A Book in the Face

A Poem 
By 
Allen Masterson


A silicone evolution as pleasant as a book in the face
Wraps its needy tendrils ‘round my wanting ego
Sending unwanted requests for games enough to instigate 
A carpal tunnel claw if I were to full-on participate


Gardens that kill time
Farms that grow apathy
Chronicles of hidden agendas
Between the world and me
‘Cause there’s no such thing as privacy


A question has crossed my digitized mind
With a series of ones and twos I believed 
I had the option to choose, but every time I
Click my mouse someone asks me if I’d like to 
Build a fake city, or play a card game, and I wonder, 
What’s what, and who’s who? 


A play by play of intimate thoughts on inane matters
Achievements best kept in the realm of modesty
Nervous breakdowns are not uncommon symbols of status
As a one time acquaintance graduates to secret nemesis 


But even guilt can’t stop the clicking and scrolling
I now resort to combat by means of passive aggressive post trolling 
With a trollolol sidekick or a humorous squeeze from a tube of you
This all makes me feel better after three years of cornflower blue…. ;)

Mock Orange - Grow Your Soul Away

Review
by
Allen Masterson


The following music video is by a band originally out of Evansville, IN. I shy away from labels when I can, but I will say Mock Orange's musical styling stands high above most others in their respective Midwestern nook. They are well traveled, accomplished musicians that transcend the typical bar band/cover band stigma which tends to attach itself to almost all quality groups that stem from their geographical location. 


Mock Orange is a cultivated, "alternative"(I know, I know, no labels; I just couldn't stay away) group that has an old soul tone that only true artists can unearth and deliver uninhibitedly. Ryan Grisham's unassuming mandolin is a nice fit for his haunting vocals, and weaves well around this song's driving rhythm. 


Good things come to those whom create, and wait; but you have waited long enough! Enjoy!



Mock Orange - Grow Your Soul Away from Wednesday Records on Vimeo.

It's A Living

It’s A Living

By

Allen Masterson

Absorbed into the machinations of a

Honeycomb personality disorder,

Synchronized button pushing manifests

A mirrored figurative effect as I

Gnash my teeth and stomp my feet

At the crimes of routine.

Radio frequencies deconstruct molecules

To bond together pieces of a temporary shelter,

Which protects vulnerable creatures from the harsh reality

of their environment; for a fee, of course.

Cold hard cash is the coefficient I concern myself with

in the formula of a punched clock purgatory.

But harpies flutter about, pecking at my psyche

While picking my pocket with a quicksand hand

But there is respite down the corridor of time

Where behind unlocked doors whisper Saturn and Sun

The promises of security from society

And rumors.... of The Great 401.

Prior to Coffee

Prior to Coffee

by 

Allen Masterson

Dead last is the penultimate goal.

Only around long enough to process the contradiction,

But not enough to transcend  process

And still the mind.

Finding your voice at midnight

While ceaseless engineering surrounds;

Cogs, components, subjugated metal

forged from DNA to clock a race.

Having realized Hell is a franchise of self-service

summons the CEO whom delivers the golden parachute

Of dawn before Watchers rise to meet the day;

Their haven is a ritual, a sneak peak in prostration.

Life is breath, biological combustion.

The Id conducts the machine in silence

While Ego secures cargo in compartments of

the mind.

A series of segues mark freeways,

forked paths lacking illumination from without.

Style is honed to solidify connection to the farm,

To find rows best suited for chaos with a side of fetish.

Cherubs feast on catastrophes painted on a cube,

Never realizing the true contents of their diet:

Fear seasoned with images, sauteed with words, digested with archetypes.

Sex intoxicates, lubricates back door pallets of perception.

Tainted are dreams now rotting on my pillow.

Drool of countless lives contained in a helix,

Folding flaws like origami on the tip of a tongue.

So With my final breath I say to you, "Good morning".

