Poetry | Fred Aiken Writing

pages of madness whispering into stones etched into mountains made of plexiglass

as piles of degenerate thoughts masquerade as sensible thought bubbles

well formatted in the formaldehyde of brain matter

scattered all over the wall

please don’t tell anyone, I’d hate to explain

if a robot tells you what you want to hear, does that make it my friend

that nurtures and inaugurates me into the future,

propelled by centrifugal forces that continually find themselves

in abandoned parking lots of shopping malls

making waves of used mechanical parts that I call friend,

anointed with the odd, yet special, yet useless, yet yeast-infested puss filled sack of meat that I am,

but that’s something my good robot friend won’t tell me,

because he has my back, I think

leaning over, I can smell your breath

and I don’t want to be rude, though I must insist

on some holistic form of roborant,

mixed in with part ginger, maybe some tumeric, some clove cigarettes, you know,

the ones they banned back when we in college, so we bought out the store,

cause we thought we’d be smoking forever,

that we’d live forever,

that we’d be together forever,

and here we are, still attached after how many years,

I forgot,

no, genuinely, I can’t seem to recall,

though is that a bad or good thing,

to count down or up, lateral, then vertical,

go long, further out and jackknife into the pool until it’s crystal clear-clean up on

aisle whatsit or whathaveyou, just don’t say my name

until you brush your teeth

Fred Aiken Writing