing lies,

belief barbed

with poisonous arrows,

eyes of stone,

unseeing.

 

Truth strangled in mire,

all traces of morality slain

inside a white-domed asylum

of stone,

where destiny drowns

in tears.

 

Chaotic thoughts,

the voice of dark shadows

removing truth

with sackcloth sneers,

blaspheming justice,

stepping on truth.

 

Innocence robbed

on the far side,

becoming undone

under the unseeing gaze.

 

The winding split

like mounds of red dust,

moving with an inanity;

hearts blinded

by wayward absurdities,

coined by a stentorian mind,

of a greedy,

ambiguous being

missing a soul.

poems by James G. Piatt

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