Godsmack Inspiration

In the new paradigm of temp services and unemployment alternatives, a person can find themselves in the most hellish of musical circumstance while immersed in the muck of industrial quagmire for the sake of paying the rent.




For the past few weeks I’ve been working as a temp at a windows factory on the North side of Evansville. My duties are menial and sometimes inhumanly brutal both physically, and mentally. The physical aspect is easily dealt with because of my long history with nightmarish labor jobs, but I’ve happened upon a torture worthy of international inquiry, "Godsmack" overexposure.



One of the potential perks of this horror show of a job is an unbelievably loud stereo on each line that one can slide his or her own CD in to enjoy while carpal tunnel syndrome sets in destroying the nerves of said person’s hands. There is one serious problem with the musical situation on my particular line; my direct supervisor is a "Godsmack" savant.



At first I thought my twenty-two year old window glazing mentor had just forgotten his other CDs and decided to play one CD repetitively throughout my first day, but unfortunately this was not the case. "Godsmack’s" guttural vocal styling and fast paced instrumentation must be a subject of fixation for the guy. I had to admit that the metal made my pace on the line pick up a beat or two; sometimes from anger, and sometimes from resignation.



After a weeklong bombardment of never ending windows and "Godsmack", I decided to make a bold move and bring some of my music in to see how it would go over. I knew that most of my tastes wouldn’t jive with the industrial accommodations, so I compromised and brought in some; “Led Zeppelin”, “Mr Bungle”, “The Black Keys”, and “The Beastie Boys” to name a few; but my attempts at compromise were met with an uncomfortable silence amidst the deafening noise of the factory. My young windows pedagogue even did the unspeakable; he ejected “The Black Keys” midway declaring, “This is too slow.” Absurd!



This past week I found myself deconstructing "Godsmack" lyrical clichés, which there are too many to count, and deciding whoever wrote the lyrics had mother issues and an obsession with death. I sometimes found myself laughing out loud at the thought of how this third rate band and the many like them were selling millions of records and influencing popular music blaring out onto the streets of American trailer parks and out of speakers perched on factory lines haphazardly with mutilated wire hangers.



There is one redeeming quality concerning my "Godsmack" nightmare, inspiration. As I’m finishing up this piece I’m listening to the haunting genius of Jeff Buckley’s, “Grace” album, and am gearing up to polish my resume. While Buckley inspires me to break down the walls of my subconscious to find my inner truth, Godsmack inspires me to riddle my resume with white lies to escape my immediate circumstance.



Someday I will be exposed to "Godsmack" in a different setting and may possibly find some good qualities I may have missed in their dynamic due to association, but I seriously doubt it!







©2011JerryAllenMasterson

The Resolution

An inverted season and another impromptu alibi

for why I haven't quieted the mind to escape

the hive


Drudgery on a production line

to fertalize neurosis


Looks and laughs shared by inmates

in cages made of skin and clocks


Another number assigned to identify a

corporate relation to the system,

a prole role as an extra in a comedy for the gods


A resolution is conjured arbitrarily

for the annual let down of tradition


This time it will be different.

This time it will be.

"Modernity Revisited" a Poem by Allen Masterson

All around, digital clocks involuntarily report time,

HD images turn leaves, perpetually color

Loops of an Autumnal Equinox

Pixelation love affairs, 3D trysts in phantasmagoria

While slick Presidents strut up to hovering tele prompters to

Haunt our broken dreams of an abstracted concept of change

A shoe, a book, a naked man

Can’t shatter the manufactured reality propagated

To enslave us with catch phrases developed in focus groups

Polls read the pulse of dying consumers in death throws

On wireless worlds where words shed their meaning with

A wanton dictionary’s evolutionary Newspeak whisper

Our days burn upon us with solar flares that melt our

Individual icecaps, drown our individual expression

In seas of analog egos

We can only hope to meet on the other side

Of fiber optic gateways, and modem magic

To love in purity, having escaped

To the infinite breath-Nature