still life

"I sit and spin the world on its flip-side,
and I listen backwards for meaning" - Elliott Smith

Floating down
the endless stream
'of cigarettes and magazines'

over sun-lit rocks
and night-lit dreams,
the chaos clash
of T.V. memes

something like an I.V. drip
of Kafkaesque news themes
and animated trips
of acidic insinuation,

filling a few rooms
of opiated asylum
from the soul-numb roaring
outside world
of clumsy, pervasive machines

with
all their garish cacophony
of gold-fever and neo-Germanic ambition:
this modern half-life
of constant undeclared war,

at the heart of it all
a vacuum...
which nature's said
to abhor