.

Good God, I just read the stupidest fu**ing change.org legalization of marijuana petition, an especially unfortunate thing seeing as dumbness attached to the marijuana campaign is obviously bad news for its supporters. First of all, I can’t stand these mass e-mails wherein the messages say my name at the top, as if this person I don’t know is addressing me. It’s overbearing and condescending: I don’t need this false personalization.
Perhaps the worst part of it was that they misspelled “led” (“lead,” a mistake which up to now I’d only seen Donald Trump make), but by that time I was already miffed by the fact of their reasoning. Here’s what they do: they attempt to say that marijuana should be legal because the war on drugs didn’t work. Well if the problem is that the war on drugs didn’t work, what we should be doing is addressing the curtailing issues in the war on drugs, and working to hash them out so the whole thing runs more smoothly.
Now, of course, as anybody familiar with the issue knows, marijuana is a token which needs no manifested defense. It’s been known to kill cancer in lab rats as well as glaucoma, in people, and it’s not a drug on which the user can overdose — it’s psychotropic, rather than physioactive. The war on drugs has basically just been one big favor to the government, which profits from the prosecution of “criminals,” and to pharmaceutical companies, which profit from innocent victims of this charade coerced into taking their products. It might be that change.org gets the job done and we move forward with some much-needed legalization measures in this department, but I have a feeling the process would go faster if its facilitators were more mindful of its priorities.

I was trying
In my mind
To come to a conclusion
On just how humanity can
Lower their heads and trudge
On
Despite all the problems we face,
.
But all I could grasp was a vision —
Like a darkening of a day
Even amidst sunlight
And worlds coming and going but
Constantly shifting,
Store fronts changing their names,
Dust and spiders crawling up
The sides, the walls,
.
And I wondered,
Have I just seen inside the mind
Of man.

The thought concerns you
That at one time or another,
With or without lighting of various kinds,
You will have
Thoughts which are inexpressible,
And you will have
Expressions which are unthinkable,
.
When all you want to be is good enough for your friends,
All you want to be is good enough for your family,
To guide them away from their dregs,
Or, perhaps,
Away from themselves
Within this noxious truth boiling over with bleeding words.

A child gazes at the essence of life,
Which is:
“Youth is better than wisdom,”
The tenet in mind all the time, albeit,
That
“Wisdom”
And
“Pain”
Are inseparable,
And so he goes brambling between pear trees
On an empty afternoon

In the process of setting out to save the world, she was killed with an axe by a man nobody could stand to look at. Now, in the inversion, it’s another day of fights and sirens.

The mail came today: a notice from the humane society and three issues of National Geographic. On the covers of the Natty Geographics were depicted outlandish, various places like Antarctica and the moon — places the average person will never go, but which cost the scientist thousands of dollars to attend, money which could have gone to better the public food and housing programs in the city of Chicago. The humane society is in my old living place. I don’t even live there anymore and they’re still sending me things beckoning me to help out animals, while in my town the hordes of impoverished smoke crack and rob banks, and a man emaciated to a horrific straw spindle, hand shaking on Wabash Ave. with empty cup extended, starves and thirsts to death in Chicago’s Loop, as tourists decorated with reams of shopping bags mope systematically by: the wheels keep turning.

When the lights in the skies
Are fighting with each other having
Killed off the grey night
As hard as it tried
The day sends vials of elixir
To the true, hungry
Fighters moving like gristle
Of bones from ankle
To hammy lament,
Oxidizing the brains
Of life’s very spectators

In being
This human machine
It’s best to satiate yourself
With
Being inside a mysterious ball
That only lets you breathe
Just enough oxygen and not
A creative amount and then
When
You toggle
Back
And forth
Between beholding the
Sun’s moons and shadows it will
All come naturally, the bequeathing
The night as
If it’s a phosphorescent
Frame of your former self

Always
Wanted
To be a good boy
I never talked
Looked down
Said thank you and had
Dreams of flying a plane
Far over dark territory
And firing missiles
Scourging the planet of the pestilence
Like
A cold, steel America
To be forever
At one with the void but
Slackerdom
Knows
No bounds so I
Bound into the cafe
And peruse the magazines
Looking for Guitar World or Guitar Player
Or somebody stirring a soup with the neck of a guitar, anything
But up stomps a misanthropic
Attractive 18 year old girl
Who probably has
Father issues and STD’s and
I see female breasts on the magazines
On the shelves
My di** doesn’t even move and
My eyes avert
Breaking the girl’s heart and
She will go on to bound
Into bars of girls wearing next to nothing
With single-celled plankton hitting on them
Telling them they want an “anal blow job”
Before up, high ahead
Will fly the cold, steel void
With eyes like green photosynthesis
To drop missiles down on our country
He always wanted to be a good kid,
Looked down,
Smiled and scowled,
Carried in his back pocket a seven-foot-tall can of Raid…

When walking down the street in life, it helps to not have a person on your back, says the amateur who’s never carried anybody.