Unemployment
The clock strikes one,
My lunch is done,
I lost my job,
I load my gun.
~ Russ Allison Loar
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Future Past
Our past was once the future,
Many years away from the melancholy glaze of reverence,
Many years away from the hallowed ground of institutionalization,
Feared by some,
Despised by others,
A threat to sacred rituals,
The demonized specter of change.
Those comfortable now in sameness,
Defenders of static conformity,
They might be hailed as visionaries
Were they catapulted back into antiquity
With beliefs and convictions intact,
Or perhaps burned at the stake.
~ Russ Allison Loar
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Everything I Say Is A Lie
We’re all pretty much the same
Except for those who are different,
But then most of us are different once in a while,
Which makes us all pretty much the same,
Except for those who are only sometimes the same
And mostly different,
Along with those who will be different most of the time
After years and years of being mostly the same.
Some of the others will be the same as they were
And continue to shift back and forth,
While still others among them
Will sometimes be different and the same simultaneously.
Some will think they’re different yet remain the same,
While others will think they’re the same,
Not realizing how different they truly are.
Many will hardly think about these things at all.
As for me,
I guess I’m pretty much like everybody else,
Trying in vain to be the same,
Yet not really that much different at all.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Lighten Up
Finding fault,
Our national pastime.
Blame,
Judgment,
Condemnation,
Punishment.
We are good,
They are bad.
Yes, intentional evil exists
And there are saints among us
And sure,
Your brother-in-law is a jerk,
But life is short,
Give him a break.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Inner Child
We were talking about the inner child,
How it never goes away,
How it’s always there,
Waiting for a chance to surface,
Looking for an opening.
O yes, we were definitely bonding,
Reaching back in time,
Shedding inhibitions.
So I spit my gum out at her
And she slapped me across the face.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Godspeed
In Jamestown,
The father of my father’s fathers,
Excised from country,
Bereft and starving.
(What an asshole!)
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Saints In Waiting
If we were saints
Living the lives of abandoned insects
Under parked cars
With our antennae finely tuned
Into God’s frequency,
We would praise the glories
Of our tiny lives,
The stray fast-food crumbs,
A patch of dew-laden crabgrass.
Behold this mighty river of asphalt,
My children,
And fear not the larger beasts.
We are the chosen,
And through our selfless purity
We shall inherit this earth.
Not long now,
Our time to come.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Oh Yeah Sure
Oh yeah sure,
Easy for you to say
It was just a joke,
Now that my head is unattached
To my body.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Ready At Last
O the young years of literature,
Reading “David Copperfield” all the way through
While home from school with the flu,
Wrestling with e.e. cummings
In a musty room at the Avalon Hotel,
A creaky cockroach rooming house for men only,
Converted from a once fashionable seaside establishment.
O the timeless hours
Consuming every extant word, phrase, sentence, paragraph,
Chapter, story, novel,
Letter and biography of renowned literary luminaries,
In-between and in place of university studies,
Earnestly seeking the intellectual armor of being “well read.”
O the stolen moments
Cannibalizing the contents of the canon
During long lunches,
Dimly lit late evenings in a frayed recliner,
Finally free of neighborhood noise
In dusty, paint-peeled rented houses.
O the lost years
Seeking out the esoteric, the hidden and the unsung,
Dutifully sampling the momentarily celebrated
While the demands of job and family
Multiplied like rabbits.
O the accumulation of time,
No longer able to keep up.
The gifts and recommendations,
The purchases,
Filling my bookshelves unread,
Overflowing my bookshelves,
Wedged on top sideways until at last
Placed into boxes,
Into storage.
O this uneventful spring morning.
The weight of all I will never read
Threatens to crush me
As I sit in my most comfortable chair
Listening to the chattering of busy sparrows,
Sipping my second cup of coffee,
Ready at last
To give up.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
I Will Mourn, Sooner Or Later
When you die
I will mourn for you.
I may even mourn for you
Before you die,
Now and then.
