I plugged my arteries up to an auto-tuned IV, maybe now I'll finally win a Grammy

I’m completely and utterly disillusioned by my overwhelming sense of self, in that I masturbate over the written page and vague fantasies of spouting spoken word over the masses with just my lone pair of glasses to set me off from every other too-thick ass with an opinion to broadcast.

I’m consumed and ravaged by my inability to place my misshapen face back unto the shelf that’s spilling over with the names of people I meet every day on the street and forget as soon as I thumb to what I need and shut them closed like hollow-books hiding weed. Allegorically, I’m the proverbial camel that breaks their backs without due notice or due diligence or prior concern of the chemical burns I caustically claim and spritz down their spines without care, unaware of the odious breeze that I breathe through their splintered teeth with the ease of a complacent minge-bag.

It’s true, I’m you too, not U2, but a quasi-modo sized lack of comprehension for when my skin stops and your head starts, so I’ll treat you like I treat myself which is horribly so and with scabs left after a conversation like I picked at your brain with drawn-out finger nails with fecal matter residue neglected.

And I erect monuments to myself in the break of night under the guise of the moon who I slipped a five to during his lunch hour. Chiseled, tone, fit, without care, an icon to myself in the brief interval of time between a jaunt and a leap into the air and I just stand there looking out into a sea of eyes appreciating me and all that I’ve done for the world, in the dream that’s a lot, in real life just enough to qualify for college and progress through an infinitesimal stairway that shrinks with each step like a cheap beggar’s trap.

Reading this when you’re alone and cuddling yourself because no one else appreciates a goat’s cheese sense of smell, well you’re right in the nook of my brain, amygdala to be exact, I’m standing right next to you giggling as you chuckle and massaging cellulose stricken thighs as I watch your eyes flicker from pixel to pixel in an overtly animated method of saying, “I get it!” or “You can come to terms with accepting me back into your life”.

I’m sorry, but I can’t do that for you, and I can’t do it yet without giving my endocrine system time to sweat out the toxins that shake me dead when I shoot up from bed and all the blood rings right to the center of my male-pattern-baldness head that’s beaded with sweat from nightmares of you and George Bush dodging shoes thrown from a chorus of Ringo Starr constellations.

I stumble along bio-connected sentences weaved with the practiced grace of someone who hates himself and begins almost every paragraph with a personal pronoun pronouncement of his desire to fellatiate himself (that’s me!). And I’d sing you the ave maria but I don’t have the chords or the time or the strength or the beard or the tears to divide between increments of I, because I only have enough me for me, sorry WE but that’s just how it is in the land of the Z.

I’ll stop chuckling when I’m dead, and I’ll stop chortling when I’m fine with where I am in life, so I guess I’ll be laughing until the end of time or the end of my heart’s beats of rhyme in the 4/4 position, as I accept derision from my typical muse of support and confidence in the 747 upright incision. Watch your neck, put up your tray, quit smoking today, eat a gallon of vegetables at the dispense of a salt-lick for your government, and remember what’s outside is inside, and if you’re true you’ll know that all doesn’t glow and all doesn’t shine, but in the end, that’s fine.

It really is.

Providence is porridge

They made an adjudication to execute an abjuration of the post’s religious dichotomy, leaving only the judaic infrastructure in place. It was initially unclear to the penitents as to whether the elimination of their sect was due to an attrition in the judgements of the financial department or the lack of contrition among their various, unflinchingly immoral members. Regardless of any attempts at rescuing the department through stern genuflection with dusty brows beating against the molasses floors, the institution of their faith was deemed didactically inefficient by the school’s board of directing anathema chuckers.

With a seemingly insignificant shove in the direction of the executive’s full with-a-lack-of-use ink-pot, the granny’s record begins to skip in the fervent, hay-wired cognizant manner of a frayed microchip. Poverty-stricken youth jumble down from the clattering roof-tops be-sandeled in decadently cheap attire (the type that will be adopted at your nearest fashion acropolis within the next few years as avant-garde and “risque”) and clamber towards the libations as desperately as the clown seeking mirth. Victuals as food as nourishment as provisions as the nutrients that supply regeneration to friction-bent organisms.

