Convention

Convention
L.Ling

We are here
You are me
We are to the kind of people you want to be
Paradigm citizens, individuals of humility,
We are the members of civility.

By the code
We lead our lives
Sets of rules we constantly abide.
For they are right and right is good
It dictates all that we should.

Never faltering, never failing
In our paths there is no strange flailing
Only confident swings of sure fast arms
Destroying and conquering all that do us ‘harm’.

Eradicate, destroy and silence
The crowd that opposes our truthful cause.
There is only mighty applause
As their blood stained bodies paint the floors.

Every day of every year
Every morning of dawn you hear
The monotone grumble that brainlessly repeats
The iron fisted rule we all must greet.


They confidently drone:

“When wounded;
Do not cry and do not weep
Kill the pain and bury it deep
Break the confines of skin and heat.
Burrow it into the fleshy heart
And warehouse the bitterness that boils and scars.
Bottle the pressure, grit the teeth
Evidence of weakness you must sheath.
Never its exposure to scrutinizing eyes
Must ever occur if you seek the alpha male prize
A rule you must maintain if you wish to survive.


Battling the new,
We must fear and hate what we do not know.
Animal, plant, human, machine,
To all alien life we must appear obscene.
These foreigners are truly cursed;
In them have no faith and suspect the worst.
To strangers we must never ever greet,
Show any warmth or let our eyes meet.
With a dagger like stare we must let them know
We have shut our iron willed hearts;
Delivering onto them a painful and silent blow.
Potential companions, prospect wives and husbands
Possibility is destroyed as their duplicity will mean our end.

When one dies
Whether a beggar, a tyrant, a stranger, a thief or a traitor
You must be sad and you must lie
You must force yourself to care and cry.
For lacking of this broken emotion
Is cruel and cold
Harking angry outbursts from young and old.
These explosive jeers
Are brutal riots that will batter down your ears;
Leaving you to be forever consumed by your fears. ”

Living in their classes,
Marks in history they seek to carve
The gluttons indulge while the scrawny starve.
Lower to middle, middle to high
‘Such distribution is only fair’ experts reluctantly sigh.
Underpaid and Underpriviliged
Mandated to support, yet their work understated
Some enslaved and some whipped,
While some branded and some domesticated.
Some forced to satisfy our lust, some forced to work in toxic haze
But all are fatally trapped in a never ending maze.

Free to speak, Free to hear
Free to write and free to fear
Free to search, Free to find
But never free to hold one’s own mind.

An Ode to the fallen- "Hero"

Hero
For Matt and J. McNeil

“Your country needs you”
They left their families and lovers for this
They trained for this
They suffered for this
They died for this.

This band of brothers
Walk along the barren wasteland,
The earth’s pallid and arid flesh stretches interminably.
The sand vengefully whips at them again.
The crumbled carcasses of cars,
Punctuate the desert, cannibalized.
They burn and weep thick blankets of ebony
Suffocating the sky, and strangle the sun.

A spindly country boy,
walks among them.
He stops and wipes his narrow forehead,
With battered and cut arms that
once harvested and handled hay.
Cluttered brown fleece covers
His eyes, an ocean of soft baby blue
As they gaze upon the harsh wastelands.
He lugs a killing tool as thick as his legs,
Loaded with slugs the length of his fingers
And struggles with a back breaking pack
That dwarfs his figure.

The pleasure ran empty long ago.
Now the fear gripping ever so tightly.
Now he is running on bravado.

Behind them, some of the earth’s flesh jumps high into the sky,
An all too familiar ear splitting roar
A bicycle sized crater erupts and lying there is the country boy.
Legs but bloody stumps, arms but crimson confetti, torso but pulp.
He cries in helplessness, his comrades flock
In silence they meet his glassy stare and glare in morbid fascination
Those folk at home never mentioned the heat, the killing,the cruelty.


Heads dip In a silent salute.
Fires of raw emotion and compassion muted.
Crimson leaks from his wounds and coagulates in the dust.
Some cry, some shout in anguish, some pray, others simply walked away.


They do not eat or speak further that night.
What’s left of him is bagged, tagged, and sent home.


Back home.
Hundreds of lifeless words printed on paper, fed to the masses,
Translate the boy’s honorable death.
They sit in the middle, right next to the weather and oddspot, reading:
“Young hero cut down in the prime of his life by terrorists while defending country”
Eyes scan through the page long collection of Meaningless phrases:
“heroic death”, “national hero”, “national funeral”, “thousands attending”, “Awards given” “memorial built”.
Heads shake, tears well amiss the chatter and the coffee.

The hands tick on,
Slowly but surely.
Coldly, they continue and move on.

two crumpled figures.
A female rocks in the corner of a padded cell
Gently stroking a linting bear.
The male stares in stony stillness at the setting sun
Through an opaque slit in the wall.
A tear is bled and it rolls down his cheek.

Their heads are buzzing.

First born,
First gone
Soon forgotten.

Beach- My very first poem

A toast to my first joust at the world of poetry, and also to my first published work- "Beach".

‘Beach’
A poem by Lawrence Ling 10FD

I walk along the jagged wasteland
Where sharp stone reaches out of the earth’s sandy flesh,
Where white wisps float around without objective,
Careless and free.

Foaming water gently embraces the earth,
Running up and down the stretching sand,
Consuming more territory with every lap,
Dragging the land further into the watery abyss.

The tortured sand, billions of grains peppered with broken purple shells,
Reddens the merciless sea.

The soft, grainy ground sinks and crumbles beneath my feet
Leaving a small crater in front of the hundreds behind it in single file.
The sea soon reaches out once more, taking with it my footprints,
The only evidence of my presence, washed away and gone forever.

Poem- "Devotion"

Devotion
A work by L.L.

Without you;
Put simply, it hurts.


Your eyes, your nose, your hair,
Your smile, Your laugh, Your hips,
Your kiss….
Everything that you are;
Is everything i need
To sustain this faceless existence.

Thief of my breath
Pupeteer of my heart
Purger of my desolation….

If you only knew.


When you leave me,
You cut my cord of security; ecstasy; hope.
Leaving me to drift helplessly;
To struggle and flail in a monsoon of rocky despair and isolation;
Memories of past trivial small talk
my buoy.


When you leave me,
The thought of you pollutes my mind.
An ever encompassing cloud shrouds my soul;
Consuming my judgement,
Commandeering my focus,
Shuffling my morals,
Sparking my lust;
My stasis from time’s cold and firm grasp;
Forever young.


When you leave me,
My heart plummets to my stomach
Crashing into a pool of caustic pain and suffering.
My soul burns and corrodes
Adding another deepening wound
At every splinter of time without you.
The scars are cauterized by a sympathetic passing glance;
Blots of ink that time can only fade
But never erase.

Sometimes I stand outside in the rain.
Sometimes for hours on end
Watching you;
A stationary figure immersed in a
moving sea of scampering people.
Pouring and drenched and Patient;
Hopefully you’d spare a wave.
It hurts more every time
Why do I even bother?


I must stand aside in the dark and wait.
I can’t ever let you know
I must handicap our relationship
Prevent it from blossoming
Let you grow and move on
Let others take you away from me, my love.
It’s for the better,
It’s not you….


In the pouring rain,
All I can do is stand in bitter silence and pathetic longing,
While my tears and dreams are swept away.
Because no matter how hard I try
You and I can never be.


It hurts.