These Things We Call Names...

Whether the bullet's path or the arrow's arc...

Or why we have so many silent moments
between conversations: you give an inch and I drink a fifth.

Another insult makes the whole thing make sense
for just a moment and then we forget the things
we always wanted to say about nothing.

You can have all your wars if I can win just this one battle;
I suppose it says more about me than you.

Spring Poem #1

The void stares back
the thin space between lines and letters
a closer edged knife,
the arc of infinity

numbers belie a truth
behind words without
corresponding reality.

The void stares back at us
tells us we've fucked up,
that the future is now,
we've been waiting for
something that never existed.

the haggard reflection
that greets us in the morning,
the tired visage of afternoon
and the lonely survivor of
another day all point
towards the future.

welcome to the rest of your life...

The Era of Hope is Dead

It has come down to this. Our political system has failed us repeatedly, given us error upon error of common sense. Corporations are considered worthy of the rights of Man, given the keys to the kingdom and the hen house. Without conscience, or remorse (unless monetary) these eyeless, soulless creatures (or cretins) devour everything in sight. K-Mart fucks Martha Stewart Living and produces a new wardrobe. Wal-Mart and Sony Records have a love tyrst, though no surviving albums reach the Billboard Charts. Ronald McDonald has pedophilic urges for the boys and girls desirous of his throbbing Happy Meals, while Burger King gives blow-jobs to migrant workers in the fields.

Life takes Visa now, but still dabbles in cold, hard cash and overdraft fees. We are little more than grist for the mill, being slowly devoured by creatures with little more than a board of directors for a brain. These heartless beings deploy marketing campaigns to convince us of their benign intentions, masking their lascivious smiles and leering eyes with warmth and compassion. Nothing is safe. All is lost. All is vanity and the presumption of fairness is a ruse used to offer us a chance at salvation and a house with the white picket fence and two and a half kids, when in reality we are bought and sold on the NYSE like so many products and commodities. Our futures, the meaningful lives we were meant to be living, are traded along with petroleum reserves and oranges.

But don't worry: Hope is on the way. A new shining face, another rising star in the political realm will save us all from the demons of the night. But lo, he is fated to go supernova, his message of change splurted out on the sheets like so many drunken revelers at an orgy. Brand D and Brand R scramble for control of the reins of power, while the tired, the poor, the downtrodden become ever more so. Little changes, but the faces and the names. The rules stay the same and that old refrain from the Who wafts over the air: "Meet the new boss; same as the old boss."

And still, we make up new myths by which to live, giving undue influence to charlatans and hacks from Alaska, real Americans in pickups driving around the back country roads of the real America. And each night we tune in for more of the same from the big three corporate news agencies telling us what to think, what to believe. There is no hope for us, the damned. Nothing and no one can save us from ourselves. We are lost.

2010...

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times...
barely had one year ended,
than another began.

We smoked cigarets (sic),
coughing up phlegm, quit smoking
in order to see the sun rise fifty years hence,
and died of colon cancer in the evening.

We rose up against our oppressors,
only to find that we were both
the oppressor and the oppressed.
Small nips off the bottle gave us
warmth and chilled our souls,
waved away the fear of tomorrow
and ushered in the enemy while we lay sleeping.

We dreamt dreams of the past and the future,
while forgetting ourselves in the present.
We left secret messages to our future selves
and drunken screeds on the answering machines
of former lovers begging forgiveness
for our past lives, and in the end
we had only ourselves to blame,
to hold in contempt.

There were two paths before us:
the lonely road ahead
and the lonely road behind.
Each seemed lonely.

And in the middle of the night,
while so many lay sick or dying,
while so many found salvation
at the end of a rope, or a gun,
or a tailpipe, or the bottom of a bottle of pills,
or just the bottom of a bottle,
I awoke and realized all was vanity.

All the tyrsts, the drunken fumbling for genitalia,
the one-night stands, the wet pavement
in the morning of the day after,
the little arguments over scrambled eggs and toast,
the minor heartaches and hangovers
of some three hundred odd days
were really nothing more than childish tantrums
and a yearning to be young again.