Impetuous actions are delved out like loaves of bread in the Egyptian market to beggars under the guise of forgotten remembrances of a betrayed brother. Joseph the helmsman recognizes the truth behind the emotionally drained tint in their eyes and offers vittles as the least acrimonious form of delaying his pronouncement as the harmonic hermano to the trivially tyrannical troop of surreptitiously avaricious bodkins who plundered the will of their weeping father with a blind man’s bluff.

Even with the 20-20 hindsight of regular reactionary procedures, the evincement that our misplaced modifier of a man has anything but goodwill in his heart is salacious, and, by a degree, supercilious in the vein of hoping to achieve moral dominance over a self-less human being. Although these are said to be entirely chimeric, the truth of the interaction between riddled, hunger-bellied men and princes is that the supplication answered is divine and begs for no remonstrance from critics.

And panned out across generational gaps in social media networking expert communicative regions, the unhindered bits of cinematic reality are displayed with the effulgence of a proclaimed human experience; a conversation struck up between business partners in a Russian bivouac meeting of synergy holds similar semblances of truth as it does for the unwinding youth in an altogether American alleyway puncturing his skin with the modern day muse of dextroamphetamine, a hitherto unknown abuse-material given a phoenix’s resurrection by the all-too-willing hands of a brow-beaten chemist.

Well it’s said that those who imbibe are those who require and desire all that they cannot have in the natural state of things and thus are venturing into the realm of preternatural humanity by inserting their well-beings in the hands of the blood-brain barrier and its ampere productivity. That being said it’s the emoticon that betrays true emotion rather than enunciation. In the ancillary bychances of romantically ideal conversation between disconnected snot-heads we witness the overbearing self-pity that grips at the soul like a tumescent sense of entitlement. Tossing themselves into the premature grave of self-repression and emotional torment like the willow-willed lotus eaters of antediluvian mythology, the twin-figured atavistically-charged consumers of pseudo-science and hipster-entwined beatnik psychology gnash on the fruit of other men’s labor and proclaim that all is purposeless in the relation of a blink.

In the perturbed manner of a cackling mannerism, such as is the vacuous and utterly pithy exhaust-winding that these antagonistically-bent gentlemen crave, the intimately executed sperm relinquishment into softly trodden digestive systems. Stern men call this cumming “inside”. While their beards capture flecks of whatever it is that they have recently acquired at a healthy and organically subsidized food market, heavily rimmed spectacles droop down the fronts of their faces like the indomitably deformed structuralism of El Greco and the infinitely, indelibly seared image of the economics wench brewing cyber-valium to retroactively beat down my fervor.

It’s a situation analogous to the presence of flouride in all major, first-world water systems, when really the hygienic aspect of its chemical structure is largely outweighed by the negative trepidation it engenders in its drinkers, who are content with being unawares of their enthrallment, like sheep clamoring for the enslavement of a farm in fear of a singular wolf. Begging the question of numerical normality, it’s troubling to be struck laconic by an instinctual fear when all the years of progress have shown us our ability to lash out at oppression.

Up to this point in our psychosexual, megalomaniacal theatre of the ubermensch inspired, Hegelian-dependent, Nietzchian love for supercilious domination of underclassmen, we’ve viewed the lurid nose of Jason Schwartzman nearly pierce the LCD barrier of the fourth wall and reality by smashing through Wes Anderson’s auteur visions of the human condition (which is often a derivation of satirically brilliant manifestations of style).

Following that brass-knuckle of modern film to our skulls, we developed a tenuous appreciation for the simultaneous lack of depth in these films and the presence of an altogether radically diametric approach to regurgitating the contents of each character’s persona; by gripping entrances tightly shut and holding their expressionism to a reticent standard, the steely-eyed and oppositely slack-jawed cast are given a breath of life only afforded by the hands of a 21st century Geppetto, cobbling romanticism into each swirl of texture in his production teams’ epidermis.

