#2: Breakbeat

B-laden I’m spelling a grade gravely with

Yellow jackets engraved with the letters of fun and games.

It’s mineral season- creep on the dome. Bobbing in tombs like

Zombie-walking a plank from the summit to feel like home.

School was ironclad, dreams a sporadic crunch-

My time on a sundial exacted into my punch

Revolting against invisible hands grabbing my throat-

Hip-hop gave me the spoken word. Dancing B-Boys, be cloaked.

See wrath come from suburban grit lifted through the slit,

A steel orchid to launch it— Pedagogical porcelain.

Ivy peels on its torso a bloody struggle to cohere.

Harmonize with collective. A dissonant sense of fear turns

Gears stuck in the concrete floors. Oak-plastic pores

D-lead branches to spores sagging “core values” and “form.”

Man-Machine again— find a market inside these walls

Caving in copper like pennies. Thoughts to the bin.

Rust Belts. Study gin. Chin up the fall, climbing the salt

Mine bigger gestalts. Blue collar faults— Believe them all.

Now, fashion and Instagramming the static life of the binge,

My adolescence reveres pocket lint strung with a grin.

I follow this intuition to void it like Winston Smith,

A perfect circular thought always links. The Prince, the wit.

A-captive top-of-the-class eschewed faith for broken glass

Reflecting my truest laughs. A song stained to its craft

Makes rocket fuel for the Last of Us Neurolinked to the shaft.

Fuck these scrambled connections, I’m sick of picking the slack.

One moment’s forever’s another’s reason to snap.

A kingdom always vessels. That’s ironclad, intact.

Belief-bricking an ivory tower— thoughts and behavior be

Stricken— laws of the land before me subvert the hour.

Cultures flicker like coin-flipping whims. Mine, in tact,

Creeps silent over the lines that we slagged ‘em over and tramp.

Quaking time with a Trail, Tears to the facts, make

Pathos warp an innocence language-born at the trap.

Which Chigur is useful to me when I need to stand?

How many strands removed from the waters beating my past?

Whose faults do I rivet advancing through theses expanses?

Knowledge pillars for cancer and banter, speech for the casters.

Hold up, where did the land go?

Hold on to seas I sip and-

Hold the weakest link as it’s

Drifting off to the grist?— Alas

Hold down a lonely island— no one can sink or swim to

My purpose within. Visible dollars churn sense.

Buying time for reflection’s the privilege we won’t admit.

Looking up to the summit, I see myself in the thick.

Carve its base from pride and feed the scraps to the poor,

Just looking out for Number One

Above it all to begin with.

© Nick Zazove (2024)

Image © Neal Zazove