Jogging the Mind

Verse Poem 6

Hello all,

This is a gross poem that I’ve edited over, and over, and over, and over… I decided the editing must stop and it must be posted. So, here it is. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Tapeworms in My Head
Tapeworms squirm in wrapped ribbons, 
Smarmily firm in gibletted rituals wherein
Eviscerated viscera is nibbled,
Viscous gnashing, the vicious crew inside you
Chewing through the neural network’s electric 
Cords coordinating connections, limiting 
Introspection by severing several
Nerves, ending temporal temperance 
To become a semblance of the self, 
As slithering worms wither away slivers, 
Heaving digested depression and 
Obsession, purged by their scourged
Proboscises that those promised dewormers--
Vermox, Ovex, Celexa, Prozac, Pristiq--I’ve
Swallowed, yet I still wallow and wrestle with
Tapeworms.

October 29, 2024

depression, descriptive, dewormers, poem, poetry, tapeworms, verse poetry

Prose Poem 4

Hello all,

This is a poem I wrote when I was angry but tried to have a good spirit about it all. I think it’s a little funny. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

An Asshat

Fucking assholes, mine being the deepest—cavernous, really. Constantly constipated with hatred, like some cruel desire for expulsion when really it envelops, in its vacuum of all things nasty, the kind of shit that sticks so firmly it’s not worth peeling. I’ve got rounded walls of lesions that bleed and peak through my abscessed anus abused by suppositories my doctor prescribed. But the medicine isn’t killing the roundworms peeking from fleshy portholes too stretched to be called pores, oozing the same black filth I drool when I’ve lost attention. No, dewormers are something but listen, my rectum’s nearly killed ‘em, those little worms, with the occasional expulsions of will–movements which evacuate as if I’ve been burning, completely invaded by flames. Maybe, but I’d like to think I just run hot. Really, my colon’s collateral damage in these wars of consumption which stick in my gums and repeat the same tirades just a bit more tiredly than the last time. I take cyanide for the stomach pain but it only seems to make it worse, probably a carcinogen too, seems every drug is these days. I guess I just wish I didn’t have to wear my ass as a hat every time I went out, but I’d hate to make an ass of myself in front of everyone else’s.

October 23, 2024

asshat, Funny, idiot, ignorance, poem, prose, prose poem, Silly

Prose Poem 3

Hello all,

Here is the sister poem to “Identity in the Information Age”, the first poem I posted here. I like this poem a lot but feel it is entirely unapproachable. Please enjoy anyway and pretend this is as clever as the Cantos (which this is not). Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Good Men Did Nothing, Edmund

The misunderstood solipsism and the tacit acceptance of good-natured mistakes as fact is solecism of the highest order. The perverted altruism of social media is a fresh selfishness and the eggcorn of our truth; objectivity is obscenity and the misunderstanding of tolerance is Overton window voyeurism. Reality is retracted and replaced by the misplaced desire to belong, pages are for ages dedicated to the sage advice of neophytes constantly cosplaying competent cognitions. Really, it’s solecism and solipsism of the worst kind, convincing the masses while holding covert fasces like scare-crow straw-men offering a handshake. The social media mistake is the modern mosaic of middling men and women meddling with messages of (previously never-before-seen) mediocrity which is now never-to-be-unseen by the majority. The hitherto localized idiocracy has now been vocalized invariably; domestic disputes are open forums, every moron’s posting their 95 Theses to their walls for all to see. Children are championed for their innocence while wiseness is made insolence to silence the majority Nixon nudged and which has now been nixed. The prodigious professor’s sacrilegious poison of the ivory tower are political buzzwords legitimate only to the illiterate; they are happy to burn Burke and Hobbes—no one’s read Leviathan, and the Reflections on the French Revolution’s a faux pas. Self-destructive dedications to the immolations of reason are not noble, but the foibles of asinine altruism unable to understand selflessness is senselessness when unbound. In today’s Reign of Error, we are but one torchbearer from adding that one fearsome letter.

October 15, 2024

And a little Robespierre for good measure, Edmund Burke, Martin Luther, Overton Window, poem, politics, prose, prose poem, social media, Thomas Hobbes

Verse Poem 5

Hello all,

In honor of my recently published poem not yet uploaded here, I present said poem. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Faking Fulfillment
“Ravished” is the Freudian slip of
The ravaged, a victimized 
Malapropism with a magnetic
Disconnect from the genuine,
Disaffected and distinguishing
A reality faux and flush with 
Lush lies, white but rusting red—
It is the changeling’s curse, your
Persecuted perception of a
(Perfunctorily) glorified personhood
Is faulty, the palsy of your
Perfections that are pretend
(Pathetic persuasions to upend
The blend of emotions emulsifying  
Melancholy with merriment to 
Concoct a contentedness nightmarish)
Are a maelstromed maleficence of
The mind--you’re binded to mortality merely 
By lacking suicidality, a blinded soul
Sulking and sinking into a silent way 
Of thinking, of unblinking bleakness—
Until you reach the end: unfulfilled.

October 15, 2024

facade, facades, fake, lies, lying, poem, poetry, self-deceit

Verse Poem 4

Hello all,

The last few posts were downers. Here’s a silly one about a pimple. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Subcutaneous
In the blood-tight yellows 
Of the skin-sack meadows 
Popped: pinched and abused, ooze
These goos like rancid booze.

Keratin-infused pain
Snaps skin, outflows the drain:
Such ills spill from those hills
As shrill squeals squeak and trill.

Pock-packed and filled with flaps:
Skin-sacks’ facial prolapse 
Loosed, reduced to regret 
And induced to roost awhile.