But I’m more likely to judge,
Rather than mourn,
While you’re still alive,
Knowing once you are dead,
The mourning will come easier.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
This Cat
If I didn’t have this cat
I would be reading about the perilous state
Of geopolitical affairs,
Uninterrupted,
Pondering the decline of participatory democracies
Engineered by religious terrorists and dictators,
Too often aided and abetted by a brainwashed populace.
But because I do indeed have this cat,
I must put my reading down
And extract the rubber spider from beneath the couch.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Give Me The Passing Stranger
Friends are delicate creatures
And require delicate care.
Give me the passing stranger,
My middle finger in the air.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Little Sheep
I am a little sheep
With headlights and a beep,
A horn and a job,
I am corn on the cob.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Money Train
Every mornin’
Climb on board,
You climb on board
That money train.
You be rich
Or you be poor
But you climb on board
That money train.
Hear that whistle,
Hear it blow,
Train’s a’ comin’,
You gotta go.
You be rich
Or you be poor
But you climb on board
And they shut the door.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
How To Write Poetry
O figure and reckon
Seeing they do write,
And how,
That is,
Out selected words
Ordering re-arrange in re:
Deforming tensed suffix
Ending original sin tax entendre?
uncap enjambers lifting geese as when simile even
meta-4 flying flight skyward soaring ethereal epiphany
yet safe nodding knowing wistful wink . . .
L'émotion artistique cesse où l'analyse et la pensée interviennent
get me to the
occasional
on timeward’s back contradicting the deliberatelyunintentional.
Be clever by omission to hide what is not there
with literary frosting and pungent classical allusion such as
Perpetually Popular Persephone
(despite not even being an ex-planet).
By the way, a certain offhand familiarity with foreign locale,
making sophisticated world citizen manifesteringly manifest,
i.e. the halting walk of chilly winter pigeons just before dawn
along the Piazza Unità d'Italia in Trieste . . .
Now add an immigrant ancestor,
(A cobbler eating moldy cheese in steerage?)
(A cheesemaker eating moldy cobbler in steerage?)
Or two,
And always,
Always,
The scarcely hidden “Hell with you.”
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Clocks
I don’t like early mornings
When I’m still asleep.
I don’t like early bedtimes,
Alone and counting sheep.
Why should I pay attention
To all those clocks I see?
I listen to them ticking.
They listen not to me.
~ Russ Allison Loar
~ Writing The Child.com
© All Rights Reserved
The Dead
How often has it been said
Of the dead,
They would not have the dearly undeparted
Suffer undue grief.
They would have us renewed with joy,
After an appropriate mourning,
Reaffirming the gift of our daily existence
With fond reminiscences.
Will the dead never let us go?
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
What Do You Really Think?
What do you really think?
No,
Not what you’ve heard,
Those predigested generalizations
Tailored to specific constituencies,
Foot soldiers amassing in the unity of certainty.
What do you think that’s genuinely yours,
Uniquely yours,
The product of your own ingredients,
Of your own mental exercise,
Unaltered by expectations of approval
Or disapproval,
Stripped of cliché,
Of second-hand observations . . .
Summon the truest voice within and tell me,
What do you really think?
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Know Now
(With hillbilly banjo accompaniment)
If I didn’t know what I know now
I wouldn’t know what I know now.
If I didn’t know what I know now
I wouldn’t know what I know now.
If I didn’t know what,
I know now,
I wouldn’t know what,
I know now but,
I know now what,
I didn’t know when,
I didn’t know what I know now.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
I Am Dog
I’ll always be a dog,
God alone knows why,
Not cat, not horse, not snail,
I’ll never open mail,
Though I sometimes try.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Whither
Cheese from a rat is like soap for a hog,
You can’t write your mother by using a log.
A nose is indifferent to all that is art,
The opera’s a good place to rip loose a fart.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Reality
For a while,
It looked like it might be dark
All day,
So few actually taking the time
To believe in the sun anymore.
But familiarity breeds belief,
So the sun again appeared
And filled the sky with light.
It is a lesson to be relearned each morning,
That we must never,
Ever,
Take reality for granted,
As if it would continue on its own,
In a vacuum.
