.

I pop my fist up at the thought of “government”…
In wanting to sing a song,
I am having a song sung to me.
And it is a song that knows it’s bad,
Like the derelict given voice
In a cancerous era.
.
And now as a moth
Climbing along walls
All I ever wanted was progress,
And more of it,
So as the infinitesimal achievements of man
Emerge before me,
I will separate all 74 people in this crowded room
And not step on any heads,
Wondering, then,
If progress like math songs
Is truly equality,
Or just this bended knee.

Animal mission
When malls lay silent for Christmas
And ices matte the bridges and skyscrapers
Laughing at urgency
She says things in a mocking,
A receptive cockatoo ensigned in
Missions of reductions,
To look past,
Always past,
Around the backs of the naked pine trees
Which keep turning
As if to hide their plainness and
Who would be the new slow transfer,
To fumigate pride down an
Anthemic exit through the fingernails and
Turn off
The machine

Your kindness,
Like a disease,
Makes tinny flatulation
With swatches
Then
.
To nestle
Themselves
Amidst the floor boards
And we wonder
Will the apocalypse be beautiful
Or is this it already

I think of it all,
Like the still,
Endless
Days in Colorado,
Partly cloudy
Days
Back in Indiana
Walking around the
County City Building
With a fat Mexican
Practically
Screaming at me,
There’s nothing here for you,
Your very existence, and slightest manifestation of strife,
Is predicated on intricate paradigms of transgression
Constructed by the most beautiful country in the world
Where my computer couldn’t seem to hum loud enough…
I think of all the torture,
All the paintings,
Wanting to gore out
Every corpuscle in my pancreas
And examine for one single cell meiosis
Which might have enjoyed Nickelback or Korn,
I think of the next petulant homeless person
I’ll see on the street,
Unavoidably, and I think of
Their expedited certainty.

We were walking down that one random street, again. We didn’t even know what was on the street. It was just sort of the walking down it that appealed to us. And this was what we knew deep down, in our inner souls. It was like what God would do if he were fastened down to earth, but in a pedestrian (underwhelming, that is), guy-who-just-got-out-of-church-and-had-been-bored-in-there sort of way.
There it came again, pretty much always — another person piping mad like a steam engine making ramshackle your reality. Behind us, we could almost still sense the buzzing of all those neon lights, as if even they were in flight, remaining on the forgotten block of toys and mice. Deeper, and deeper, we sunk into the homeless man’s eyes who passed us, being seared by his need, basic and humanitarian, and then his animalism, wild, mischievous, uncouth and true.
We looked at each other, and we suddenly both seemed too big for our bodies, or like an avenue in our hearts had become obstructed by fathoms of goo and mire, like something impenetrable and that you’ll never get to see over — it was like the feeling that the sun could never burn bright enough, in 1,000 years, to erase all the hate, spite and disuse populated in our own town. And then we got to wonder, even if some photosynthesis were to take place, like some constant beacon harvesting peace and prosperity, would that even be enough.
To our left, and down the road, we looked, leaving it for the gun blasts. Night fell upon the town, with storekeepers sweeping in fronts, with television sets turned on in gusts of envy, and with an anger so deep in our fingernails and toes that language would never be the same again. Then, within the eminent eyes of one young girl twirling bubbles, or one welfare mom glaring African sun from a porch stoop, we would again see the immateriality of things, knowing accomplishment only in the impossible, in oblivion.

It will have been the land of 10,000 bit tongues,
Tattooed more colors than is even possible
With life deescalated to a street address war
More quickly than the paradigm Post will ever report,
.
The land of eating your own throw-up
Behind barbed wires of invisible hate,
Each day devoted to finding a secret,
Finding a way around
Reality,
Around moth-like buzzings to the light
Around each other.
.
The eyes cast down
In accordance with the rain.

How foolish my conversation with the sun is,
Now,
That it should be emulating my movements,
Showing me, just by suggestions,
What I did 17 February’s ago
Apparently so steadfast but which
Had seemed so commonplace and hopeless
As I was staring at the gravel knowing
Only dusty straightaways.

* No EVEN MORE idiotic opinions were harmed in the writing of this blog post. They just weren’t mentioned at all.

..

“The system is fu**ed.”
This is something I hear with a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters. Just the other night, I was in a bar discussing politics with this guy who’d professed being in favor of Sanders, and he kept saying things like “Things have to change.” I asked him why, and he told me to look at things from a historical perspective. I asked him what point in history, and he goes, Rome. It’s like, what? That has to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. First of all, Rome isn’t even a point in time, it’s a place. Second of all, he’s attempting to make sense of our current political “quandary” (by the way most Americans do want Obama back, including me) by incorporating the most obtuse, LITERALLY ancient reference anyone could think of. I understand that Sanders ran on essentially a platform of legalizing marijuana, and I do believe this is a good idea. I also happen to feel that Mr. Sanders desperately needs to SMOKE some marijuana, seeing as he was like easily the most mental individual I’ve ever beheld in my life. Anyway, presupposing that it is a good idea to legalize marijuana, the proper thing for that dude in the bar to say would have been “We really need to legalize marijuana,” not “everything has to change,” especially seeing as we are right on the heels of a revolutionary health care plan’s institution about which I have not heard a single complaint. What’s more, it was initiated by a black dude. It’s ideal melting-pot American progress. Oh, our system is fu**ed? Well, then, it shouldn’t be any problem getting all these immigrants to leave, should it? Has it ever occurred to people that PEOPLE BLOW OUT OF A PIG’S A**HOLE? I mean Donald Trump didn’t elect him-fu**ing-self, last time I checked.