Directly connected to that node of hypersensitive candor, the paradox of beautifully ignorant cultural ubiquity lends itself to the novel CAA by FD which delves into the psyche of one Ras as he pursues himself in less of a whodunnit and more of a when-shall-I-say-what-I-did-which-racks-me-with-guilt and pushing past that point of admitting culpability would be nearly impossible without exceptional foresight as I’ve only consumed the completed portion of a dictum set by the whip-bearing, melon-capped wench of a cunt who drives at our sore backs like the original malicious men who nearly martyred Moses.

If he was to utter “Let my people go,” or concordantly, “Let my Cameron go,” borrowing directly from the cinematic classic FBDA, she would merely respond with an inherently unknowable and irrevocably harsh instance of a violated will from the penultimate pages of a magnum opus which no one has cared to read but knows is intrinsically treasurable from the first word “BREAKS,” which is printed exactly as typed here and shocks each man who cracks the spine with the comfortable ease of a self-proclaimed lexile champion and puts the text down in a matter of seconds with a florid demeanor and a reexamined sense of fortitude.

Inveigled by an underwhelming idea, the leaders of such an independence movement would be remiss if they hadn’t assumed the position of providing new lessons to the morality of their forefathers and stitching lesions into the collectively unconscious ideology of their ancestors. That is to say it is their duty both to break forth with innovation and also to pump the prime principality of attrition, all while remaining overtly meek to appease their initial followers and secondary campaign contributors (a max of 2,300 is legally allowed).

This is also the amount that the soon-to-be-knighted Sir Matt Damon of the Bostonian province of the United Kingdom offered up to his noble Lord Obama, who is not only currently in precedence as the first black president but also maintains that stereotypical arched dome that is connotative of a particularly incisive wit and brings to mind Moriarty of Arthur Conan Doyle canon. That’s a villainous tag, however, so ignore its presence in this stream of unconsciousness.

As the winter breath crackles under the Bourne-man’s trudging feet, a sense of hypo-patriotism juggles between his internal organs and finally decides to ascend to the heavens in a tribute to both the pederastical Uncle Sam and the pop starlet KP who provided a treatise on the benefits of positive thinking and the adventurous aspect of lugging one’s spirit into the firmament of the heavens.

Instinctively, and with the newly dawned knowledge of one who begins to understand the symmetry of the man who plods around the page in a random progression of advancing schizophrenia and falsely phrased truism, it’s the dichotomy of having to project oneself as intelligent in a world of increasingly succinct identification, all while maintaing a personal flair for the written word and hoping to hold a style, which Ira Glass says is achieved by pursuing the creation of a voluminous amount of work, regardless of its initial quality. I believe he’s completely and utterly correct in his statement that only exponentially expansive amounts of creation can benefit one in the area of pluralistic production, as one begins to delve into the micro-substantive aspects of one’s own work, as opposed to the holistic stoicism achieved by the blubbering lips of the like of Bloom. That is not in disrespect to literary critics, but rather to anyone that attempts to convey a false sense of empathy while deliberately slashing at the aspirations of a knight-glissant.

But who can make sense of Achebe’s criticisms of Conrad’s portrayal of the black man as a savage when really JC was the savage wielding the tom-tom of ensconced emotion set in the backdrop of a jungle invaded by the force of intimidating imperialism. I loved the idea of a novel that explored the theme of an inner-grit that shone throughout the omniscient depravity of man. It’s the same reason that the average man loves to watch television programs about their fellows triumphing under the curious force of oftentimes self-imposed adversity and coming out with a regulation of lessons in one hand and a cudgel of haleness in the other.

Divided across the hearty line of two millenniums and a vast epi-culture of roman numerals composing a sea of eukaryotic cells that plunge into an ocean of calcium and overdose on evolutionary procedures, driven by a primordial monkey on their single-celled backs and hankering for a fix that in the short-term appears to be deprivation but in the decadence of a stretched-out half-mile jog comes full circle as just what the human brain needs to expound its sense of balance in the universe and eschew the aggressive tendencies given to us by our relative reptiles.

