The Rant of All Time: Deep End

Spent.  Done-for.  From prince to worm.  From life to flimsy-whimsy shell.  I figured it out.  All of it.  From birth till death, all of it.  At 32, too.  There is no reason to live, but God.  Who can rely on anything?  You have your mother and father and siblings and wife and husband and children and friends--they all abandon, in the tears and dust of death.  Put a diamond ring on Job and Job still brains his way to the stars.  But he is still crawling on his belly with the creeping things.

Why the fuck do I even tell you?  I hate it all.  The good moments are nothing in comparison to the bad moments.  Other people are windows into mirages of myself.  Money intertwines us all.  Fucking satanic currency slithers.  You are branded like cattle.  I am branded too, in the wasteland.  Eliot, you fuck.  What are these noble ideas I was taught?  Tell me!

I see no nobility but maggots and I feast on the maggots like a gnome.

What the fuck was I thinking?  But I figured it out. No distractions can blind me any more to the illusions of the godawful truth of an enslaved world.  Falling from grace left and right.  What tit have I been sucking on all my life?  What vodka can I drink to death?  What film will take me somewhere else?  What cruise will show me what I don't know already?

I don't even need to know the news anymore.  I don't need to know what's happening over there, across the globe.  Or which person will sell themselves for gold next.  Men and women are whores.  We all are whores.  That is existence.  Name your price and you will dance to Stalin, you will gas Jews, you will promote your ego, you will sweep turds off my feet, you will service the cock of Satan, for money.  And death is the only ticket out of this hell.

There is nothing before.   Nothing after.  The Greeks and Romans knew this.  The ancients knew this.  Shakespeare and a hell of a lot of other cocksucking noble yinny/yangy phonies knew this.  Go fuck yourself, philosopher.  Go shovel the shit off a soldier's grave.

I can't take it any more.  Justice, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: let's give it a shot!  No one can escape slavery.  Once or twice a year slaves purge themselves in the cakewalk of their own minstrel show.  That's what's the essence of all art--The Minstrel Show.  Paint your face black.  Paint your face white. Fuck the nearest whore and plop out offspring.  Teach them that love is a rainbow that is pretty.  Teach them that life is fair but unfair.  Teach them to earn that dollar to make it.  And then teach them to escape to an underdeveloped nation to paint their face brown.  And smoke their escape.  Watch the Minstrel Show everywhere.  Treat people with the illusion they wish to be treated.

The Golden Rule: treat others with the illusion you wish to be treated, you fucking phony.  You're all fucking phonies.  Readers, shut your eyes and go to Science Fiction Land where the Galaxy is far far away.  And the Atom is so profoundly small small away.  E=MC Squared, my ass.  All of humanity is a parasitic blunder.  Tribes of families sucking the life out of each other.  Tribes of nations blowing each other.  Germany, blow Israel.  Russia, blow China.  Mexico, blow the US.  The US, blow Canada.

I fucking hate myself, get it.  And this is the hell we all share.  Why delude children so they can get it in the ass?  Feed them pills.  Flunk them from "Language Arts" and Math and Science and Anthropology.  Give them As for taking notes on how to kiss Satan's ass.  "Shelter them."

Kids, the first thing you need to know is that getting on your knees to suck Satan's cock is ok, so long as you confess to the priest, so long as you keep that hellion cheer about you, in snarky, snide remarks, and have a whopping smile at the blinding sun.

Every day is the same day.  Until it ends.  And there will be no symphony or grand opera or Horace and Homer elegies spoken over you, Jesus won't revive you to Lazarus, no old old friends dropping all that they have to weep at your coffin and grave stone and ashes.  Wake up.  You live, you die.  There is no such thing as happiness.  No such thing as happy moments or sad moments.  There is only existence, pure simple raw existence.  And you want to fuck your neighbor as bad as the testaments won't allow you to.  You are raw and wild.  You were meant to kill and eat.  Nothing separates you from that crow near you, as you read Poe.

