Mike Falconer

The Offering

I carry my burden
My belief for those who came before
Those who give freedom through bondage
I come to sacrifice

We crawl on our bellies
Willingly to give blood to stones
Call me zealot, call me monster
My faith has a foundation of innocents

Who are you to criticize?
My god is a vengeful god
And my beliefs only need be acceptable to me
Rage, rage against the dying if you must

The cruelty of an altar of souls
I am absolved from damnation
A damnation I may deserve
But my thoughts and prayers are all

While I watch those around me eat themselves
Gordian knots of hand wringing and impotence
I remain a humble servant
With velvet rope predilections

And so my atonement is of others to give
The blood of those most dear
The pain of my belief and righteousness
A burden that grows heavier with every loss

But I, of the exceptional and chosen
My choice is my eucharist
My god is my absolution
You are my penance – the price I am prepared to pay.

A Man of the People

A mask for fish and ponds
Nature of belonging and brand
Always the wronged and a glass half full
Leveraging the good will of strangers
The trail of the fallen, left behind

Selfies with a crowd of unknowns
Everyone’s best friend
A man of the people
Standing in the ruins of my failures
A reminder of what is not to be

Onwards like iron sulfide
Words are cheap and easy
Food for thought but not of sustenance
Bonds to be unbound
A con hidden by feature and fluff

Disappointment by courtesy
There is no we without me
No myth without belief
Manipulation is a retrospective
Viewed with the dispassion of outsider status

There are no coincidences
You owe me nothing other than disillusion
In spades I repay and endure
Angels are but demons though eyes of a beholder
Always a better option, except in the dark

I am but petty and vindictive
Loyalty and foresight are golden idolatry
Don’t ask for blessings that stink of comprise and cowardice
Measure what matters even when eyes are closed

The darkness is of my indulgence
A lack of probity
Masquerading as integrity
A moral compass bereft through a lens of familiarity
The devil smiles; wild, reckless, and self-indulgent.

I am for you to abandon
And likewise, I pick my poisons
We can agree to disagree except by logic
What one feels is still loss
However, we have each broached what can’t be undone

Finding What Touches Your Soul

What makes the difference between one day and the next?
There is more to life than work, even when there’s not
What can you be passionate about without being all consuming?
Finding what touches your soul

Passions are not about ability
They are about drive
They are about the motivation to create meaning
Work, of course, can always be a passion
But does passion pay the bills?
Should it ever need to?

We may delude ourselves into feeling that to have a successful career – we need to be passionate
That we need to be all invested
To the exclusion of all the else
To emulate the master of the universe with their latest autobiography
To do so risks their fate;
Their lives, their liberty, their reputation, the ultimate emptiness of their passions

Is accomplishment enough?
Making others miserable, or the exploitation of others, is not a passion to emulate
Or a very good excuse

An argument is to be made that careers are about compromise
About finding what works for circumstance
To not be passionate, does not begat a lack or concern
We can’t all be passionate about all that we do
All of the time

The expectation, is unrealistic
Regardless if we are talking about others or ourselves
Cut yourself a break
Don’t believe your own press
Or the Instagram posts of others

How does one find a passion?
How does a passion find you?
Will it be a picture of altruism and selflessness
Will it be pure creation or performance
A hobby, a pastime, a person, a pet
We define that passion as much as it will ultimately define us

And as if to surprise you, along comes that passion
That other interest
The thing that can put work and career into relief
And bring you the same

We often cannot see the label on the outside of our jar
A kind word, an insightful comment
Can hold a mirror up
And penetrate the fog of the overly familiar

For me, it is the gift that COVID gave
Introspection and a void to fill
For me it’s words, which some might call poetry
A word that causes as much discomfort in me as is probably does to you right now
Sorry it’s the only one that fits

An outlet for emotion and thought
An exploration of love, loss, life and death
And of course dogs, there are always dogs

The words that fit best are their own passion
Whether these are them
Is not for me to say
Only for me to believe in
Passions are for oneself

If others find value in them, so much the better.

A Fit of Pique

On lockdown orders we crawled into our houses
With our stacks of toilet paper and hand sanitizer
Our streaming TV and TikTok
And we died in there
Like badgers gassed in our burrows

When our ghosts emerged, they tried to imitate the world as it had been
To make things right and whole
But it was the shell of a world
And all the pretending would not fix what had been

The people could no longer talk to each other
What was effortless and simple
Was now difficult and complicated
Reason was gone
Replaced with with emotion and vitriol
A species at war with itself and the idea of civility

The longer we pretended, the more wrong it all felt
The more our world decayed and broke down around us
Longing for the good old days
When the days were not what had left
The dead have no momentum

And while there was nobody to eulogize the human race
The ghosts of lockdown went on with the pretense
Any excuse for emotion and connection
Even the bad, the negative, and the toxic

You never know what you’ve lost until it’s gone
This was never more true than for human beings
Not the death of a society but the death of society
A race too stupid to know that the end had come and gone

The putrefaction extended to truth and the sense of right and wrong
No need for justice when entertainment rules
Faces illuminated by the detritus from the websites of billionaires
Dreaming of walking in shopping malls like the Dawn of the Dead
A fit of pique inheriting the earth at the end of days

Agents of White Supremacy

The Agents of white supremacy
Not always the idiots with bed sheets over their heads
and holes for eyes
Not always the ones with swastikas on their arms
And tiki torches in their hands

Everyday normal people
With jobs, children, and even friends of color
Some like Disney, self-love, and confidence
Some like everything gold
And the adoration of those they can’t stand

