Romero Plays for Keeps
Romero Plays for Keeps
A moment of truth and I know,
These words fail expression
Of the torture I’ve become,
And it’s Tears for Fears
Asking where did the boy
That I once knew - go?
My tears for fears,
Tears that are sublimely
Wiped for fear of acting
Out a role,
A role that knows
All innocence has gone.
We know it all when kids,
But harsh tricks from cruel a world
Makes all believing null and void,
And like the engine
Of a tired clapped out
Old banger,
I am spattering and sputtering
My last sense of self,
Die-ing inside at
Every day a heart-ache.
Is this it?
Is this whom I’m to be,
Cathartic at the deaths
Of children when in essence,
I am dead myself,
It ails me, fails me –
This life where contact
Of the heart be a battleground
Just to see how hard
A man can fall,
And there’s no way back,
No way to find the meaning
That innocence and naivety
Told upon the whimsy
Of all I thought I knew,
And gullible retorts still
Resound deep within
My recesses of emotion;
Spitting out denials,
Spitting out denials.
Blast it all to hell
Or kingdom-come!
Blast all the Golden Globes
And Oscars, blast
The BAFTA’s and,
I am tired of acting like,
Like,
Like I’m happy and
Content for upon
The truth,
Upon the knowledge -
That PHD of life,
My time wishing
For a better world,
A better way of living
Surmounts to nothing left,
And there, there is me,
Nothing left and spent
Like a cold clammy rubber,
Like water drops
From exhausted fumes
Left upon a dog shit road,
And I am old,
Older than I realized,
Older still than those
Within their twilight years
Of wisdom,
I am zombie,
Just like Romero’s films –
Except,
I still have within -
A conscience that
Stalks the Deadzone
Of this world; a looking
For a distant place
I can call a paradise of
My own,
Where I may yet find
A remedy for the madness –
A sanctuary from sadness –
But heaven now;
That afterthought of life?
Seems very, very, very far away.
Michael J Waite 8th October 2012.
