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Life Arts    H4'ed 9/23/21

Six Sonnets of the Bitterroot and Pain

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bitterroot
bitterroot
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In the Beginning was the Word, you dig?

- toilet stall wall Toledo, no "Nietzsche is Peachy" found


'studies in animal cracker lust, part 5'
'studies in animal cracker lust, part 5'
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I.

Am I thinkin the same thing I'm thinkin?

I'll ask myself one day and maybe soon

when I'm beside myself: bus stop: blue moon,

waiting to leave the town of Rinky Dinkin

where puppets of the regime caterwaul

and bark like animal crackers, honkey clowns

with shape-shift frowns high on sniffing gluons,

do the White Man Stomp through DreamTime afterfall.

In this land of tea kettle tempests, small

abridgements of reality required,

minotaurs with mind control have been hired

to maim HaveYouOn faces in the mall.

Their bonny flag features the Union Jack

but has features of ISIS, fade to black.


'Ivy' Pete and His Limbomaniacs, 'Limbo Party''
'Ivy' Pete and His Limbomaniacs, 'Limbo Party''
(Image by Max Sparber)
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II.

In the mean time, in a season without hope,

when time has lost its character and bleeds

away like Dali songs to chronoscope

the wretched waste of "souls" turned to sour weeds,

we lift new epiphanies and paradigms,

and pray to the Sun for a solar flare

that drives us from the hive with sad droned rhymes,

a harmony not our own that we share.

When I went fur burger on Sally Mae

to make her forgive my student debt loan,

it was with catches and, to my dismay,

required she reach a lost chord degree moan.

I owe so much, there's oh so much to pay!

My tongue's become a mattress, where I bay.


'Zebras running in the Serengeti'
'Zebras running in the Serengeti'
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III.

I had a bowl of fresh flowers in bloom --

sprays like dilettantes across my table,

naked cheribimbos to mark our fall,

to mock our knowledge and taunt us, and call

after us about Satan's Cain, Abel

had it coming! and deserved his bop doom.

Course, being Satan's, Cain was a psychopath,

a dark Aries who killed a blonde Libra,

a tale that went on to inspire Wagner,

Dark Ages followed and then the Magna,

but you can't change the stripes of a zebra

and Cain took over. Now, you do the math.

Every time I whiff those cherry bimbos

I swoon into a multiverse of limbos.


'Which drag do you like? Either way, John Travolta's hair is fake.'
'Which drag do you like? Either way, John Travolta's hair is fake.'
(Image by feastoffun.com)
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IV.

Batter and ravish my heart three-pronged God

and I'll beat the living sh*t out of you.

This ain't no fuckin Kenmore Square disco

where you act like a Travolta gig'lo

steal her, leave me all love's labors lost -- Oooo!

And shitfaced, nothing to show, faith a fraud.

To be honest with you, Sir, I'm lost, lapsed,

and don't need more dark negativities.

Elvis died, then You, dogmatists took over,

and now, I dunno, we seem to hover

between strange, fucked up relativities.

Ich will nicht mehr, was Du fur mich hast.

There were times when I worshipped sorrow's gaze

upward into a holy sunlit haze.


'like being in the Plato's cave'
'like being in the Plato's cave'
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V.

I have some kind of cancer and will die

alone and unshriven, but still I laugh

at the unfurled features of my sorrow,

the unspent tears that others want to borrow

like a cup of sugar too bitter to quaff:

I no longer even look at the sky.

If you could see what I've seen of shadows

behind the Plato's Caves of sleeping eyes,

too locked in lucid dreams to wonder why

the Real and the True have passed them all by,

then you would know an emptiness surprise

burrowed in the smile of Rachel Maddows.

I want off this blue thing, I am black

metastasized and won't be coming back.


'I Tried' Mary Tyler Moore in Chnage of Habit
'I Tried' Mary Tyler Moore in Chnage of Habit
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VI.

O Father why have you forsaken me?

Why have you left me among such angeles

of depravity and arbitrary

power, such token local Mengeles,

choirs of vacant monotones who drone

their celebration of lifeless forces,

viral parasites who think that they own

bird song and quavering human voices?

Like Mary in Change of Habit, I tried,

I tried, but Elvis got in my way, too --

the pelvis, allure of tossed dainties -- I cried

slipping from venial to mortal. What's new?

Yeah, now I'm all forsaken; Godless, too,

stuck in a mind menagerie, or zoo.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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