Napoleon's Russian Offensive

[The following is undated but was probably originally written in the spring of 1980. A cheery little thing about miscommunication between lovers. It's certainly not based on personal experience and my two and a half years of celibacy following the alleged incident, uh, the writing of the poem is purely coincidental.

Once again, I am unable to reproduce the formatting of the original. When I orginally composed on an electric typewriter, the visual impression of the indents for different lines in relation to each other was an integral part of the poem. I tried putting in repeated &nbs-p (without the hyphen) to approximate the tabular effect but apparently Blogger doesn't really like that and gets rid of them. It could be that Blogger just doesn't like the form of my poetry unless I alter the basic template in some way. I'll poke around to see if there is something I can do about it.]

[Update: I've managed to jigger the blockquote to work to indent lines without it looking horrible. However I'm still left with the problem of needing to indent several different levels (approximately four) to satisfy my formatting requirements. The template pretty much only has two paragraph styles I can apply within a post: a normal paragraph and a blockquote paragraph. As far as I can tell, this is a limitation within Blogger's built-in editor. I've tried posting from MS Word (it's a little Blogger program) and the formatting worked briefly but then Blogger's editor stripped out the indents. 'tis a puzzlement. This is all maddenly kludgy. I may leave it alone for the moment.]

Napoleon's Russian Offensive

you wanna hear the objective view?
got a few weeks of spare time?'

transmission garbled by the negligent receiver
don't want to hear it coming
through cold air loud and clear
such a wretched action
hit by a truck, alone at the intersection
I’m just fucked over
and stuck with the groans evoked
veins bulging within my head
blackmailed by sad emotional movements
my honest travesty
the whine of self-castigation
half undressed and pitiful
in the darkness on my soul
i am that

watching for some form of self-respect
certainly not developing in the near future
don't whimper it again
i heard you before in feedback
kick back the hurt and stop sobbing
before i convulse with revulsion
there's no winning in this
parasitic situation growing strong
feeding on the feelings, tumorous
shut my eyes and lose all grace
as i lie to myself with
soapopera sentimental gestures
in guilt and negation of the previous
stupidity so contemptuous

i once called it trust but
it has changed to mere fumbling
in the dark, wanting to appear special
how trite we aspire to be
snowflakes fluttering
sleep in almost intimate happiness
only to become fools dreaming
of the stars in the sky
i don't want to see what you mean
because it oppresses me
when i grasp the actual meaning
I’ll never feel as if i know
exactly what you're saying
the night obscuring the winter brightness

I’m sickened in the violent moment,
consumed totally by the strict demands

© 2005, wordlackey for php