Author Archives: JRL

The Cotillion

Will you be respectable down at the spectacle
once the event has begun?
When do you plan to have fun?
How long does a show like that run?

Will you be elegant at the extravagance
after the champagne is gone?
What will be left to build on?
Who will survive to the dawn? Continue reading

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Lose Your “Authentic” Self

It feels like not that many years ago there was an interest, almost a “movement” if you will, to seek out and embrace our “authenticity”, to “get real” with ourselves and our world, and cut through all the game-playing to get back to the essentials of human living. Continue reading

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What You Think It Is

It isn’t what you think it is at all.
There is no solid substance underneath.
Just one small push will make the whole thing fall,
and patching it together, to be brief,
is just a pointless exercise, designed
to take you far beyond your breaking point,
and there, when you begin to lose your mind,
to leave you helplessly and fully out of joint. Continue reading

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Engagement

If every day you can say something new,
to keep your content fresh and sparkling clean,
it won’t much matter what else you may do,
so long as you don’t say just what you mean.

See, no one wants to dig in all that deep.
The truth is, what we want is light-weight friends,
just close enough to hold but not to keep
beyond the time the current platform ends. Continue reading

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The Point On

If you and I aren’t really seeking, there’s just not much point in speaking. If the boat is truly sinking, it won’t matter what we’re thinking. If the means dictate the end’s taste, does a life’s toil feed life’s waste? Continue reading

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We Like To Think

We like to think the truth is complicated,
that life is how it is because it’s hard
to figure it all out while it is happening
and comes at you, rapid fire, non-stop.

We like to think our big brains are so useful,
that the solutions we come up with are so wise.
After all, we spend so much time thinking.
There must be something worthwhile in it. Continue reading

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Saying Nothing: sonnet

So many ways to share our thoughts, and yet,
we choose instead to merely nod and wink
to better justify and then forget
those fleeting moments where we stop to think.

It’s not a conversation that we seek,
nor dialogue that motivates our daily posts.
We tend to lead with pictures, and not speak,
lest we reveal our monsters as mere ghosts. Continue reading

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