Reality depends on us all.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Devolution
He was bored,
So bored with routine,
Every morning,
Brushing his teeth,
Making coffee,
Slogging off to work,
To predictable employments.
Then,
Weekend chores,
Social obligations,
So encumbered by family, friends and finance.
The half-slumbering supplicant,
Longing for escape,
His earnest entreaties
Finally heard,
Heard and granted.
Now,
As the first light warms the earth
He drags himself out from under a stone,
Eager to feel the sun against his scales,
The taste of yesterday’s grasshopper still lingering on the tongue.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Ready To Fly
They say,
Never give up on your dreams,
They say,
You only fail if you quit trying,
They say,
Failures are the stepping stones to success,
They say,
Believe in yourself and all things are possible.
Everywhere I turn I am encouraged
By celebrities and self-help gurus,
Inspiring me to believe in my dreams,
To visualize my dreams,
To act on my dreams
And be bold in my actions,
Persistent in the face of failure,
To endure,
And most important of all,
Never, ever give up.
So once again I am here,
Standing on the edge of the roof,
Wearing the wings I have constructed
From rice paper and cotton balls,
Ready to fly.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
But Then
After all the years of trial and error
My memories are stained with embarrassment.
Even the most exquisite chapters of my life
Contain paragraphs that can still make me wince.
And so this morning I am resolved,
Resolved to fast from the feast of self-absorption.
But then,
There are these words.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Balzac In Paris
This pretentious, unbridled egotism,
Bridled by academic sycophancy,
Shackled by erudite nonconformity,
Eruditely enforced by the last living literati
Hanging onto the endangered species list
By his and/or her precarious pedicured pedigrees.
This turgid landscape bleeds sour
For want of a coat of arms
Worthy of such shame,
Such intrepid debasement,
Oh yes,
Here in de basement
I goo goo too,
This awful-god game,
La comédie humaine.
Some call it poetry.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Freedom From Want
Freedom from want means
Freedom from thinking about what you want
Cause,
After all,
You’ve already got what you wanted,
So now,
You can spend your time being so incredibly bored,
Trying to think of something else you want.
Soon,
You will go shopping.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Thumbs
There will never be a shortage of self-anointed critics,
Self-appointed judges of all manner of things,
Of people and events,
Large and small,
Those who educate,
Those who obfuscate,
Those with knowledge,
Those without,
Those who somehow believe it is their mission,
Their responsibility,
Their calling to point a thumb up or down.
We are blanketed with critics whose only qualification is ego,
Whose pronouncements are so soon forgotten
After scholars and historians assemble research and knowledge,
Honest intellectual inquiry,
To illuminate the past.
Do our media-created, ill-informed, knee-jerk commentators
Believe they are changing hearts and minds,
Guiding the course of a nation,
By unveiling the certain, unquestionable truth?
We are cooperative.
These pontificators give voice to our a priori conclusions,
Assuring us that even the most complex issues of our time
Can be measured by the masquerade of mass hysteria,
By the illusion of popular opinion,
That all we really need do is vote,
One way or another,
Thumbs up or thumbs down.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
God Dog
Once there was a small brown dog who loved God.
He loved God so much
He decided to change his name
To God,
God Dog,
The 1st.
Then,
He began to pee on the furniture
Without restraint.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
Another Day At The Office
The black-winged fungus of death
Would like to have a word with you
And is holding on Line 2.
Take a message,
Say I,
For the splintering semen of rebirth
Is Miss Ledger’s hand on my thigh.
Encountering my limitless nonself
I give her nothing but love,
Baby.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
My House
It was barely sprinkling
After several hours of light rain
Early Sunday morning
When I heard the coughing,
The retching,
And looked out my breakfast nook window
To see a young man with his car door open,
Vomiting on the street in front of my house.
My house.
How lucky I am
That I can say the words:
My house,
While aimless young men
Wander through this city,
Regurgitating at will.
~ Russ Allison Loar
© All Rights Reserved
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