Gavin Bourke
Landed into the midst,
ensuing chaos.
Exaggerated connections,
heart-sink presence.
Cynicism and entitlement
Severed from the natural, human relationship.
Emotional shrapnel inside the urn,
carried by the pallbearer.
No longer to be ventriloquized,
alcohol seeping through the cracks
of the last few generations.
Induced Alzheimer’s in a mother,
cared for by her unmarried daughter.
He walked through the working life,
causing scars to bleed,
closer to savagery than those
in the vicinity.
A broken father stood in a doorway,
in the darkness, for over 20 years.
Carried the anger, through the social world,
harnessed by Valium’s touch,
carrying inherited darkness that
never was hers.
From father to son and so on,
throughout each new generation,
traits in common.
Knowingly and unknowingly bringing
the weight of unwarranted aggression
to bear on every situation.
Dysfunctional frameworks,
paradigms passed down from the rotting wood
of successive staircases.
Selfish emotional terrorism,
oft rewarded by the modern organization.
Emphasis on cute bureaucrat,
the enemy of statute.
The movement of the body and eyes,
mismatching language.
The departures of form from semantics
under well-dressed hides.
Privilege without responsibility.
Deeper into valleys of narcissism,
schisms of aggression, never contented,
mottled mind.
Couldn’t live with this anymore,
a father and blackening suns.
Barking in hallways,
through watering eyeballs,
with persistent rancor at everyone
and no one in particular.
Left blood on autumn leaves,
results of peculiar anger
and personalities disordered.
Ethanol breath,
condensation around brass pendulums.
Fell like the blackest slugs,
from stalactites to stalagmites
in darkened caves,
through the generations
on his father’s side.
In chain mail,
draining those in close proximity.
Killings with pens and phones and keystrokes,
the black filth of back-office politics.
Twisted in online abysses,
morbid self-interest, records amiss,
the stock in trade
of negative diatribes.