What I've learned---

The kind of poem that could only be written with the ink of experience

had I surrendered to celibacy, today'd be my silver anniversary seated on the resurrected thrown of Charlemagne

but thinking I can rewrite history is like trying to iron out a bloodstain, so wipe the cold sweat, drop the jittery, stand up, & grab responsibility

a life ruled by crippling fear & self-doubt is an eight decade rubber room stay-cation; contemptuous bitterness the lone lasting souvenir

do yourself a favor, douse a brick in gasoline, strike a match, & heave the clay molotov cocktail at the television,

scour every newspaper for what's hidden, learn how to read the unwritten, the only things rarer than a truffle pig with a nose for the occult are coincidences;

sheeple shirt-tail golden-tongued pied pipers down doom-loops paved with simple answers to difficult questions & adverbs

listening requires silence, growth requires pain, opinions aren't violence, & narcissists breath the aromatic shame left hanging in the air, the clam chowder vapor trails wafting above the bobbing bloodless bodies floating in their embellished bitcoin blockchain

they cage & fattening their flying monkeys in dead-bolted closets furnished in lavish hope & change; boiling them like bullfrogs to feed to their leviathan political campaigns programmed in acid rain propaganda to shower the terminally-ill thrall masses in projectile vomit of bluster, lies, & blame---

setting their hooks in the pale cresting whitecaps of nauseated opaque emptiness stretching as far as the eye can sea---

tyranny knows no seasons, it cancels critics, disappears witnesses, evaporates the integrity of journalists, whitewashes history, & censors voices, all in the name of social justice but you can't iron out bloodstains, no matter the vigor of your prejudice