F.E. Feeley Jr.'s Blog, page 17

gasping for breath (poem)

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We meet at the base

in the wretchedness of our humanity

in the culpability of all that word entails

for good and for evil

Before we are anything

man, woman, gay, straight

black, white, beige, or yellow

Jew, Muslim, Christian, or Atheist

we are human – born naked and gasping for breath

It’s in the denial of humanity

the exorcism of this truth from their mind

that has brought the assailant his right to murder

different

it’s in the denial of humanity

the exorcism of this truth from their mind

that allows us to sneer at the stink and unwashed homeless

and say, “Get a job.”

It’s in the denial of humanity

that allows some fool to to arrogantly posture

and list names of great men and women who’ve come before

as proof as to why you should be allowed in

The greatest of us were no less human

no less prone to fits of laughter or rage or fear

but their circumstances thrust upon them an opportunity

to ride the potential of their lot into the gates of heaven

while their names remained burned into our memory

We are human beings, before we are anything

the denial of which is strangling our world

in the wretchedness of our ephemeral bodies

we have been made blind to our ethereal souls

clothed in our own short sightedness we leave our society gasping for breath.

Fucking excuses (poem)

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I am so tired of the fucking excuses

friendships, relationships, existence excluded

concluded for what?

are we that fragile

is thinking, now, something frowned upon?

staying true to a person now passe?

is it all relative?

Love is not love that turns its back and walks

stop spreading bullshit – this isn’t a garden

9/10ths of the problems of the world

are rooted in the idea that a person has a right to another

I can own you and can therefore do to you what I want

Whether you’re talking about police brutality

or when people let their fandom that much access to their lives – people will move the fuck in and will take up whatever room you allot them.

Are you for real? Still not clicking in to this?

How about when a grown ass woman – not some nasty side hoe

doesn’t reduce herself, her dreams, her ambition so he can feel needed?

Feel me now?

He couldn’t own her, she wasn’t on the auction block, so he left.

And in my case I stood up for some Jews

those are the fucking people you hate when you WANT

to become a bigot. They’re a racist’s training wheels.

I could have said that a lot nicer

But I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not

There was no ‘welcome to my parlor said the spider

to the fly’ sign on my door

I’ll kiss your ass for the same reason I do your laundry

and that’s only because we’re fucking.

I am sure there are people here

who are tired of being hurt because they put a down

payment on the bullshit someone sold them

and when it started to crumble moved heaven

and earth to make the relationship work

only to find the property was in foreclosure to begin with

but goddamn – the things we’ll do just to hear someone say

they love us

What we trade in for just one more night in their bed

or one more phone call, book sale, a nice word

for what? In fifty years I won’t remember their last names

and neither will you

So stop letting people treat you like their side chick.

all or nothing

no more fucking excuses.

Unbeliever (poem)

 

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I am an unbeliever

some would say an atheist

but not toward this thing we call God

no, it’s more complicated than that

I look upon creation

and like Franklin see a Creator

but when my gaze falls from the stars

I see the steeples and domes of worship

It’s in that transition

from the Empyrean to Terra Firma

where my eyes shift from wide wonder

and furrows into suspicion

I can gaze into heaven

and believe. For despite the scapegoat of

‘mysterious ways’ and how the devil

‘walks about like a lion’ neither seems true

All I have ever witnessed with my eyes

or read in tomes of our history for good or for ill

has been wholly and inexcusably human

event after event in the affairs of man on earth

Yet I am not unconscious

of the hypocrisy of my myopic view

for I have never trod the path of angels

am the weakened flesh personified over and over

However, I do believe that sin

is rooted far more inside of intention

of evil than stumbling into it upon accident

when good intentions have paved our paths to Hell

It would take a God

to see what I see and yet still

love a church, synagogue, and mosque

and not become an atheist in his regard of man

Life’s Banquet

 

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Who I am here, is who I am in real life

