Untitled Poem

 Untitled Poem 

                                        Forbearance is how I bear this                                          

Patient pain of guilty conscience

Kissing away my common sense

There’s a cost to each soft sip

Excruciating, alleviating, debating

The dangers of this tasting...

Shameful shamelessness cloaks my aimlessness

Careful chaos, 50 respectively, on black and red each

Wagering a paradox on semantic sameness

To lose the silk chains of crafted speech

Innovating, restating, manipulating

The rules of my approximating 

Vicious apathy brewed masterfully washes down your casualty

Sipping casually the coarse cocktail of selfishness

Caring costs, causes Self consciousness of its superficiality

So feast of inexact actuality and relish the bliss of undecidedness

Liberating, exhilarating, postulating,

My passions decide my actuating

Forthwith, this is the fourth hit

The fourth and final kiss of flesh and death

Living on the edge of grinning lips

Gripping the bloody soul of my inner chest

Intoxicating, elevating, escalating

Begging me the question, “what am I trading?”

. . .

To live or not to live,

Is to give or not to give,
For life will take twice
For each and every gift

To face the tick of time

As life folds into death

Leads a man to wonder

What is worth his breath?

If between birth and earth

Is all I stand to lose,

What is worth my winning?

And how am I to choose?

The timid may take little
And suffer just the same
The choice is only yours
What pleasure for what pain

If I must give to live

When death does finally call

Let my living echo

I gave to life my all.

- Quin McGlaughlin