The Agents of white supremacy in the house next door
The ones who make jokes in hushed tones
With furtive glances over shoulders
The Karen in the parking lot, having a bad day
The secretive text messages starting with “I’m not a racist”
And ending with the ever so subtle “white power”

The all lives matter counter slogan
Invalidating all meaning with spurious comparisons
And the support for state sponsored execution with “if they’d only comply”
Apportioning blame, and guilt, without any attempt at equivalency
The belief in lies peddled as entertainment

It is all the failure
The failure to acknowledge the problem
The inadequacy of words in a poem
Like the words of police chiefs and politicians
The words of old white guys
Too little, too late, and not often enough

Inspired by, and based on, a TikTok by @tizzyent

Stories of Shoes and Other Feet

My shoes go where they want
Your shoes need to follow
Not the rules, but what I say
My shoes are free to do what they want
My shoes are exceptional

Your shoes are the wrong color
I don’t care much for your shoes
Someone’s shoes that look like mine?
That’s different – it reminds me of my shoes
And my shoes are exceptional, didn’t I already say that?

Shoes on other feet
Don’t be ridiculous
Don’t be contrarian
Shoes are meant for walking
Not for being walked over
Well my shoes anyway,
and shoes that look like them

Stepping on my shoes makes you evil
Stepping on any shoes makes you evil
It also makes you singular
I always have a good reason for stepping on other shoes
But don’t get close my my shoes
My shoes need room to move and breathe

Some might ask why step on any shoes?
All shoes should be equal!
All shoes can be equal
And nobody should step on anyone else’s shoes
I will support and protest against stepped on shoes
But some shoes are more equal than others
Like my shoes

Don’t ask me to walk a mile
Like I said, my shoes are exceptional
I have many colors of shoes
But I like some more than others
Shoes also fall out of favor
Shoes are rarely just shoes
Particularly my shoes.

Mountains

White Mountains

A distant promise of adventures unrealized
The beauty of the seemly out of place
Nothing special anywhere else
But the heat of the desert in winter
Creating a strange normality.

Brown Mountains

Daytime in fall
Or false winter to locals
Cold but still looking like a movie set
Allergies from wind where nothing grows
A barren moonscape, given life and meaning.

Grey Mountains

The haze of “I’ll never get used to this view”
Traffic, fire, smoke, and the desert badlands
A kabuki backdrop to slots in the grocery store
The fantasy of mystery hills
Rather than where we went hiking over the weekend.

Pink Mountains

Dawn. And the view of those up too early
Black highways and the sodium halide cellophane of suburbia
An unreal unveiling of what is to come
No shepherds to see superstitious warnings
Only traffic lights to direct flocks

Red Mountains

Mother nature is a showoff
Not content with blood red skies
She boils the earth to the color of lava
A relief for baseball games and barbeques
Inspiration for juxtaposing photographers and poets

Sand Mountains

The oven dryness of the heat of the day
T-shirts, shorts, chapped lips, and the need for air conditioning
Hospitality in this most obvious of inhospitable places
A place for demons and families
A vacation spot by the pool.

I love coming home to where others vacation
The bright lights and silliness of a tourist mecca
And the conveniently small city beyond
Surrounded by the even present mountains
Who leave their footprints in our thoughts – between distractions.

A Party to which you are not Invited

Ever present, never present,
Not actually wanting you to be here
But missing you all the same,
Always on the lookout
Because who I am kidding?

Remembered anniversaries and birthdays
Never marked or acknowledged
The pleasure of gift giving denied
Gifts of old now destroyed
Because who am I kidding?

Like a party to which I am not invited
A catch up of perpetual second place
There is familiarity – but not intimacy,
The awareness of the slippage of time
Because who am I kidding?

And there you are in front of me
A haunting of space and time,
With no frame of reference for how to move forward
All we can do is retreat to our own corners
Because who am I kidding.

The Enemy of Synchronicity

Judgment wrought
The enemy of synchronicity
Betrayal begat betrayal

Righteousness for those to clad stones
Words that chattel
Disbelief in belief in oneself

The rights and the wrongs are but opinions
And detente is nothing but hard to come by
Not forgiveness, agreements to disagree

But doubt
Doubt that this will work
A reckoning unsure one wants

Betrayal is in the eye of the beholder
However, stings do not lessen
just because of whom endures them

A modicum of trust is a fragile foundation
Being the better person is a point scoring solution
Understanding is not for everyone

The responsibility for the beliefs of others
A weighty burden,
Only equaled by the zealotry of always being right

But what it would be to be wrong
Is this the price for self belief?
The numbing effect of time – the hope

And hope is all that any of us have
The recovery, timid, and fragile
Damage done, an undoing yet to be seen.

Time Passes

Old photographs.
Young people now gone.
A different age.
A diffident page.
Walls that received scrawls.
Papered over notes to future generations.
Rooms of changed purpose.
The rescaling of memory.
Conversion misalignment.
Context leading to comparison.
Time Passes.
An indoor playground.
An indoor care home.
Shared memories.
Forgotten times.
Small house.
Small rooms.
Washing up by hand.
Ill fitting appliances.
Painted wood.
Wallpaper and patterned carpet.
Condescension and lack of comprehension.
Old roles winding back the years.
Reintroducing subservience.
Bordering on servitude.
Time Passes.
Board games.
Card Games.
Game Shows.
Soap Operas.
Take aways.
Documents.
Arrangements.
Subsistence shopping.
Abandoned hobbies.
One of the many things no longer possible.
Depression.
What to eat.
Joint pain.
Weight loss.
Waiting for loss.
Ready to go now.
Undisclosed medical conditions.
The awful nothingness.
Time Passes.