Follow me to the edge.
Walk to the end.
Will you be my friend
if this is all that it is.

Welcome to the abyss.
I missed this
fell off a bit
but came back a prince.

Left a trail of breadcrumbs for the ants to follow.
If you don’t want to follow
don’t follow no more.
That simple.

Take the lead.
Show them that you belong in
first place
for the first time.
Let ’em know each rhyme and punchline
came easy like sunshine.

Let ’em know each sentence formed like lines of disenfranchised overworked medicated minds
with picket signs
fighting for their rights.

ADA!
Yeah right.

Let em know your words
wants to be heard.
Connecting nouns, verbs
Forming like Voltron.
Start a revolution!

Together we’re words.
We mean something. Apart just letters.

In these painful times we need more medicinal minds writing
rhythmical rhymes.

Knock off
the box office.

In primeval times I was a monkey.
Drumming on my desk
Dancing on it for money.
Spraypaint the senators
And put em in full view.
Meatballs and pomodoro
Poodle in the blue patrol.

That was off the topic
Novice.
Slipped
on it,
like hospital vomit.

Gizmo
Is a gremlin
A furby is a gizmo,
Get em wet.
They both don’t work right
No mo.

A video in fast forward.
A rhymer
Rhyming
S l o m o.

A syncopatic drummer.
A sympathetic lover.
Make Tiffany a symphony
And play her like a cello.

Put Jello in her hair.
J E L L O
a Dead Kennedy.
Kill the Poor.
Whatever though.
there’s the smell of fresh fruit and rotten vegetables
and the smell of democracy in the air.
Hypocrisy in the air.
Bullshit.

Speaking poetically.
Poetically speaking.

Together or separate
Still feeling cheated.
Oxygen tank
Tube fed.

Keep an iron fist,
and an iron lung
keeps our country breathing.

We begin to clot and heal our wounds
from the last mass shooting.

Breathe in the toxins
of our own pollution.

What are we doing?

We’re Danny Glover
In Lethal Weapon
Two days till retirement.

Wondering where the peace went?

Violence.
Running through the cerebral cortex
Neurons firing back at me
Running with scissors.
Splicing synapses.
Nightly my mind is trying to find me.

To fight or flight me.

Wow this poem got off track.

That’s what happens when you start a poem
Leave it and then go
back.

You got
Something different then what you had.

You got
Good
And you
Got bad

And you got a Tuesday morning laugh.

And a roll in the rhymthic
sack
with the poet Captain Jack

Rhyming relapse
Back to the future
to the back.

 

Jason Wright is the founder and Editor of Oddball Magazine. His column appears weekly.