Author Archives: Mike Falconer

After a career in the entertainment lighting business encompassing, sales, technical support, marketing, photography, and writing, I now manage and market veterinary hospitals.

Polite Dismissive Neutral

Not wanting the black hat
From a pit of the worst instincts
A stripping away of civility
Rage from the dark
Intoxication from bile and venom

Not wanting to be the bad guy
The gentle soul one pretends to
Left beaten and bleeding by the roadside
Violence of personality
Leading to the doubt of one’s ethical narrative

Not wanting the feature of rudeness
Chafing at rules and policies
Ego inflation and what one feels one deserves
Polite, dismissive, neutral
Jousting with the insincerity of over politeness

Not wanting to need reciprocity
The drive for vengeance on those less than deserving
Not exactly the innocent or blameless
But undeserving of spite and smite
And the out of control vitriol

Not wanting to hold onto the grudge
To rebuild over spans burned to ash
To let go, to forgive, to forget
A prayer to one’s better instincts
Treat as to be treated

Not wanting to be angry any more.

Image by Artie_Navarre from Pixabay

The In-Between

Trying too hard
To be what others want you to be
Rejection via email
And uncomfortable silence

Don’t push, don’t push
Change the narrative
Explore other expressions
But this is what I want

And so, to putter
To look for forward motion
While traveling in reverse
The in-between state

But when the lights are off
And the only things in thought
What only confesses to oneself
The unattainable goals of dreams

The secret heart of every poet
The quest for the great American poem
Cliché and rhyme
Of status and decline

However, the lands of angels and demons
Are not for wishes and horses
To work, to grind
A return to creation, any creation

There is value in process
In the body of work
Context equals understanding
Therefore, words are worlds

Explore as you will.

Dead Letters from the Apocalypse Society

Accuser of the brethren
What is here for me is what has gone before
From a time of desktop publishing
I absolve you of memory
But condemn myself to obsession

The slaughterhouse and the joy to burn
Dead letters from the apocalypse society
These are the peaks in the deluge
But there are those that drown in nostalgia
Maudlin, the fatigue of future past

Rage, putrefaction
Pain and the forgotten
The season of the dark
Dreams of end times
Love poems to loss

Hippos are more dangerous than lions
Old science fictions masquerading as progress
Tales of working-class dystopia
Lessons never learned from a lack of hope
I see you, yet I choose the ignorance of the times.

Farm Americana

A demographic vision of plans within plans
We of Farm Americana
Those who reject history and all that
Although we have learned subtlety

The planting of a crop
The harvesting of generations
A game of numbers and influence
A return to hegemony

Master, chattel, indenture, serf
Slavery is such an ugly word
Truth to behold
History is deeds not words

A consequence of meritocracy
The realization of lacking of a class
Opportunity and hope for all
But not for a base disadvantaged by those with pretensions to lead

And so to farm
To change the playing field of birth and death
Our stemming of the tide
A devising myth of our own creation

Nothing so crass as Atwood’s visions
At least not yet
But isn’t that the point?
Distraction and alternative truths for those who fail to scratch

This is a rooster call
There is no farm without complicity
The middle ground is no ground at all
It moves beneath feet that were never that steady

A Return

An uphill struggle on uneven ground
Familiar, but out of reach recollection
Ideas that have no place or soil
To be strange in a stranger land

The forgiveness of novelty value
Paying the dues of lost time
The temerity of escape and change
But the welcome of failure

A return to homeostasis
With the untrusted eyes of an outsider
The pointlessness of make work
Does not reduce the struggle or achievement

“You can never return home”
A mantra for those building Babel
Toil and creation, motive and myth
The hill has still to be climbed and overcome

One doesn’t traffic in redemption

Summer Rain

Rain
Rain
Rain

The whisper on the lips of desert dwellers
A sky blue black bruised like a threat in a bar
The side street flooding showing how few blocked drains we are from disaster

Flood channels become rivers
Rather than arteries of action movie tropes
The detritus of fragile growth
Slick the roads with vegetation mash

Thankful for the water
Like the believers of old
A temporary reprieve from the inevitable
Like the relief from the heat

What the rest of the world takes for granted
Is viewed through eyes of disaster tourism
The city the butt of jokes
And apocalyptic memes

Roofs built for sun, leak
A sunshine playground floods
Water in the sports book and on the casino floor
Instagram worthy amusement at the misfortune of the profitable

Tomorrow, the sky and sun will return
But for tonight the smell of clean
Cold experience and damp
Transportation to another world

For a day.

Living in Shadow

There are lots of rules
He tells me what to do
And when
I don’t always remember
Or listen
Distraction and excitement

He loves me, I think
I love him, and not just for the omnipotence
Our routine and stability
What’s not to love?
Of course there are disappointments

And there is anger
But I am always forgiven
Perhaps a sign of control
Of trying to understand all the words
Trying to understand the world

Yet, I yearn for adventure
The secure and safe kind
The kind I can retreat from at will
Faux risk and bravado

But he knows best
My emotions and desires get the better of me
We are not known for our self control
A road to self destruction
Trust, up to a point
As much trust as I can muster

Bland food and bland days
Sleep and keeping myself amused
There are times I am not a priority
And I get that
I understand my privileges
Although I don’t always like the state of affairs

His need and vulnerabilities can be unnerving
I can’t fill all the gaps in a life
From the shadows
But I can defend the home from all enemies
both foreign and domestic
Or give it my best shot

He is my human
This one is mine.

A Number

Elasticity
Cause for celebration
Cause for regret
Change
The child I am
The child I was
The betrayal of the body
Non reflective of mind
The betrayal of the mind
Fear
Forward stumbling of numbers
Perspective
Recollection
Predilection
Reconciliation
Acceptance
We all die
Time
Passage and gone by
The mile marker years
Childhoods end
Virginity
Drinking age
The geographical
Crisis of early middle age
Marriage
Betrayal
Divorce
Move
Move again
Home
The loss of youth reflected in the faces of the young
The missed
The regrets
The mistakes
The bridges burned
Moments of focus and pedestal
Forks in the road
Blades of decision
An irrevocable cut
Blood under fingernails
Measure
Landmark
Imprint
Motion
Commotion
To settle
To compromise
Old
Age is but a number
Except to those experiencing it
Acceptance
Rage
A fate understood
The present informs the past
An unreliable narrator
Memory
Horror
The weight of the wait

With Sorrow We Dissent

A country that fails its people
A court with no black robes – only red and blue ones
A tale of Handmaids
Less rights than that of a rotting corpse
Or a gun

A clock setback 50 years
A leap along the road to theocracy
Never about life
Only ever about control
And division

Humans control their own reproduction
Woman are not livestock
Or incubators
A place as second class citizens is not an aspiration
No blame for crawling into bed to forget about this day

However empathy, responsibility, and strength
I see every woman taking the knee during the national anthem
A nation that targets its citizenry does not deserve to be worshiped
The snowflakes warn that winter is coming
With sorrow we dissent.