All the petty disputes, the minor catastrophes,
even the weather formed only fading memories
of a year in passing: little more than grains of sand
in the hourglass of Time.

Only our laughter and mirth kept us alive
while the sun returned and Orion
crawled slowly across the sky
hunting the Future.

So we wake up to another decade
and decide to live more and fuller lives,
regardless of terrorists intent on blowing us up
and sending us to Allah,
or the intelligentsia who tell us how the world
is and what stocks to invest in.

We wake up to the first day of our lives
nearly ten years separated from 9/11,
from the rampant fear and loathing
of a xenophobic culture bent on repeating the past
and all of its mistakes and missteps,
stumbling towards the dustbin of Time.

Dinosaurs, anyone?

Winter Thoughts

The rain is falling again today. Brief spells of quiet broken by a thousand drops of rain falling on the ground outside my window. Maybe it will rain again tomorrow. And the day after. Who knows? The light outside my window reminds me of something. I can't remember; the past, maybe, or the future, or something slowly taking shape in my thoughts. I am not privy to it, whatever it is. Only the rain falling outside my window offers me any comfort. And what comfort does the rain offer? Little, I think; less than a cup of water to one in the desert. Still less than fresh air to one swallowed up by the earth. Maybe it offers us the comfort of washing away the past, gently eroding the lines of our fates tangled and woven together in knots.

Just as I decide there may be some comfort to the rain, it stops, dispelling me of the notion that the earth cares about us, the way dogs care about fleas. Deep inside my shallow skull a thought stirs, stretches its limbs and returns to sleep.

How old we grow during the long, rainy seasons. How like the dead we become upon waking and again upon our descent into sleep. How tired and sullen our eyes shine out of our skulls as the grim morning meets our gaze. Each morning and night is the same struggle to live, to embrace the cold certainty of our fading dreams and shattered hopes. Each morning brings us closer to something, to death, to life, to that ineffable frontier beyond the simple acts of living and dying. With each passing day and night, the cycle of the Earth's orbital dance along the trajectory of its fate, we become hardened to the mysteries of simplicity. We grow from infants to adulthood in the flash of an eye, barely registering the passage of individual thoughts and the span of years separating one moment from the last.

Legion are those who suffer under the oppressions of their own making, finding solace in the dregs of wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays, in that silent, drunken sleep without dreams from which they emerge more exhausted, closer to the despair hanging palpably around their hearts. They can neither run nor turn to face their fears. They look to the ground for signs of dawn and tread carefully across the wreckage their lives have become only to find a wall of mythical proportions stretching out in either direction. There, they finally turn and face their fear, smiling gently and cruelly at them out of their own reflections.

The rain has stopped. It will start falling again, but for now it has stopped and the world glistens with the same possibilities it had while the sun shone down upon us before this interminable winter of our dissolution settled into our thoughts.

And this too shall pass. As the sun riseth, so does it set...

(insert sinister, evil laughter here...)

At the dawn of a new day, while the record skips, and the moods attack us (here being the royal "We"), we stave off another defeat, another chance to allow history to continue on without us. Have you seen tomorrow? Have you seen what will come?

I have a guess...simple, really: Time marches on without no man.

What is new? What is old? What will be? Easy questions with hard answers. There is a place...somewhere between North and No North, in between the moment and the future...

Somewhere...

R3

That's Funny

It's funny how the feeling comes and goes, the heat of its fires and the fierceness of a cold akin to death; the mind subtely stumbling along composing verses to the wind and no one. It is similar to the allegory of footprints in the sand and a limirick about a man from Nantucket, something about going for a walk and falling flat on your face because your legs have been cut off. Probably drunk. While else does a man with no legs try to walk? And a writer with no thumbs? That's also funny.

What's even funnier is my lack of concern. There are words, some dark and evil, and others ancient and true written into the very fabric of reality. These words have a certain amount of power to describe what is written for all to see. The slow churning of the universe does not concern itself with us. As a friend so aptly scrawled across my bathroom walls recently in spray paint: "The Universe is old. Time stands still. Fear will always exist. Enjoy the ride." HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA...

The joke continues!