Poetic Insurrection

[redstrain]

Some of my writings, for your enjoyment.

Postmodern Age (lyrics, ~2012)

Every generation has its own Armageddon,
Every age is the zenith of the overdramatic,
Every page in the history book is turning,
Cities burning, no one’s learning, so anticlimactic.

The opiate of the masses is stability
Their addiction is the fiction of normalcy
And no status quo can be overthrown
Until we find the will to recognize our own.

What comes after the postmodern age?
What disasters shake the locks on the cage?
What comes after black gold and austerity rage?
What the fuck do we have left in the postmodern age?

We always, always are
Motivated by deadlines
And that’s just to return,
To return to the baseline

How will we live with ourselves if we only survive?
Can’t we try to make the crisis count this time?
Can’t we stand our ground, and not back down this time?
Don’t we deserve better than to merely survive?

Saturate (rap, 2014)

Yeah, I count magnitudes past nine inside my mind,
Fracture lines, you’d only find those kinds of dark designs
In 1945, at the Soviet frontline outside Berlin or somewhere in
Hiroshima when August lights could blind the eyes
Of anyone, worse than the sun, and look at our guns now
Someone strapped them to drones somehow, and wow
There’s nowhere in the world now where hellfire can’t rain down
At whims of Presidents and generals, but I’ll cut this short
Before I get too full of my shit, the metaphor can’t fit no more
How absurd, where the fuck do I even get off comparing my life
To a war? ‘Cause half the world at least hurts than me
Way motherfuckin’ more, as I write these words with a keyboard
In my safe middle class home, it’s like I live inside a dome,
The light don’t bend right and everything I’m shown is an illusion
My pain’s a delusion, self-martyrdom’s confusion, I’m ungrateful
I was born to win and now I’m always losin’ my energy, my will
Think I need another pill, Xanax tab to fill my mouth with bitterness
But my flood my mind with bliss and maybe it can wither this
Poison flower spreading spores in my subconscious, I don’t want this!
Not anymore, not anymore, I don’t fucking want this!
Don’t want to be a garden for doubt and rage
Or the guard at my own cage, but it’s the bed I made
Time for me to lie down and drift away
But here’s what I have say:
As long as I can turn my curse to verse
Come whatever nightmares may and…

Saturate the pages of my life story,
Lay the words right down before me,
Press hard as you can and make that ink bleed through.
Better me than you.
I’d rather black than red, draining out my veins instead.
It’s no wonder my hands shake
With all these earthquakes in my head

Sedition (poem, 2012)

My ambition is not conditioned to accept this call to competition
Stagnation, boredom, repetition – refusal is not avolition.
My mission: Contradiction, negation of hollow cognition
That’s followed to these bleak positions
A dry well made to throw a wish in
Transcend permission, increase the friction
Dismantle borders through attrition
With hopelessness as their means of order
Consider this sedition.

Recursion (poem, 2013)

I imagined myself standing between two mirrors
In precise alignment and flawless proportion.
And I came to believe that the person I saw
Was nearly myself but not; it wore subtle distortions.
Then I had the thought that in the eyes of the other
Were neither mine nor its own but those of another.
Those thoughts were the catalyst that began the recursion.

So continued the sequence and in each reflection,
Changes quite more apparent as the light traveled on.
Unrecognizable the innumerable others became
Until they were blurs, then a point, and then gone.
And if sharper vision could extend their existence
Still no light has the time to traverse the great distance
Of a universe ever expanding, itself a recursion.

For even replicas are which from replicas come.
With this understanding, I lost my point of reference
To perfection, the infinite, the first and the last.
Those words from my mind, an irreversible severance.
Now I invite others to stand in that same place
And reflect on its nature until their minds erase
Any doubt that we are but a single frame within the recursion.