a poem for the dysmorphic

Though we master advanced forms,
sooner and later
we lose our primal ones...
surrendering
to the angel of decay.
We see
our once poignant features
caricatured in anarchy's clay,
our psyches
over-dosed with pathos,
numbed by vast modernity,
depraved by ego,
darkened then lit
by mania's glow...

reduced to Silver Sufferers
hanging tense
between two spheres,
clinging like communists
to the gray state we know...

hunch-backed and flat-footed,
faces like Halloween-eve masks
with every sense, entry, and exit
mechanized...
pissing in catheters...
hiding in brief narcotic cures,

and yet we pick up
the brief-case,
unpack the easel,
pen the profligate drivel...
yielding only to mortality's gavel