October 8, 2024

Funny, Pimple, poem, poetry, Silly

Verse Poem 3

Hello all,

I took a 1-week hiatus because my OCD got the better of me. Here is a poem that I think is flawed. I am uploading this poem in direct opposition to the OCD that won the battle from last week. We will see who will win the war. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Anxious Enthrallment 
I am a thrall to my own fall,
Echoes of an internal ghetto
Spoken in falsetto and false too
Are bounding the walls, confounding
My weary self into a dreary day dream
Destined for destruction without abruption;
Like these circular lines and ineffectual rhymes,
I resign to the flow, unable to sew sanity
From faux vanity, until my own humanity 
Is absorbed in disgruntled profanity
And the inanity of my life;
The repetition of this cognition 
Kills me, especially because, unpoetically,
This admission is unworthy of submission—
Lame lines lacking all time and metered rhyme,
And my poor mind is so unkind it won’t unwind;
These pathetic poetics keep these frenetic
Thoughts domestic, echoed in my own ghetto.

October 1, 2024

anxiety, anxious, mental health, ocd, poem, poetry

Prose Poem 2

Hello all,

Below you will find a prose poem that I wrote almost a year ago. This one is more approachable but it helps if you’ve read Raymond Carver and Richard Brautigan. I think they’re great and that this piece is fun. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Fishing to End the Sunny Days

I hate fishing. Brautigan could have thought of another metaphor. Not all of us fish, you know. I’m no trout, never caught one. Though, a friend’s dad brought us out once. I caught a Sunny and in a flash its gills turned the white of my hands a muddy red. He said hold tight but that made it all the sharper, the breathing blades of that flash of life. Ray Carver’s problems postpone for fishing and I’m left reeling, more and more. Nowadays, fish won’t take the bait but I’ll bite the naked air, empty and unsatisfied as screams echo around the woods. The creek and I babble on, completely alone. I won’t fish, it will not reel me in because I’m hanging out to dry. The ripples and streams splash and steam an uneasy mist around my boots as I edge closer, until my echoes fade into the brush, near silent again. If only the creek would quiet, then perhaps I would know a singular peace. Yet as I cast the end of my line into the void, it echoes back again, my silence breaking with the light of day as the bubbling creek’s currents cease, drowned out.

September 17, 2024

brautigan, carver, fishing, poem, poetry, prose, raymond carver, richard brautigan

Verse Poem 2

Hello all,

Below you will find the second verse poem I’ve decided to post. Tonight is a debate between horrible people. In their dishonor and ours, I’ve chosen this poem. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Talkin’ Bout My G-G-G-Generation!
Our fetish for flagellation is 
A Freudian thrill, the theme of the 
Thanatos-eros errored urges like 

Some sort of silly suicidal-
Societal social experiment 
Exposing erosions of ethics

As anxiety allows an artificial 
Attack on ourselves, opening 
Orwell’s pandora pandemonium in 

Social media’s meatgrinder like 
Gluttony’s penitentiary, pleasure centers 
Measure meaning, in a demeaning 

World where wanton wants warp wit and whip 
Unbelievers; their fevers contagious, 
A deceiver's delirium wherein 

The climactic climax of kindness is 
Ignorance, grand-standing virtual 
Vitriol of pathetic unsympathetic 

Tolerant empaths and emissaries of 
Thanatos-eros errored urges like… 
Some sort of fetish for flagellation.

September 10, 2024

commentary, debate, poem, poetry, politics, social media, verse

Verse Poem 1

Hello all,

Below you will find a verse poem that looks very different from the first. I like both of them, hopefully you do too. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Jiggling the Door Handle
You’re slumping, bobbling, throbbing
For the knob bobbing affirmations
That reality’s ajar while her door is
Stuck, stiff—hinges are squeaking,
Forcing you to peeping through the 
Key-hole thus, and in battered brass
You’re beholding your beholdening
To that God which is a woman,
Cruelly echoing your own cries.

Futile, feral, the knob throbbing
Bobbing, rattling affirmations: 
Up, down, brass bulbs quaking 
As you’re shaking, with your knob
Thrashing at the threshold screeching 
Past those hinges which then singes
Your sanity, such that your humanity’s
Slumping, blubbering, bobbing as your
Battered knob flops below the lock,
Blocked.

September 4, 2024

betrayal, freestyle, poem, poetry, verse

Prose Poem 1

Hello all,

Below you will find a prose poem that I wrote a few months ago. It’s a little dense but I hope that the rhyme and word play keeps it enjoyable. I am a very pessimistic person, as I am sure you will soon conclude. Let me know what you think, if you decide to read it.

All the best,

JCO

Identity in the Information Age

I am empathetic and this malapropping neologism propping up our zeitgeist is the destruction of the word: empathic. It is this perverted altruism of social media that is fresh selfishness and the eggcorn of our truth. Let me explain:

Our absurdist obsession with identity is idolatry of the exemplary—holy highlight reels, innumerable influencers, and venerated vloggers are lord to our peasant present. The profligate propaganda of comparison breeds commiserate misery and mystery unto the self. Quiet contemplation is the contempt of the nation, bringing the defenestration of our individuation. In other words, the contagion culling confidence also swallows my self, satiated instead by an indulgence in others, an obsession with the inferior ulterior as if I’m motivating myself. That’s another eggcorn, as precedence is given always to perusing people’s postings rather than pulling myself together. Outsourced introspection is obtuse, an amorphous amalgamation of others’ desperation and their insinuation of decency when they are deceitfully lying to me. Personality blurs by the monitor, its black reflection obscures, and manifests a destiny deadened and desperate for introspection, yet I never learn my lesson; I am empathetic and understand nothing, least of all myself.

August 28, 2024

commentary, critique, poem, poetry, prose, prose poem, social media