All great minds transmit information.  And that information is the conclusion from giants that came before.  And therefore, you are but shit of data.  And your data concludes you need to have a family, be good, eat healthy, reach for the stars, and give your soul over to that .99 cents.  You are fucking brainwashed by EVERYTHING, you fuck.  No wonder why some loose cannons shoot their brains out.  Shoot others out.  Molest their own families.  Molest their own minds.  Publish or perish.  No wonder why they struggle with the ideas of souls and morals and "evolution versus God"  "Creationism versus Scientific Method."  Not because people are idiots, but because they are brainwashed and fucking confused about how they should be brainwashed, how they should brainwash themselves.  Which brainwashing suits your fancy, you phony.

We all fear the day we are naked before the massive death.  Every judgement and gossip we see and hear is but a reflection of the last moment of our own self review, our own inventory, and that alone will be our trace.  Otherwise, there is nothing but the Demiurge, the Creator, the Vishnu, the God, the Opposite of Evil, the thing you don't want in this world, the Author of you and me.

And who the fuck am I?  One bus ticket shy from curtains.  One modern persona, the nutjob made by you and you and you, all of the phoniness from all the ends of the earth.  From the codified laws on how not to live to the unspoken street ways to get by.  I am shit creek.  I eat your shit food.  I smoke your shit cigarettes. I drive your hunk-a-junk glory wagon.  I read your shit words.  I look at your shit photos.  Just sit on the toilet and make a life out of it, earn that satanic currency to feel good about earning that satanic currency, so you can feel like the picture of a sailor on your fucking arc, the picture of a race car driver in your fucking slave mobile.

No one gives a damn.  Once pushed to the mode of survival, where are your virtues?  Where are your morals?  Where are your pizza crusts?

So smoke that joint.  Read trash.  Care about green things.  Guilty-pleasure your way through commercials and brainwashing mechanisms.  Let the politicians be figureheads for the banks, which have all your souls in chains.  Just count the 1s and 0s in the program of your existence and by the time you have reached the end of your program, you'll know that your bones are nothing.  Your jazz is wind.  Your poetry is windy wind.  Your suicide is a blessing to no one and your survival is a bleeding to everyone.

Feedback, shit.

I am irrelevant in the face of God. And damn me if he may, but at least he'll know that all the sins I ever did were to see what the fuck this was all about.

Married...with Children, Revisited

Graffiti tags in a litany of 1-2-3 liners, the banana peel under the heel of Job,

the face a menace of cheeks, Dangerfield squints, chewing teeth, shades of balding,

the Americana tie and rolled up sleeves, newspaper under the arms after the flush,

the same episodic joke of a man over and over, in the wit of his vulgar domesticity,

the never-win, but works out, the cry of food, shelter, and pawned playboys,

and the fat woman sings her shoe is a different size, Al Bundy,

this Al Bundy, this watcher of crap on TV, hand in pants,

this Al Bundy, this high school dream footballer, with 3 touchdowns in one game,

Al Bundy, the lover, the weeper, the mourner, the victorious,

this Al Bundy standing at the barbeque with mittens and chef hat,

this Al Bundy, who helpless in the faces of those around, digs sanity

as family, friends, neighbors, professionals, dignitaries, scoff at him,

this Al Bundy comes home and asks the old world for dinner, pauses, is not surprised

when it isn’t served, every third minute the show arrives.

And when ex-homecoming queen Peg, pink bowling tights, 50s hyperbolic red hair,

sits at home, always a cig, always a bon-bon, always a mockery of herself

and the feminist revolution she spins, never cooking an egg, never doing what women once

were supposed to do, pleasantly rubs the Panamanian statue for lottery winnings,

Peg, the receptive to the atomic heat,

Peg, the experienced wife, with a retort for a depraved world,

Peg, the committed to the pathetic man, committed with cartoonish smiles,

and rolling nods, and sideway glances,

Peg, the life of once or twice a week, implied by the minute hand on a clock,

Peg, the screeching shrew meant for Al, a trashy pair they make of the TV screen,

with an invisible wink that reveals the ruse for the score of their marriage,

a caricature relationship of happy-go-lucky desperation, way past the hill

and into the cities of holy masquerade,

the tragicomedy of the blind king and blind queen,

and the side you are on is never dull as the same joke unfolds.