Memes and comments aside

I’m nice to people who are nice to me

and I don’t acknowledge the existence of others who aren’t

It’s not difficult really

its a matter of simply shutting a door

walking away and moving on down the long winding road

to another face, another chance meeting, a conversation

stuck up like a match

There are literally seven and a half billion people on earth

all with varying degrees of wit and humor

surely I’ll find another conversation worthy of my time among them

Maybe a volcanologist in Bali who has an affinity for sharp cheddar

It takes a certain kind of person, really

someone wrapped up inside of who they are

to think that one should starve themselves from sampling

life’s banquet – for a chance taste of you

my odds are better ‘out there’

in this nebulous thing we call the world

and quite frankly although my pallet is easily pleased

I find honesty of character far more to my liking

than pleasantries for pleasantries sake

No, I am no Nobel Prize winner

No Oxford Scholar, Poet Laureate, hell, I barely graduated high school

Yet I have lived a full life, have sipped from the cup of pain and joy

and I speak full throated about the flavors that broke over my tongue

So, if that speech bothers you too much

I’ll take my leave as soon as you think I should

for although my feet are calloused from years of walking

morning will break over the horizon the same as it did before

Walking like gods (poem)

 

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we’re walking like gods

in this day and age

where perfection isn’t requested

it’s demanded and the faulted; reprimanded

for not being the paragon 

their humanity forbids them to be

ignorance is triumphed, lauded

praised, rewarded

the producers of malice given a platform

while the advances society has made

is bled to death, made anemic,

from the fangs of power hungry preachers

singing a hymn written for a conman

and on the flip, we’d starve people

of the same precious information

because the figures of the past were imperfect

human

it doesn’t fit your New World Translation

where we – as good as we are – still wouldn’t qualify

not for a speck, but for the plank in our own eyes

there is a depth to us, in this new age,

a petri dish would call shallow

emotions whip with gale force strength

and thought and reason crumbles inward

and are sheered off the windows of our hearts

we’re walking like gods

in this over emotional neo-romanticism

and old ways – old things that should be long dead

have risen

disease, flags, and monsters with their

old hatreds for anything different

now trod across bodies, these willfully ignorant sacrifices

to sit on thrones of shattered lives and collective shame

Not Pretty (poem)

 

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It was hard to watch your taillights disappear

as I stood there at two o’clock in the morning

the stale taste of angry words burning the back of my throat

held in and swallowed down

because you cut me off, shut me down, and walked away

For the last week or so I’ve mourned you

but you’re not dead – you’re just gone

the conversations we’d had, the times we laughed, the intimate things I told you

are now gone away from me and I don’t know how to be

It’s not like you were my lover

you didn’t know me that way but that made this more pure

there was just the need to be together

and i showed you more than my body ever could

you were my friend

But you hit me with your drive by goodbye

your words – bullets, shattering my perception of you

and all the angry shit I want to say just stumbles

out of my mouth and onto the floor unused and tired

before they melt into nothingness

I’m hurt and I miss you and I’ve never felt this naked before

you were a constant voice in my head

and now all I can do is hear myself talk

but I can’t do that again – even if your headlights were to wash over me now

since i haven’t moved from the spot I was in

I’m too afraid you’d leave when I am not pretty

Slip into the river (Poem)

 

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Slip into the river

let it take you down, down

slip into the river

where no air can be found

Float, face up, and look at the sky

float, face up, watch the clouds pass on by

block out the sound, your ears submerged

slip into the river

and let it take you down, down

Slip into the river

let it take you down, down

forget the worries of the world

and all your worldly cares

Float, face up, and let the water caress your weary mind

Float, face up, what a way to pass the time

slip into the river

and let it take you down, down

Don’t you know the world is ending

Can’t you feel in tremble under your feet

All the progress man has made is now burning down

there is screaming in the night

and fear stalks the day

but slip into the river, child

and let it take you down, down

For safety’s sake, so you’re body isn’t torn

come down to the waters edge and ease yourself

into eternity

London Bridge, Ring around the Rosie

pockets filled with stone

slip into the river, child

and let it take you down, down

Slip into the river

let it take you down, down

slip into the river

where no air can be found

Float, face down, and look at the silty floor

float, face down, and know you’ll breathe no more

slip into the river

and let it take you down, down

Educated Lamentations

 

