For Jim

Speak to me truth
In that subjective way
Some say you have
The fact is, you aren't one
A fact, that is
Your high and mighty bearing
Your axiomatic strut
Just a starting point
A premise, no promise
To further reasoning
Yet, so dear
So near to heart and soul
A paradox, you know
And I, the "liar"

Caught in your tease
I could say, "This statement is false"
If true, it would be
False, that is
Or conversely, if false
It would be true
The delicious rub of
Truth or untruth
As if you and yours
Exist at all.

Generation Gap

The roll of the eye, the sigh
Whether overt or veiled
Is regularly dispatched
For no good reason save that
Which is understandable

Her glance, a cringed meander
Through missed steps, slow comebacks
Stumbling antics of one seemingly frantic
To be seen as relevant,
May reflect disappointment.

Imperfections, newly discovered,
Erode her grip on girlhood innocence
Witnessing the stain of middle age
Detachment pervades from the one
Who answers every call.

In Humanity : A Rap By DJ TazzieDog

The case of homelessness
Continues to hound, confound
Resounds across towns
Found criss-crossing this dear nation
Vacant thresholds hold
Untold stories of hard luck
Fucked up tattered souls
Bi-polarized, forgotten lives
Out on the lam
Slammed by sad confusion
Delusion, whirling dervish world
Swirls in careless glances
Chances are you've paused and wondered
What to do with the cardboard sign
The god bless design
Everytime you're stopped at a light
Averting your eyes
To the blight blinding all empathy
Blinker turns you away from the sight
Of such ravaged souls
This savage state cold, inside and out
A toxic spout of deceitful invective
Selective in kindness and jurisprudence
I sense more nonsense, mere pretense
A vicious core that scores
Winners, losers, you choose your
Poison, mate, your fate's in your hands
Bootstrap crap sapping our humanity
Capitalized vanity an insanity of
Clap trap backed by fat cats
Content to caste aspersions, convenient diversions
Downstreaming reality to a dead pool of banality.
New Colosus, now a collasal farce,
A sonnet of grace with lines to chafe Lady Liberty's lamp
Dimmed, tarnished, barely a glow:
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled
Masses yearning to breathe", a throwback to

ignore
Abhor, deplore the reminder
Of our own inhumanity.

"This Is Just To Say" Redux

William Carlos Williams' famous poem, "This Is Just To Say" came out in 1934.  It is short and sweet, oh so sweet. Or, perhaps, not so sweet. Here it is in its entirety:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Florence "Flossie" Williams' reply to her husband's famous poem, disguised as a refrigerator note, was sweet, considerate and very wifely. No doubt, appropriate for the time. Still, it bothered me. So, I  rewrote it and feel better having done so.

Dear Bill,
Yes, I was looking forward
To the plums for breakfast.
Instead of eating them,
Per your icebox note,
I made do with a
Handful of blueberries.
Also, made you a couple of sandwiches
Which you will find in the icebox.
I don't plan on eating them,
Although I'm sure they are delicious.
I forgive you
As always, Flossie
P.S.  Don't be such a bastard
Next time

Word Smithing - A Rap by DJ Tazziedog

I'm rearranging words to unlock the verbs
To disentangle nouns that give a profound
Sense of stability
Adjective reliability
Adverbial enhancement
Yet a disenchantment ensues
Imbues my fret with introspect
All that feckless, reckless, circumspectless invective
The utter abandonment of my objective
Oh the rules, the fools who make them
The fools who take them
To pedantic heights of
"I've got the right, the intellectual might
To make what I say, the word and the way."
Objectively speaking
Subjectively reeking of loud mouth espousing
Jousting through tongue twisters
Making might of word blisters
Sister, give up the show, turn in the ego
The faux of such imbroglio, takes a toll
Oh, the sigh of the soul
Tap dancing through metaphoric chancing
Enhancing the see-saw of your verbal claw
Take pause, a Stylistics clause of
"Stop, look, listen to your heart"
Before you start where the word is the art
Before you pick up pen and start over again
Before you, who is me, can free the myth from the smith
And just be

The Shy Protester

The shy protester wants to take part but doesn't know how to belong or how to even start. So, she seethes privately building a rancor with no release but to turn to a community that can't be hers. The action group she founded, part of the social media overload, was unable to threshold her to "viral" heights, which wasn't surprising given her unimpressive collection of "friends". Her disappointment that her grandiose fantasies would not be achieved was mild. Still, curious how it's done, this business of activism, she faces down the phone. Not her friend, never her friend. She lends her voice to the collective outrage of the moment. A simple task really, calling the congressional folks. The phone numbers provided by an action group that was successful, unlike hers. The shy protester prepares a script to make the odious task bearable. The area code (202) Washington D.C., connecting, no doubt, to some cubicle inside the Capitol Building. A stranger with no eye contact, no gesture, no smile that could be beguiling, nor furrowed brow, no speck of lint on the no collar, nor fingernails bitten to the quik. No real human connection save for a voice that could even be a recording.

"Hello, Congressman Issa's office, how may I help you?" The shy protester blanked. The script, where was the fucking script?

Apocollapse - A Rap by DJ TazzieDog

Do fish in the deep, sleep?
Pectorals are stilled, no vibrational trill
Gills slowed to just a flutter
Hiding under shadows, undulating time
But this divine essence must return
To the human presence
Can't escape it, the egocentric
Let's face it, we live for the mirror,
Our preening interior struts
Rebuffs what we deem inferior
Our self-congratulation, adulation
Center of the universe excitation
Sadly dismisses those we share space with
Their place is based on our needs
What feeds our unrelenting appetite
Despite the signs that our mighty might
Antics, our pedantic insistence
That our resistance to "less is more"
Our unrelenting hoarding
Primordial rewarding for a species
Overstaying its welcome
Now playing the survival game
Has no one to blame but ourselves, a stain of shame
Contains our realization
That our end game is the end of
Civilization, as we know it
And the fish in the deep, asleep, not a peep
They're divine, they're sublime
Given time, they'll be just fine.