Circus People

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/charlespoet/episodes/2019-12-31T15_21_44-08_00

My friend Beth always asks me why I call us circus people.

I always answer that it’s quite obvious, but for Beth the obvious always eludes her like sympathy for a much maligned devil.

I’ve always felt the most at home on the Island of Misfit Toys because the lower your expectations are the more likely you are to dance successfully beneath the limbo stick.

My uncle Marc told me recently no one he asked had a single, good thing to say about me and my only response to that is consider the source and how you can never trust a racist especially one who throws their own people under the senior bus and then goes on their merry way.

All my life I’ve been misunderstood because I always call it exactly how I see it with no rose tinted lenses to obscure my view from the cheap seats.

My father once told me I was a survivor and I still hold so dearly onto those words because it’s the one and only time he actually was there for one of his children without first thinking of himself.

I’m Jewish and Sicilian which means I’ll kill you and then feel guilty about it later or even better make someone else feel guilty as I go out for New Year’s at any Chinese restaurant that will still have me.

Circus people are just like any other people on this planet meaning they wipe both their mouths and their asses before finally calling it quits and getting into the fetal position.

My dad has always had a thing for fruitcake and circus peanuts two things most people cannot abide and that’s okay because most people cannot stand me the first time they meet me until they realize I’m the only game in town and they best pony up before all the seats are sold and you’re left standing in a Roman Colosseum of your own meager devising.

Charles Cicirella

12/31/19

Velvet Glove (Count the Dead that Rise)

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/charlespoet/episodes/2019-12-31T01_28_49-08_00

We make pretty bombs to kill pretty people

We spill pretty lies to nullify petty grievances

It’s all for naught and to unstabilize our stable geniuses

The touch of your velvet glove creeps out a nation

The touch of your velvet glove lends us nothing, but acrimony

The taste of your poisonous lips paralyzes our unflappable resolve

Silencing the sheep shouldn’t be anyone’s prime or unprimed objective

We exist to be born and born again

Dying a cross we must bear like luxury and libations

We write pretty poems to heal the ugliness inside and outside

We withstand lies and treachery to save our fractured selves

We wrap ourselves in blanket assurances to ready ourselves for the fight of our atypical lives

The touch of your Velvet Elvis is music to my rock and roll ears

I promise not to step on your blue suede shoes

There are three words I will not utter until we’re prepared for sleep and sacrifice, in that order.

I miss you Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Charles Cicirella

12/31/19

As is

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/charlespoet/episodes/2019-12-27T21_20_32-08_00

Broken and don’t remember how to cry

I hate memories that leave an aftertaste like diet soda

Fake chocolate was made by sadists whose own mothers didn’t love them

                                                  

We can agree to disagree or we can slink away in mutual bouts of shame and embarrassed tremors of whimsy as we sit on the pot and start peeing like a real goy

I remember the first time you uttered the words I love you and how it felt more like a question than a true declaration of love

I can’t climb the rope because my hands are made from ground beef

School always seemed like an enduring session of torture or dodgeball with the pent up nuns from across the courtyard

I know next to nothing makes sense to you when it comes to how I choose to express myself while I misremember my disemboweled past

All I know how to do is shout and that’s neither constructive nor destructive if you happen to be an anarchist

Unpaved like a road in need of immediate repair

Sometimes I feel like chucking it all in and doing my best to forgive and forget that I’m the chosen one

It’s a lot to lay on a person especially when that person already suffers from a Napoleon complex the size of the Northern Hemisphere

I’ve never seen myself as a person of short stature because I honestly don’t know what that means

You lost me when you pulled out a voodoo doll and started to look for any stray pins or needles

Fake people can choke on their fake words as they wait for their fake gods to deliver them from their fake hells on this here spoiled Earth.

Charles Cicirella

12/25/19

Blues for Samantha

Over thinking

Over under

Over you

Scrapping my expectations

Lowering the bar

Redesigning my first impressions

Overwhelmed

Over easy

Over you

Stand tall you statue

Sticks and raucous bones

Better to be a lover than a manipulator

Over the moon

Over exposed

Over you

Let’s change the song

Stop playing cat and mouse

We were created for a bigger mousetrap

Repeat first verse

Charles Cicirella

12/25/19

Let’s lay down with our lions and do our very best to forgive the sheep.

https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/charlespoet/episodes/2019-12-24T21_36_27-08_00

No one dreams of anything when they’re electric except why they’re not Elton John

I’ve always stood against any and all levels of hatred, especially the type of hatred dripping with gasoline and thirsty for a lit match

Let’s climb out of our skins and focus instead on what comes after we’re defunct and circling the cosmic drain

I know you don’t believe you’re a lion, but I’m telling you that you are

Ignore all the disingenuous soothsayers who like most beat poets will never beat the rap of being a typist instead of a writer

That’s of course if you take Tru’s side and if you do well that’s your unanswered prayer to wrestle with until another virgin writer is born and spills their cold blood

I’m only a poet when I’m writing, the rest of the time I’m just Charlie, something I thought Joe Cohen of all people would understand

Let’s impregnate our doppelgangers with less obnoxious versions of ourselves

We’re gonna have to start effecting change through any blunt means possible if we have any hope of a revolution.

Words not guns always prove the most effective weapons in our cannon.

Keep this in mind the next time you’re stringing together popcorn and taking down one Walmart customer after another

“Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home”

Charles Cicirella

12/24/19