Simplistic visions of utopian Mores dash out across the plain of self-expression like the buffalo awaiting to be skewered by healthy minds, only to find that with each consumption comes one less valued idea and that the geniuses who produced them are long-withered and stricken with amnesic illnesses, incapable of satiating the rumbling fervor of readers. Without this perfection comes the bloom of the dystopian vision of soma which seems much more realistic than a society that can service itself to the optimum amount and provide itself with the ideal amount of happiness. These rookeries of fictional bliss come to be superseded by the temporally comatose limpings into the grey realities of an existent tomorrow, filled to the brim with changelings and horrendously mutated governmental structures that are even more horrifying given their close resemblances to our own.

These bashings of standard society, in accordance with the effect of the mass populace achieved in the novels (a typical sense of dysphoric apathy, combined with atheistic theology and a striking inability to cease caring about not caring but lacking the necessary functions to care enough to change), drive towards the real-time purpose of shocking us into realizing just what the Big Brother has in store for the clamoring sheep. Each author who divided his parchment with this ink forgot that as long as we love to live in this world and eat its food by the rules of our leaders, naught but corruption is cultured, and it will be that way until a cataclysmic event shunts our belief systems through a metaphorical window of stained-glass magic realism.

Gladwell punctures other illusions.

She wore her glasses like a helmsman with a lubricated nose. The lenses were always on the verge of tumbling down into the plebeian sub-sector of students with overly animated faces that sent the message of a clamor for knowledge but with brains that begged for the minute hand to collide with an arbitrary increment and release them out into other situations that they love to hate and love to leave.

I wondered when I stared into her faces of sometimes expression but oftentimes regret and I listened to the movement of the heart of the kid that always sat next to me. Pondering about why exactly it was that I yearned to tread the lineation of carpet that would lead me into the tile which would siphon me into the well-constructed doors that served the fiberglass purpose of showing the tiger the zoo’s food-court. Those doors take you to cars and cars take you home and home gives you the time, stress, tension, and impetus to study for the next day of clamoring for an escape and the original intent of bending the wills of others into appreciating our musings on the dreads of the time.

The dregs of swilled tobacco drain out into the foot-pedals of the automobiles that we each earn in a line and the first in line is the most lovable, the last still gains the power but by then it’s a standard that should have been granted at the whim of the planet’s revolution, not at the crest of a financial or cultural yarn. So I stare at the raisin-stain on her left cheek and wonder what the motion of a circular flow chart really means in relation to the daily choices we make in and as a consequence how we react to the scare resources that grow scarcer each day. As she preaches the by-chances of macroeconomics I try to visualize the amount of oil under the crust of earth that shelters the tile, carpet, and the doors, the cages, the jailers, and the perceived prison. It’s like the experiment at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, or some other institution of higher-education we all hope to enter and that have enough fluffy research ability to delve into the psyche of humans and fester in the fungus of truth-diving.

Each legion of professorship holds the flagellant of fascist Catholic political pundits that beg for us to cease being apathetic and grasp for our own opinions, all while telling us what to believe and what flag to burn, which one to pray for, which one to worship to, and similarly how fair, honest, and politically correct we must be to be prim and accepted by the very society that we as a generation constitute the future. Well, if we the students are the bridge that the golden era dough-men and the baby-boomers are using to shuttle themselves into retirement and crash-and-burned pension plans, then why do they hold so much antipathy towards the very concept of our existence and our inevitable success?

I can’t hate the graying woman with the slippery lenses that peers down at us with the recognition of our inner-drive to replace her. To improve her job, utilize all her manifestations for the most possible enjoyment while maintaining the effectiveness of teaching and idea-sharing. I cannot hate her in any sense of the influential four letter adage to madness, but I can use another quatrain of cerebral attachment to describe my feelings for the informative witch that brews cauldrons and tests to chuck at while we duck behind social networks, textual distractions, and the fuel for the hobbies that will define our careers later in life; whether our function in society is to provide cannibinoids to the unnecessarily stressed out masses, to pick up after those that don’t think about who picks up, or to teach those who toss for those who pick up, or to maintain a nine o’clock to five o’clock entering data into computers that laugh at us for having to work then going to a bar after-hours with your buddies that hold similarly useless professions and ganging up on the one who decided to teach those who mock the ones who pick up and secretly throw down bits of their trash onto the tile that connects to the overbearingly warm carpet in the classrooms, lulling each child to sleep and dooming them to pick up after those that negatively consider the ones that pick up as a career choice. It’s all about the grades that you earn on the first day of school.

