Diminishing Returns

"I think most American publishers' tastes are on the level of the comic strip...they don't

have time to read; they're too busy hustling....they're the first automatons trained quite simply

to spot imitations of previous imitations."  Terry Southern, circa 1958

"It is precisely in unconscious involuntary manifestations that all evil lies. You do not yet 

understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you

do understand."  G.I Gurdjieff, 1916

"Rage, rage, against the dying of the light."   Dylan Thomas

What happened to the poets, the writers, the painters?

What happened to the people that loved them?

Belittled, shot, thrown into a ditch like Lowrey's Counsel...

poems wrapping fish like yesterday's newspaper...

the rise of the "airport novel"....

What happened to Paris, Greenwich Village,  Morocco.... 

seething gardens of human rainbow? 

The magic lantern hypnotized us all...

patterns on a screen that stripped us bare

of sweat, love and joy so all that's left is fear...

and a numbness that freezes bone.

Even the magazines are getting thinner...

starved because of inattention...

There is a fierce song in the hearts of

men and women  that will not be suppressed.

Poets die so that others may read them and live.

I drink to that....I will not be led to my slaughter

without a handshake to my executioner,

and the chance to call him "brother".

The world is going insane in sameness..

which is why it is my duty to be crazy

and loud with laughter...chaos is the

compassionate response to an order

imposed by madmen.

There is no end to this poem,

nor am I a poet...

I'm just a human that likes to sing.