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It’s weird these thoughts in my head

words spoken to me in the midst

of stacks of books, reams of paper,

and a student load debt I cannot afford

It’s strange this sacrament placed on my tongue

though bitter to the taste and damaging to the bliss

of ignorance and a sheltered life

where I was shrouded in a perpetual state

of nebulous Christo-centric fundibabble

I was liberated into something hard and bright

naked and irreverent to the soft cushion of church pews

no, this place was hard and harsh and loud

for I was delivered out of my ignorance and handed

into the hands of my own responsibility

It is a place of jagged and haggard edges

and where truthes – while constant and vigilant –

were few and further between than the innumerable angels

supposedly adorning the crown of my head

as I lay myself down to sleep

Liberated but not liberalized

the truth doesn’t care what you believe

nor does it care about the slope of your spine

and the drawing down of your smile and the shadows

etched thick and black around your eyes

as the weight of truth rests upon mortal shoulders

While there are pleasures here in abundance

if you’re lucky enough to find a hand to hold

the process isolates men into their own thoughts

the likes of which not even the warmest hand

can pluck us out of when we wander in too far

Who am I to know the thoughts of a King

Sword drawn in utter defiance of the uncertain future?

Why should I know the memory of the slave trod

underneath by the boots of men of my own race

Where do I stand as I visit the Boot Hill

filled with Christians and Jews and Muslims who died

for a God that never spoke aloud to either?

How did we manage to keep from wiping each other out

when the falcon could no longer hear the falconer?

When does the human race break through the surface and come up for air after it’s self inflicted baptism of fire?

To none of these questions do i hold an answer save for the last one.

What happened to me that put lines on my face and gray hair in my beard?

It’s simple a thing, really, no mystery at all I suppose

I partook of the fruit of the tree of good and evil

or as lay people put it – received an education.

He was a Middle Eastern Jew (poem)

 

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Murderous, venomous

Thomas Hobbes is now a prophet

where refugees are cast aside

and black men die for the color of their skin

and thugs wearing badges prowl the streets

yes, your abundance of a pigment is STILL a reason you must bleed.

Broke down, low down

dirty rotten shame we’re sitting in

It’s like the 1930’s, 1960’s, and 1984

all rolled into one stinking pile of a lack of acumen

White is right, White is right

white is wrong here, brother man

we’re bleeding this age of reason creation

in favor of jingoistic, fundamentalist, belief in a lack of pigment

a belief in a LACK of something

that makes you superior? please vote, people

or you’ll be governed by your inferiors

cardboard cut outs posing as human beings

who’s lacking is not in color but the beating

heart that occupies a real person’s interior

Its like the tale of the body snatchers

as we’ve become soulless, demonic,

forget Agape, we can’t even grasp the platonic

love necessarily to keep from killing our fellow countrymen

someone born under the protection of and rights GOD has given them.

But you want to sit up in here and lecture on sin

are you for real? Baptist man? Pentecostal?

Since when did King George III tyranny become so lawful

it’s awful, sit down, shut up, read that damn book you carry

because what you’re lacking, really, quite clearly

is the Son of the Virgin Mary

Who, by the way, I know I shouldn’t have to say this

although it’s avoided yet it’s really hard to miss

the fact that he was a refugee, and brown skin to boot

the last thing may surprise you, He was a Middle Eastern Jew.

I don’t like myself (poem)

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I don’t like myself

I feel the weight of those words in my mouth

slanderous, murderous, suicidal words

but true words none the less

When someone says they love me

i wonder – god, what’s wrong with them?

something must be, for someone to like me

they can’t possibly be operating with a full deck

I’ve never liked my body, my voice –

well, that’s okay I guess

it’s deep enough to pass for straight

if it weren’t for the hard S on the end hissing

my truth clipped in northern exposure

My mind is as a shattered glass door

painstakingly super-glued back in place

the wind whistles through the cracks and missing pieces

and everything beyond is distorted, surreal, and as

jagged as my tongue

My emotions, God, where do I even start?

If I said, “Is like herding cats.’ would you understand?

Its like many people in a room all talking at once

overwhelmingly present, often unpleasant

and hushes only when someone gets behind the mic to speak

I drink down everything everyone says to me

i roll it over my tongue to try and understand

if they’re right – for I am not sure

and it takes me awhile to run it through the library

of insults and things said about me

with each new one, the methodical search begins anew

Its so bad – I’ll tell you – my image of self

and tho I’ve been married almost four years now

sometimes I wonder if my husband really loves me

or if he stays because people who don’t like themselves

are often amazing in bed.