Regardless of whether these grades affect any sort of GPA or whether not that GPA in and of itself describes the person that is in possession of it (and with the constant stream of pseudo-intellectual fodder that counselors spew at us about the importance of college-acceptance, we are defined by these things), the pertinence in grade-work starts on day one and starts with an initial sense of superciliousness towards our classmates and developing an obsequious need to impress the teacher with mile-per-hour hand shoots that nearly scrape the ceiling with the fervor to answer the question of the teacher who at the time is wondering why they haven’t blown their brains out with the luger that they bring everyday in their lunch sack and stare at next to their lumpy peanut-butter sandwiches as the children thrust each other in the playground and establish the social power-structure within their specific school district until the day that senior year ends, and even then the placement of an individual within the vacuous importance of his classmates will always affect how said person acts in college and whether they choose to imbibe toxicity every morning before class or whether they retreat into a tangle of cloth, paper, glued spines, and hysterically pathetic situational comedies revolving around the lives of anyone but the person viewing them in a wake of dependence on escapism.

I don’t need drugs to be an addict, or alcohol, which any stoner will tell you is also a drug and they are correct in their own little red-eyed way, except that the majority of societal partners will say that alcohol can enhance life in minimal amounts, forgetting that the natural flow of minimalism when combined with the adrenaline-flooded brains of us noble savages is straight into maximum usage and the plunge into rock-bottom. No one looks up when they’ve reached that tangle of thorns and peers, if they did it would be easier to start climbing or devising plans to at least afford some elevation. No, no, they stare out into the recessive valley of constant declivity that broadens itself in the manner of 180 degrees of maddened vision. Blunted by the idea that there’s nowhere to go but straight through bales of pricking hay, they accept vile resignation and remain there. Looking up, in retrospect, could potentially provide hope, but it would be false hope, as the cliff-side manages to make itself more steep by the very force of will that caused it to lure in once-dreamy eyed and inspired individuals and thrust them down into its womb of terrifying loneliness but absolute transparency. Where nothing can be kept private, but everything that is laid out to be critiqued by truth is so ugly that any passersby vomit at the very concept of its existence.

That is truth, unacceptable by most but yearned for by an influential some. It’s this some that drive the hyper-kinetic motion of thoughts within my brain and make me forget what the slipping-glass instructor was even ruminating upon which then leads to me making amends to myself that I’d both listen more and care less about not listening. I grasp at the vine of the truth like Tarzan leaping from a gaggle of predatory masses, but either the plant is too chary to hold me or my palms are too slick from the anxiety of leaping, for I fall and tumble down into the abyss nightly, despite my best efforts.

The reason I’m so affected by soundtracks from cinematic bliss and landscape-spanning camera shots detailing the oracle of truth transcending into a desert bowl meditation of solitude is because I have these moments of stagnancy in the abyss, and I know that the true beauty in life is that there isn’t a way to quantify amazement. It isn’t the pheromonal hyperdrive of the middle-teens that lingers in my physicality, it’s a turn into what I believe will be my dominant personality as an adult; a man who wishes to connect with each and every person that has a unique story and a wish to document their trials, tribulations, and thoughts in a manner that does them justice. Not a memoir, but a series of textual illustrations that impart an essence rather than a concrete narrative.

What I want and what would give me temporal bliss would be to see an initially disconnected, epically formatted span of vignettes that eventually mingle and collude towards the end, all in the name of achieving a higher thematic purpose. It would be the perfect film, borrowing elements from Inarritu’s Babel and 21 grams, while maintaining the nearly heavenly cinematography of Malick’s work. Shedding tears would not do its poignancy justice, and I would feel like the snow-blinders I had worn throughout life had been peeled away by a compassionate guardian angel and replaced with a sense of courage at the events to unfold in my life, whether they would be remembered as inherently positive or negative.