..

“A high prevalence of rape cases increases the significance of one isolated instance of rape.”
And now for everybody’s favorite class, which apparently nobody has taken… high school economics! You see kids, when something is everywhere, all the time, like, let’s say, “iron,” it’s not a precious metal, but rather something cheap as dirt you can use to make sailing ships, etc. Similarly, if an EVENT is everywhere, and it takes place all the time, then it’s time not address one isolated occurrence of said event, but rather the overall, cultural reasons why this is happening. Is it REALLY so unlikely that it has to do with pop music like Lil’ John and Taio Cruz that could make John Quincy Adams sneeze?

..

“A teacher having sex with a student is like.. the WORST THING EVER!”
Ya know, I’m not even sure how they punish these things, but I know they must, ‘cause I hear about it from like way across the country, and the teacher who got caught is usually pretty in stitches. This poor female teacher was like in tears about getting in trouble for it… I dunno if people understand this concept or not, but you can’t actually RAPE a guy in conventional sex, if you’re a girl. There are biological functionalities preventing that from happening. Guess what, folks: sex isn’t going anywhere for a while, it might as well grab a Snickers, and the only way we could formulate it to where everybody chooses a PERFECT mate of their exact age would be like some futuristic Brave New World thing. And I don’t think any of us want that. Don’t answer that, by the way.

..

“All minorities are not only the same, but they’re actually also the exact same people, with the same social security numbers and everything.”
This is almost too stupid to even believe: The New Yorker, a magazine which once upon a time I respected, published this blurb by this D.C.-area teacher. The blurb not only purported Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as a main topic, but even FEATURED A PICTURE or Ellison, right at the top of the piece. Then, the story proceeded to be all about the teacher’s immigrant, Hispanic students. The writer had even claimed growing up to have never thought about immigration at all, and for anyone unfamiliar, the idea of being an illegal immigrant is to actually BE invisible, to hide from the cops, whereas black people are in the exact opposite situation — they were shipped here against their will, and now face a situation of difficulty in affirming their identity against a vacuous, apathetic backdrop, or so I assume. By the way I have a stalwart pet peeve of this sort of gratuitous flaunting of stock Ralph Ellison’s photo. I don’t believe an author should be judged by his or her appearance; it’s what’s on the page that counts, and the real sad part happens to be that Invisible Man is easily the best book ever. Or, it was.

..

“Vinyl records always sound better than CD’s.”
Let me preface this please by saying that I once heard Neil Young and Stephen Stills’ “Long May You Run” at my mom’s crib on vinyl and it was darn near a life-changing experience. But this was an analog recording. Many modern albums were made digitally, such as Beck’s Odelay courtesty of the Dust Brothers, and then go for like $23 on gyp-joint sites like Vinyl Me, Please. Plus, if you complain about hearing digital music, don’t you think you’re kinda just an a**hole? I’m just sayin’. I mean, some countries have like dysentary and hepatitis epidemics to worry about. That’s all.

..

The show Portlandia
This show makes multiple sclerosis look funny. It’s like wow, you know, usually when you take a premise of a town where only like EVERYBODY AND THEIR COCKER FU**ING SPANIEL wants to move to, throw in high-budget production of attractive, dancing women in sweaters and some aesthetically erudite (notice the ironic word choice there) cast, the result would be something remotely desirable. Or… WATCHABLE. But then, we don’t live in a fair world, we live a real world, like Jimmy Carter said. Which, granted, is why we have hipsters in the first place.

..

“White people can’t like rap music.”
I hate to pull your hems and flip your wigs, righteous Brothers of the Sun, but black people invented rock and roll and jazz, too. One of the more easily spotted logical fallacies out there, no doubt. Not saying black people have an easy plight in this country, or that they don’t deserve full credit for their artistic contributions, but still, it is a logical fallacy.

May the sun cradle your hopes
And exhilarate your pores,
And may you never
Have a care
In the world.
.
I have
Shown
You the ditch I dig,
The mines I probe,
And the chasm I keep,
And
.
Somehow
Within you
All the electric lights
Have fed you
And bled themselves
With true colors,
.
I see your smile in a photo
And I turn my hand up to the sky,
Electrical clouds waving
Like faces formed from chemical fragments
In night rays.

That’s something that’s hard for everyone —
To quell the absolute expungement of energy
In favor of something
That would actually make sense
If you were to look at the larger scope of the world,
The globe,
The blues,
The greens,
The million waiting eyes
Watching on YOU,
As the axes fly on the TV screen.