The Empty Ballad
Basking in the spotlight
An angel
Feeling so proud and omnipotent
Throngs surround
Shout for more
Critics rave
Only Time knows realistic nothingness
Words of a passing era
Face on an album cover
Actually, they hate as nothing like they ever will be
A star reality crushes their dreams
The lyrics their fantasy
Nothingness
But for one moment they believe
Robert K. Stephen
“Mike shied away from the contact. ‘It don’t make you feel nothing.’ He put down his head and increased his pace The little bartender had nearly to trot to keep up. The street lights were fewer. It was darker and safer. Mike burst out, “Makes you feel kind of cut off and tired, but kind of satisfied, too. Like you done a good job-but tired and kind of sleepy.”
John Steinbeck, “The Vigilante”,1938.
Mother T Go Home (Tropical Bunga in Reverse)
Necessary victims of the freeze dried
The white ice of deadly progress
No harpoon redress
Trust only hastened the inevitable
Amongst mineral rights and the Sovereign
And commercial Arctic Ventures
Spouted from dollared dentures
Accompanied by expanding markets
Fishing guidelines for the sub 49er’s
Searching for char
Presents of sealskin dolls
Fabricated at venerealized encampments
Foistered by fiats of ministerial hacks
White sympathy
Tempered by budget allocations
Remainders from ministerial vacations
Robert K. Stephen
Job Interview
Yelps and barks of circus seals
Tenuously balancing sparkling balls
Adequately
But
Not dangerously ostentatious
Don’t ruffle the placid master
Your audience
But then don’t underplay
Even though
Regulations and conventions dictate a certain humility
Statutory interpretation on the trapeze act
The tumble can be wicked
Return to delaying promises and options prudently promised
Optionally false for the survival of the dream bureaucracy depends on that illusion
And the salaries of the wizards and silver haired corporate beggars
Rattle tin cups against the rages of the market
Discretely of course
The pounding on the door louder of nespotitcless victims
Who contemplate the tragedy thought personal
Yet almost universal
Robert K. Stephen
“This was the first time since I’d been with you in the room where you were slowly dying that you spoke, even indirectly, of death. When I was a child and then a young man, you often spoke of it, I’d almost say with satisfaction. ‘ When I’m dead children…..’ Or: ‘You’ll understand when I’m gone……”
But that was more than fifty years ago. Now that death is lurking in your room, so as to speak, you don’t say a word about it. You don’t seem to fear it. I imagine that you accept it and that sometimes you’re even a little impatient to find it so slow in coming.”
Georges Simenon, “Letter to My Mother”, 1970.
“When I speak of hatred, I’m not exaggerating. True, I wasn’t there. But when a husband and wife living under the same roof get to the point where each does his own cooking, each keeping his provisions in his own locked food cupboard, and one waits for the other to vacate the kitchen before getting his own dinner, what other explanation is there?”
Georges Simenon, “Letter to My Mother”, 1970.
Casino COVID
Caught in slot machine blur
Praying for the jackpot of herd immunity
Big Pharma legislated impunity
The three cherries of hurriedly tested vaccine untested for the long term
Could be worse than the germ!
RNA concoctions messing with our genes
Holy shit where are the simpler days of captain Kangaroo and Mr. Greenjeans?
Displaced by the politico-medico teams
Opening, closing, duplicating and replicating surges and waves
Killing and maiming more?
Similar to an infected whore
Misjudged again and again
Ruining the economy and the health of all
Crazy focus on a virus but in a casino you know who always wins?
The house
Robert K. Stephen
Casualness
The ALL authority
Beckons
the lecheurs and menials
a court of the tactfully polite
conveniently spellbound
Robert K. Stephen
“Today I realize that a couple with children is not just a couple. And sometimes they forget it. Near them in the house, almost always present, there are children who watch them and, in the measure of their own intelligence, judge them.
The parents think of themselves as simply a father and a mother. But they are wrong. They are two individuals whose every gesture, word and glance are judged mercilessly.”
Georges Simenon, “Letter to My Mother”, 1970
The Unofficial Mission
Sleek
And silent
The 52 birds knife up through Da Nang tropical air
And when over their target
Spawn the hot roe of doom
Upon the suspecting unsuspecting below
Leaks to the Fifth Estate
“NAPALM BURNS AND MAIMS 700”
In a private conference the generals and politicos are Most Disturbed
Shouting “God damned press bastards”
While millions with temporary interest
Gobble down the evening meal gawking the evening news
And agree with the generals
That it was the gooks, commies, Ho and Cong
With their propaganda machine
Smith and Jones thought it all deserved less attention
After all war is war
So open up another can of beer and switch to Hogan’s Heros and Rat Patrol
Where was and will
War films fun and
Painless
Robert K. Stephen
A Bird's Eye View of Fashion, Food, Travel, Culture, Beverage and Curiosity