Machine Parts

Not much left for me here

Penniless poet

Pockets full of pills

Going to war with only 

An arsenal of word & wit

Historians record verbatim

Religions stick to the books

The holy poets, seers & prophets of

The young  21st century

Speak their own truths.

Howls etched into memory

Trials for obscenity

Black lists, communists.

Hitler’s hellish pogroms.

Atlantic  and Arabic slave trades.

Political prisoners as labour.

You forget your dead comrades,

Struck down by the hand of madness, depression, suicide,

Alcohol poisoning fentanyl overdose

Government issue bullets, tasers, starvation.

The poet is the weather vane of their time.

Sappho, Milton, Homer, Ginsberg, Estep, 

Angelou, Hughes, Dylan, Carroll

Will the paper be buried in plastic?

In simplicity & cellphone factories

Carcinogenic killers,

Concentration camps

Prison factories?

–Jack Blare

What We Became

Get out of my head

I don’t love you anymore

You’re with someone else

I’m an arsenic apple core

–

You flicker through my thoughts

Of desire and jealousy 

Haunting my nights like a ghost

Howling insecurity.

–

I’m still stuck in a world

That never was.

A sweet young dream,

A suffocated love.

So many memories

Congealed by age

–

Time passes quickly

‘Neath November skies

Still nothing really changes

And everybody lies

–

The sky is slowly weeping

Tears of blood for the land

As time has unfolded

You could never understand

The worst wounds we can receive

Are dealt by our own hands.

–Jack Blare

Summer Dies

Depression

Obsession

Fading out

Fade to black

Jack Jacked in a black jacket

There is no future

In death

Life is a collection of unique experiences.

Once they stop being unique

You aren’t really living anymore.

Just rusting away

Wasted lives wasted on repetition

Make me suck down their cancer.

Play the game but won’t go all the way.

–Jack Blare

Seeing Grey On The Autism Spectrum

Hollow, emptied

Viewing life through 

A pane of frosted glass.

I can see the shapes of other people

But we can’t communicate, 

Touch or make eye contact.

I can’t connect with anyone

They don’t want to connect with me anyway.

Its easy enough to wear a mask,

Knocked out narcosis

Waking sitting up with a hypnic jerk

A body’s last ditch defence against permanent dreamless sleep.

Doesn’t seem like such a bad way to go though.

Depression and anxiety has worsened

Apathy, lack of motivation, isolation.

Nothing is fun or exciting anymore.

I have no one left to confide in.

A writer in an age when most people don’t read

I’ve never made much, don’t own property or have a steady job

I don’t want money, don’t want to work at something I hate

Just to keep on living ah empty life.

Part of a slow suicide through hedonism.

I expected to have expired by now,

Everything is starting to decay.

I was never meant for this society, this time.

I used to have so much respect for my friends

But their ideals were phases

Mine have not changed.

–Jack Blare

Shadow Puppetry

Already out of step with my generation.

Tranquilized, disinterested, fucking bored.

Irregular beat, arrhythmia of the eternal soul

Free-falling through endless night.

–

Ghosts dance wild waltzes

To faded beats ancestral drums.

Shadowy plays flicker & figure out truth & illusion,

Death creeps quietly across the walls.

–

Am I the prisoner? Escapee? Saviour?

The enlightened mind?

Or just one more shadow

Playing out its part on the walls of the cave?

–Jack Blare

Imaginary Image Machinery

Soft skin summer sun

Warms Autumn’s cruel gaze.

Sunflower Songbird.

Insomniac nights.

Bored brains create no haiku.

Time runs without fuel.

Addicted moans

Offer cash opened hands,

Sparks burning out night.

Overturn within.

Discover flaws in walls,

Let sweet summer in.

Ginger steps soothe aches.

Nausea of bent mind

Quells springtime sun sprouts.

Imaginary 

Image machinery voids

Reality cheque.

Machines silence ghosts.

Trees bow to angry roads.

Valleys weep crickets.

He’s not a liar,

Just an inventor of more

Convenient truths.

Lips calm nervous storms

Overthrowing winter ice

With painless fire lust. 

We sit down quiet,

Accept repetition.

Pour clouds of deep sleep.

–Jack Blare