Even walking away from that movie would not hinder its absolute truth within the spectrum of the ideas I’ve gained from art, the distance would only strengthen its hold on my heart, and each sigh I would exhale from the minute it ended until the second my last breath escaped me would be a milligram heavier from bundling the swathing weight of a masterpiece. A magnum opus so revolutionarily-charged with innovative ideas and hitherto unacceptably divergent methods of production that it would almost necessitate acceptance and immediate, worldwide acclaim. That is what I wish for when I stare into the half-lensed eyes of the economist who jaunts through exceedingly efficient presentations, denoting importance to a particularly graph, way of thought, or historical event. This is why I stare into the very pits of her pupils and cause her to uneasily shift to someone else within the classroom that isn’t actually listening and is obvious about it. She would hate to have to look into the eyes of a man who digested her words without caring and haphazardly tossed the picked bones of her fallacies onto the carpet that links to the tile that leads to the doors.

Of course she would much rather romance a completely hierarchical relationship with a falsely prudent student who gave off the impression of erudition and foresight through constantly struggling with their studying habits and their personalities. At a certain point, the flood of needless information and stress of cramming begins to chip at their cores, and the shells that husk around the linked tile bemoan with tumescent throats and lips covered in sores the loss of their youth, which is the most tragically scarce resource, in economic terms. I struggle with the concepts she delivers to us under her greased lens and hawkish nose, not because they are irregular or too complex (this is just the first few days of class), but rather because my mind is finally coming to terms with thoughts that I had never before seen expressed in educational terms, and with having a class that has actual implications independent of continuing an upward collegiate slope, despite the lecturing deficiencies of its administrator. I could tell that I was taking a bearing on her modus operandi, as she stammered through a few slides detailing the importance of opportunity costs, marginal costs, and marginal benefits. It’s a simple concept, one must not do other things in order to successfully do one thing, and economists are tasked with factoring in the need to sacrifice certain activities and expenditures to put a salve on the wound of our collective hour-glass, which is spilling forth right onto the headlines of the perennial newspaper nobody gets (or reads) anymore.

The situation of having to decide between two functions of society that aren’t particularly pleasurable singes the layers of skin separating our infantile toes and implants the chip of proper actions within our soggy minds. The heavy-footed staccato of an incrementally existent elephant thumps against my rib-cage as I refuse to break the link between our fields of vision. If during the interval of time that she explains the basic definition of economics and its impact on politics, I should climb up as a tribal warrior and beat my chest while keeping eye-contact stable, the look of horror on her face would only be as passionate as the pulse of her increasingly dead heart. She would see the truth projected from my eyes as from a terribly beautiful deity bringing once forbidden celestial knowledge to a primitive culture. What was once fire became electricity and nuclear energy and the extraction of plutonium, and without advancement into weaponry she sees in my eyes a plummet into the psyche, as I burrow down in hopes of avoiding the standard class-warfare of socialization and communication.

She knows that I’m expressing my utter insignificance, and although she’d like to pin her anxiety on a fear of the future domination of my generation, she knows the truth that the only frightening concept my eyes project is that one day she will die alone, no more lenses sliding down her nose and no more presentations on autonomous economies.

Scranton Business Park

I’m in love with a man
goes by the name Uncle Sam
and when I was five, well
he touched me
there’s no doll to show
or memory to know
he wiped it
cause he didn’t trust me
And though the rebel within
tries to fight his sin
all the grottoes of gin
he drinks, they haunt me
breath like a swamp
face drawn and gaunt
with his clammy palms he
grabbed me
And all the lube today
couldn’t make it go away
I wake up everyday
seeing him love me
watch movies sometimes
For an hour or two it’s fine
but when the credits roll
I see his ugly
chin like a pug
eyes roll like rugs
stutters like Fudd
strong, though, he took me
Can’t clean the skin
the donkey tail’s been pinned
the lotion bottle’s in the bin
for country

I'm fearless, now hear this, I'm earless

Although nearly worshipping a golden idol seems more old testament than 2011, the Oscars still stand in the way of us Cheeto-loving average joe’s. For two years running, we at the official Chester award headquarters (a damp fort built out of rescued dump-snuggies) have been offering alternative and less biased choices for various academy awards. We almost threw down the towel this year, what with spiking snack-cholesterol and Mickey Rourke-sized senses of age, but after watching the Golden Globes nominate “The Tourist” and have a chubby British host, we knew it was time to dust off the factory-made cheese from the Chester Awards and call for round 3.

