Christian Ochse / Poetry

“Ode to Dreaming”

Spirited away from a powderkeg insomnia,

Just dust and chemicals but ready to explode,

The phantasms; not fire but claymation paranoia,

Not suffering, ever - but eternal fleeing.

The mythology of martyrdom; the cycle of death,

The ghosts of these false relatives and friends,

They are seen complacently acquiescing,

Giving up themselves and all of their essence,

to the invisible demon of the modern man’s mind,

Gnawing on the marrowbone of morality.

This nightpanic twilight is barren of conscience

It is fear and delusion; fantasy and truth,

Its’ patience is infinite

and it’s grandeur - baroque. The outlet

for guilt and pitiful erotica.

Don’t fend it off with barrels of gin

or a milky syringe.

Submit to the night, and tacitly oblige

the whims and desires, of the primordial mind.

Meet it inside - this congregation of dream

and face only the unrelenting silence of self.

A man can not be blamed for what he dreams,

but condemnation awaits every suffocating action.

————————-

“Meaninglessness”

Waltzing through life alone,

My invisible partner unknowable,

Lost beyond the incoherent contingencies,

of mackerel spotted mannequins.

The banks have credit cards in their vaults.

Marble eyed mothers show no love for Baby,

They only shine in the light of Horse,

and wait for the state to repossess.

Marginalized artists give up their craft

Swerve off the side of the road

in a fit of blindness - they had already forgotten

their glasses anyway.

and never saw the proclamation of truth; blow away

their crystalline bonedust remains.

The wind will carry them somewhere they’re wanted.

Vodka scented children with armaments,

stand on their petticoat decks,

Greyfolded skies overhead

and a fistful of bleeding pariahs

All for nothing or a trough full of prize

The pockmarked officials in their lonely pigsties

The meadowlark - It’s beak fell off; it died.

All for nothing you filled my heart with lies.

All for money, you filled this world with lies.

————————————

“Ode to Failure”

I fought a thousand battles and I lost every one,

Martyred every time, I never stopped to run.

I turned down ten thousand blue roads and got lost every time,

Almost saw the light, but it never turned out to be mine.

Sang one hundred thousand songs, but botched every rhyme,

I never gave up though I could not hold a tune.

I wrote a million books, that all have tragic endings,

And every one is true; I’ll write another soon.

Failure is like a leather belt I always wear,

It holds me together and fends off the responsibility of success,

You’ll never find me complaining that life isn’t fair,

’cause ev’ry time I lose my way, I find myself again.

Every scar attained in hopeless clamor, is pain that wakes me up,

From dreams of gilded power that’s always partly brittle,

A precious metal, a dusty jewel; these are no match for a lonely fiddle

The sound of sadness, the sound of wounded hopes,

The broken pillar of mankind’s glory

is more beautiful

when pieced back together

from fragments gathered

through the years.

————

“5 A.M. At the Port Authority”

Tangerine tiled walls scarred by elusive Time,

Who never seems to rescue those who wait

Sitting impatiently, heads bowed like monks, in rows and lines,

Their vagrant clothing reveals their class; their reason; their dire straits.

The West Indian general with his hat and spectacles,

A black beret on his mahogany skull,

His singsong voice burrows into my ear, like an infestation of termites,
His troops; lackeys of the Authority with mops and buckets, at war with the rectangles

that divide the floor, despite the certain fact that it never gets clean in here.

Nowhere else does Mozart sound so lifeless,

This place; it bores even the illustrious wunderkind,

And the soul feels filthy and concentration’s a mess,

Every beadle eyed, fishmouthed passenger is obsessed

with watching the digital clock, hoping to find

a bus that will surely come.

Like hopeless refugees they cower, somehow they’re dead to me.

Even when I hear them speak to the general; I can not empathize with anyone.

And every moment is a propped up chair

Just about ready to collapse under the weight

of a gigantic wrinkled woman with rats in her hair.

Every moment is a doomed fall down the stairs,

An inevitable journey to a meeting with Fate,

An unavoidable surrender to this emotional freight

that an imprisonment here will always create.

—————————————————-

“February 1st, 2008″

Pablo your world and mine are a hundred years apart,

Your alpaca mountains, your dying farms, your fading culture,

Your angry losses, your bloody poppies, and your glorious Macchu Picchu,

Your America and mine, one North, one South,

They are not so far apart as the lords

of mine would hope.

The ocean here, too, is formless unity and exponential energy,

The farmlands here are filled with weathered faces and

shrinking capacity.  The healthy one’s replaced with

cow factories and inedible plaguefields.

There are unappreciated men who live like a set of hands,

Creators who build, grow, make and die, silently.

We have wine. We have books.  We have the need for peaceful

Revolution. We have Poetry.

This country walks the path at midnight

It lost the starlight that once guided it.

It is inebriated with debt, homogenized children, and

television worship.

A drunk man in the dark always falls.

Unless another holds him up.

This is our bond.

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