Poetry Corner

Elements of the Fight (An Ongoing Work)

1. Nests built in apprehension of a surly weather report.
2. Fibrous moments seized in random contexts are allowed to filter the personality to some recognizable form.
3. A mainstay of confidence and security.
4. Something to hold back the madness, like a gently constructed dam.
5. Holes in your shoes as you step on others’ toes.
6. To walk with a dogged limp, a tired ghost ready to give it up.
7. A logjam of supports, tenuous at best, but there’s solidity to some extent, in some temporary sense.
8. The overflowed and otherwise useless receptacles of regret converge in trashheap conversations several trashdays overdue.
9. An early start at transformation sidesteps legislation from the primary vices.
10. Multi-level declarations brought about by living situation complications.
11. ‘Free and Fair Use’ is determined detrimental to the modern democracy.
12. Pave the sidewalks, pave the sidestreets.
13. Static days lead to restless nights.
14. “We left the body in the woods.”
15. To reconstruct one’s life as to bring about change sometimes backfires and recidivism trumps progress.
16. The medication must be multiplied as daily doses increase with the desperate feeling that someone, somewhere is drowning.
17. Coming to conclusions often means acting hypocritical.
18. Tossing away photographs of onetime lovers.
19. Contaminants create an inauthentic life, neither real nor unreal.
20. Comforts come form whacked-out death-trip fantasies.
21. On-line journals open for business spill our intimate guts, while family gatherings remain eerily quiet.
22. “I was just gonna hit him, but I’m gonna kill him now.”
23. All deeds seem dirty.
24. Setting up a line of defense, as in a game of chess, to protect some part of oneself from an attack, real or imagined.
25. As television disciples, our past and present are tethered only by our most extreme moments.
26. Literal interpretations log increased airtime in mind’s eye, while all figurative and critical models are heretofore designated anti-American.
27. Ever-increasing agoraphobia stalks the public psyche.
28. “You stare long enough into the void, the void stares back into you.” = “The more you shop, the more you save.”
29. A mild feeling of nausea when the air-conditioning is not on.
30. While some keep a pack of dogs made vicious by hunger, others keep people made vicious by other circumstances.
31. Metafiction of mass consumption mediated by model citizen dressed in maintenanced morals.
32. Advertising will one day corrupt every word in the lexicon.
33. Forked tongues remain untied.
34. Saving the best for last becomes the big joke in our modern era.
35. And on and on and on.
36.

(Copyright 2003, Dung Magazine, B. Hoben)