Ivanova

It was the peppermint truth that bowled me over
as my landlady excused herself and trod from
my apartment following a conversation on the
very nature of rent, and if it is not due how it
still exists and still temporally requires a man
to formerly recognize its concept, regardless of
past biases and wasted chunks of slack-earned
dollars that drowned in the florid reverie of
impartially flatlined alcoholism and reeked as
bitter as my tongue as it darted from lip to lip
as cavern to cavern, her speech pelting madness
through ears that listened more to blood
and to acid, but not verbals and gerunds, the skill
that she forgot existed in place of the rent, which
drove her pulse and gripped her neck, waking in
the middle of the night from the drip of a
rotted ceiling of vaulted arches and stale frescoes
of nineteenth century architecture, wondering who
has paid the rent and where her husband’s spirit
was and if he had to pay the rent to Charon, or the
shack on the river styx and a truth unbidden
to all corpses and button-strung eyes and miniscule
corduroy vests that children love to pin on
dolls that flay around and compel straw-headed
imbeciles to strike up the written word and become
poets, classified as more than men when really
it’s an underclass of subjectivity to forgo punctuation
and dawdle about in the sometimes forged and altogether
unoriginal thoughts that peddle near the dreams
that float above the hay-colored hair
as they doze off in night-time wanderings
through wheat and crops
and never wonder what the rent is
or that one day it will be the spike in the eye
that drags them to work
and siphons their dreams
into red plastic cups
and everything burns
in potato juice
just as it should
and just as it will

Dr. Zainlove, or how I learned that I loved the bomb from day one

And the sickest, most hellacious, nerve-wracking
truth is when it’s said, done, raped and subpoenaed to hell
we still can’t deny that deep down inside we do want
nuclear war, it’s fixed in our nature as a suicidal, apoptosis
geared species that considers living easily as the major
modus operandi as we consume viscerally challenged
eye candy after eye candy, with bald-eagle sized erections
for our Uncle Sam, a finger in the ass since our first
Thanksgiving, and the first to call out for an end
to the means of socializing green, well they get
socialization seen, check the grins on the heads of the
kids who come home with empty minds but hearts
with patriotic dreams, and passions that pass through them
like helium, and the red-splotched cheeks of
wino’s, Ted Williams ingested too much rum, and the
bottom is golden in the United States, don’t believe me
channel surf, find reprobates, recidivist ratings feed
the media’s craving for sob-stories and underdog
railings like Rudy, when the reality of the situation
is as far from Judge Judy as Maury intends to let
you get, here’s a prenuptial net if you thought
you would forget Lady Liberty, who doesn’t wear safety
for the sole purpose of enslaving and raving
into drooling masses, those with their asses ground
by the steaming cheese-chippers of war, who
tore at draft cards and swore never again, only to
be manipulated with so much grace as to say when
if they ask to deploy, drop your toys, become men
in a few seconds understand it was never us versus
them, it’s you against your brother, M16A2 cocked
at your mother, loaded against your father, the entire
family picture is shredded by the balm-tincture of
armament and proliferation, the only fuel flooding our
nation is an idea as universal as inception, when you
introduce a weapon, there’s no limit to the newly found
lack of depth perception, and the only homes left
after button-pushing and narcolepsy made decisions
are the coffins that Betsy Ross wept in