Enter the exhibition are the children: Kelly and Bud, iconic, frivolous, reflecting

a generation just learning to forget to read, learning to use remotes,

Kelly, dear cat of ditz, the lust of popularity and the slut of the populace,

Pumpkin, who doesn’t know when the jokes on her,

yet wields the baton at patriarch and matriarch, can’t spell “A,”

but consistent to full capacity of her prowling charms,

this Kelly, the accidental instigator solving minor problems, with air-head precision,

this Kelly, 90s dressed rockstar living in the 80s, blondeness wakes

as she places her hand to her head to worry,

Kelly, dear lover of the random ooze and meat, dregs and misfits

out of the carnival image of punk and metal scenes,

dear Kelly, daughter swinging in the web of nobody caring,

and reactive without cares in the world,

and older sibling in the rivalry of who is played more,

Bud, Bud, backseat smart, suave pervert,

twirp with no compunction, piping in truth here and there,

the son of no identity but the father of his own hand,

here Bud is drilling a hole to peep,

there Bud is pickpocketing the bully,

here Bud is selling Al to the neighborhood children,

there Bud is punching line after line into the skull of the dim,

the schemer Bud, the butt of his pubescent id,

the clown Bud, Al’s Dodge dressed in brand new clothes each year,

Bud, Bud, one bus ticket away from strip club promoter,

an amateur at everything he does, Bud the pro dog for one dollar,

and cuing needed segments and guts comes the dog, Buck,

a moral code underlying, to revolt his master, the Bundys,

as if to know their rootless, fruitless starvation

is of their own device, and Buck won’t be part of it, this Buck,

this dog that reverses Lassie’s trust and loyalty,

Buck Bundy witnesses where dogs dare,

Buck Bundy, trained to be untrained, always exiting stage left.

And under the Sisyphean merry-go-round that is Married…with Children,

where sweat stains in V-necks and power flushing toilets

and ovulations are puppet strings,

under all the why-me, and God-why, and who-cares,

a No-Exit sign is in the real laughter, as each cast member pauses.   

  

Lamentation

                                                            I.

Born up, below.

Dollar bills float in a stream of piss along the Ohio River

and I can’t imagine a Founding Father.

Systemic matrices bind the survival of so many, so many Whitmans,

but who can say Walt Whitman anymore?  Who dares?

This stripper on my lap

is the wife of the pimp in the back, lumps of semen outright.

Dark hours in the coal mines.  Rubbing together kindling to escape into fire.

And illusory flicks of headlights,

seen with 3-D glasses,

worth more than me,

aborting the youth, one youth at a time.

There is no corruption but me, in a holocaust I caused,

in a guilt where guilt is all, in a guilt where psychotic aims, indecisive

yet prove to know, grammar of the masses.

                                                            II.

No better than the cigarette that kills me, I never find the Jesus of Nazareth,

as the prayers fly above me, like fireflies, reaching

reaching the god of every soul’s surrender. 

But how to kneel on the bum on the park bench?

How to place my palms together, in the shit storm Lear sat in?

How to say aloud, let alone sing, praise or forgive or redeem,

when I will have to drag these bones to the dust?  And, worse, witness

the dyings of my parents, friends, partner—how can I beg

for a life worth living, as I can’t stand straight can’t

stand on feet, use utensils.

                                                            III.

I shoulda been an ancient humanoid

before Adam, way way before the half-life of bones,

way before Ice Ages,

way way back when the panacea was rock and teeth and trees and fruits,

and creeping and hunching and climbing,

and paranoid of giant creatures.

I shoulda walked when no Jesus or Hell or Heaven or God or Moses

or Civilization was HERE.

I shoulda been eaten by tears.  

