“Artificial Lives and the Only Constant.”
There is an ambivalence that haunts me now,
Ambidextrously, too, I juggle these unfocused feelings,
Though I know love is true and mine is real,
this is the only constant.
The Taming of the Shrew, but who is the rodent?
Ideals are tainted left and right,
by dried up old crustaceans and lizards,
sold in bulk by mindless buzzards,
who hawk belief with their merchandising pleas,
I’ll never follow anyone who leads
because their family said so.
I’ll never follow anyone who ever speaks,
in pleasing paranoia lies. I’ll laugh when they are dead
and covered in horseflies.
I can’t find the answers anywhere, I probably never will,
Blocked by the insipid drone of what has become of journalism,
my mind grasps for all that is left open to me.
In the texts of those who everyone says are so different than me,
I grasp the only clues and then forget. Too badly flawed, am I.
Summer drifts along and winter thaws, they pass
like those fleeting truths; too fast to hold on to.
Don’t step on the grass say the policemen.
Then they shoot me for forgetting when.
Fantasy is too literal, escapism is too real.
It’s a disease of a society,
that wants to change but is not allowed.
Behind those flickering computation screens,
Lays another set of hopeful young eyes,
too tired to try to get up and fight
for things that are too distant and obscure.
I never feel like anything I briefly know
is ever truly assured. It’s always attached,
to some Jim Crow lie, some lyposuction sky
of true artificial life. That’s what most
of us are living. You gotta try not to.
Get up and don’t be afraid to sing.
Broken things are always the most beautiful,
if they have no chance of being fixed.
Martyrdom is all its said to be, and more.
Wash the floor with gasoline and
take your daily supply of morphine; derivatives
that’s what it all amounts to.
All I can do is seek, seek, seek and hold
on to that one constant. And everyone else
they just speak, tweak, and act so pathetically weak.
Join me and remember art and love.
Dance until the morning comes.
“Part 2.”
Tell me, old friend, when you go to sleep at night
do you plan all this madness that you cause by light?
Tell me again, because I didn’t hear you right,
and I know how much you like to hear yourself speak,
Just don’t wait for my applause.
Though you might get it if you pay off enough geeks,
All the grandmas and social tough guys will love you if you imprison enough freaks.
Tell me, my old friend, what happened those years that I was gone?
Did all that meaningless sex numb you to what you used to be looking for?
Or was it all the free coke dumped on you by all those mishmash pillfiend lobbyists?
Was it them who dragged you into the dregs of the political garbage dump?
Now you do jumping jacks for any man who will slip some greenbacks down your underwear,
While everyone you cared about is living in ranchhouse shacks,
Separated from you by rusty, suicide traintracks,
And all those people you condemn as “wetbacks,”
You’ll sell your ideas to the common man,
And then tell him he bought the cheapest insurance plan,
When his son is dying in a hospital cancer land,
Nobody is getting better, we’re all getting sicker.
And it’s because of people like you,
That we’re all gonna die in the worst way,
Remember when we used to trip in the dark,
and listen to liquid guitars sing like the pouring rain,
and wish that everyone could feel this way?
Well it ain’t ever gunna be like that,
It’s gonna be like that time, when we were a little older,
that I showed you the same place in your mind,
And you cried and said you were scared of the black.
You should’ve been, because that was your heart.
You couldn’t get back to the good place,
The place we shared all night til dawn,
You were too far gone, down, down, down,
Too far gone and too much down,
Looking down at the people you thought you were better than,
but you weren’t you just thought your ideas were too much for this town,
You bought into the death chants,
And wished you had went to the high school dance,
instead of watching the Aurora Borealis
behind your eyelids with us,
while glorious jazz played on the little black radio.
You wanted to be part of that high-strung money-worship cult,
And now you’ll pay the price
and watch your senses burn
when your miniscule morality turns
completely dead. And this time when you eat that gel tab, your face will melt,
like all the innocents who will die to nuclear fallout,
because of your inhuman greed,
and you’ll know you sold out.
“Part 3.”
When the last ray of sunlight is buried,
Beneath the cold, dead earth,
And an everlasting night falls upon these weary lands,
And the once green grass is replaced by a permanent frost,
Those of us left alive on this tarnished silver orb,
Will ponder in the time alloted to us,
Why all of this happened; was it a must?
Did those responsible ever ask,
If we wanted death clouds for a sky?
It never crossed their mind as they rolled,
In their political mud pit; bureaucratic pigsty,
That those of us with open eyes,
Might not want to watch our families die,
In useless, oil tantrum deaths,
And then called martyrs and defenders of freedom,
While flag waving poodles pointed furry fingers,
Inflicting guilt on those who raised the most innocent of questions,
The question a child asks when he sees something unjust,
And asks his pa if killing is wrong,
Even though he already knows it ain’t ever right.
If you’re a little older and you ask the same thing
of your governmental patriarch,
You’ll be told you don’t belong. You should get the hell out and don’t return,
until you wear bars and stars for undergarments. And point accusing fingers
at those that sing so-called subversive songs.
Those who ask the question are the enemy.
So the only conclusion is to purge every child who asks if what you’re doing is bad.
Only then will there be no one left but those who are clad,
in good deeds and patriotism.
That’s all we want here, says the hooting owl
as he is interviewed by some brown nosed, brainwashed pundit
who proposes capital punishment for all!
Kill all the lawyers, says the newly elected king.
And everyone else, too! chant his seven deadly sins,
or is it his cabinet who sing.
But as we huddle in our lean-to tents,
In an atomic winter that will never see spring.
We can’t just blame our parents.
We didn’t even raise our fists when the death squads came,
We were already in Europe pretending to be sane,
Walking the streets of Paris with fancy, ivory canes,
Writing junk about revolution from coffee shops and cafes,
And watching pansies with hard ons fire automatic rifles,
At dark faced mothers in distant places,
While we claimed to be stifled. We were just cowards.
When the time came we didn’t live up to our words.
The pot had been stirred for naught.
We are just as much to blame,
For this flickering flame.
Now it’s snuffed out.
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