Economics and Unempirical Realization

Often I have noticed the thin veneer of service industry workers and blue collar workers.  I have friends from all classes (except the 1%).  And it dawned on me this very day, as a writer, poet, self-proclaimed money-hater, that what is, perhaps, behind this thin veneer of smiling bank tellers, smiling coffeehouse workers and movers, is essentially a modern dilemma.

What I mean by this, is that years ago, we were an agrarian/industrial nation (America), and that the Protestant and Self-Reliant (Emerson, of course) ethics were not questioned.  But we live in a very modern climate where the weather is very rough and unsteady.  We no longer are the superpower we were after WWII.  We no longer build things ourselves, but are outsourcing the "builders" or workers that our very products we wear, eat, sleep on, and most everything depend on.

So, what do we have, technology, service, health care, and education.  While these are our staple "goods," they do not have roots like wheat or iron like a hammer.  They are dressed up service industrial models, and if you develop websites or nurse a patient or tutor a student, you probably will find that it is not unlike a business transaction, in which service is employed.

Class divisions fascinate me, because, in a lot of ways, people reveal themselves through their class, and this got the ball rolling and the guitar riffing for the ideas that are to follow.  They relate with above in the sense that America has not only hit a global crisis, but it has hit a psychological one as well.

Example:

I was having a cig today outside a mall, when a man carrying a board--to build more onto the mall--said "excuse me, sir."  And it answered all my class-system understandings.  For my readers, I can't help but let you know that I grew up in an upper-middle class family, in a rather poor town.  I even dressed down when I could to hide this fact, but you can't hide class.  It's just there: in the language even.

Why did this dawn on me?  Here we have someone who probably did not love his job, but loved the FACT he had work and made money so he could do whatever he was going to do the rest of the week.  I grew up in a generation that felt (I believe it was my generation) that we could be astronauts, Presidents, Indian Chiefs, whatever we wanted to be, so long as we loved what we were doing.  And perhaps, 50 or 20 years ago, this was just dandy.  Now, no longer.  Now, we live in a crisis, not only of the sort that is global in scope, but personal as well.

In the maturation process, we find out that survival is first, then goals can be achieved. But when I look around, what I see is a psychological dimension that is very unlike the kind I was raised to believe.  This psychological model is not entrepreneurial, it is not start-up.  If you want to start something, you have to use your imagination, but the imagination is a pipe dream to the realist.

Survival is the bread.  Now, there is no butter for the bread.

The economic crisis, beyond my scope of understanding I know, has all but resigned people to their class and to Loving the Fact they have a job and can make ends meet.  This is very much like the Great Depression, as I see it.  Times are so bad, in a way, that, the spirit of liberty and pursuit of happiness are no longer pursued but a backdrop on which we stand.  On which we hope the day will not come where we are on the street with our family.

Perhaps, these are my realizations in the maturation process, perhaps these are ordinary "you gotta do what you gotta do" type of "It is what it is," but it is very sad.  And the drudgery I have seen now makes more sense.  Because in the back of that pizza kitchen, the pizza kid is smoking a joint.  Because after the photographer puts down her camera she gets lost at the theater.  Because, at the end of the day, the drunk and addict fend for change, just to escape a very real phenomenon; that is, the loss of stability and security in not only their lives, but the organizations around them.

Just about every corporate scheme and tiny organization can be bought and sold, jobs being on the line every second.  So that the corporate or worker monkey can keep the banana on his nose for the boss who has a banana on his nose, and so on.  The thin line between something staying together and falling apart is a simple as time and damage.

We are all on "thin ice."  And who knows what the leaders will do and say, who can statistically model the answer?  I don't know.  But the ethical model is no longer the same.  Dreams come from the pipe.  And the real story is the fact that fear drives us all to flip that burger, fire that person, sell our souls every fucking day--and anyone who doesn't sell out has enough money to wiggle around the world.  Even though they don't know, they are still slaves to the fascist system, stemming from this corruption known as currency, I say.  That may sound belligerent and unschooled, but from top to bottom and bottom to top. it is always a smiling green president staring you in the eyes.  And we may ask ourselves, who really has any life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.