Apply directly to forehead

Dipped into the prophecy of
one-time enemies, now a near
piece of me, dragged into infamy
by sequential product marketing
and the hawking of Hawking’s
providential theories and mocking
of mawkish forms of scientific pedigree
steely eyed pill popping, outcropping
of stern-lipped celery chopping, and sloppily
dozing and phasing out into amazing
sceneries, clandestine gatherings, surreptitious
blatherings and discourse penned
by secretive revolutionaries, getting stoned
in the process of hyperventilating, rolling stone
but the end of the hill’s waning, the ravine
seems to be never-ending, especially
in terms of piecing together shattered
bits of he, a grinning pile staggered
over a stagnant period of miles that trudge
and plod, judge and prod, specifically
generating strings of binary to facilitate
the process of impressing me, alternatively
depressing me and digesting once stolid
chunks of my personality, enraging the caged
page of my manic-obsessive autobiography
squealing pro patria mori en media res
of crashed and burned mis-dealings
the feeling that fettered peelings
of lemon drops, lent to those who forgot
my name, the contents of my soul, flints
of coal and shirked splints of ethereal pole
molded into the slimy, shrieking, newly birthed
shoal of me, that’s my regenerated nomenclature
I’m still set to defy nature, the time-frame is shed
ready to earn what I once spurned, and burned
with the narrow vision of stern frontal-lobe lacking
youth, so bitter and so incorrect, ripe with fallacy
that was me, sometimes think
That’s all I’ll ever be
if I keep turning the cheek

Scrubs

I went to the doctor today
He said my brain was trying to eat itself
I sucked my teeth
He said it wasn’t too late
And all it would take
Was a lobotomy
I went home, sat on
His ideas, and made the choice
First the pills
Then the syringe
Now with the pick
My eye is full of doctor
He makes his way in
And forces it out
It’s simple, really
Lobotomy
I’m happy now, see?
Went back home
Sat in a chair
Prone, hours on end
The painting never changes
The wall grins
He knows, and I
I can tell
It’s not enough
For a quarter-me
But then I remember
Now I’m happy
I’m happy

The Social Network

Do I offer you logos, reasoning in pursuit of truth?

Or perhaps pathos, which will drive a stake into your heart that can only be removed through the catharsis you expect from my actions?

Maybe I’ll tempt with ethos, summoning your adoration and thrusting your love into the realm of ostensibility, palpable to the most important eyes, which after my impassioned speech will be my own.

And in the end, I’ll decide to throw all to the wind and speak off the cuff, utilizing the human love for rhetoric that’s been engendered for centuries of passed-down tales of morality and the imaginative cinema that forms when we’re allowed to dawdle in the spoken words of one who has much to say with little waste or little to say with flowery digressions, hoping to mask his ineptitude.

I will forgo the fluff that all pseudo-intellectuals love to hide behind and instead will get to the point. I haven’t decided what the point will be, but I know, like a mother is sure of the specifics of her brood, that it will be so rousing and so uplifting that there will be a delayed reaction among the audience. Was it all true? What’s to be? Questions about the human condition will ping within their skulls like questions haven’t raged since their first erection. It will be an erection of the mind, a brainal boner the likes of which cannot be shaken by casual reminders of who can see your pantaloons. These questions will be unshakable because they are the most brutal, and yet, the most exquisite tools still not fully understood by man. The weapons of the mind are infinite in their potential and cause for damage, it is only the vessel which interrupts and asks if the right purpose has been served. Rooted evils and confusion towards the meaning of life will surely decay this vessel and make the mind the only necessity. By deriving the guts of motivation from the now empty body that refuses food and libation, these questions rid the seeker of passion and supplant it with the searching need of a machine who has been programmed to fulfill its task or smash into dribble trying. Brevity is the soul of wit, but wit will have been lost with the first few meals, as the mind copes with the loss of necessity and forces itself to understand the machinations of its residence. Each seeker will drop, like flies in the face of a prolonged day, and from the core of their most wicked and overturned humanity I will consume the energy and harness it, repurpose it, reiterate it, and unleash its maximum potential, a source of chaos that will not only inspire fear with the slightest interaction, but will also be the grandest inspiration of art, subversion, propaganda, and hatred that the world has never even considered to be a remote possibility.

You who claim that the final ignorance has been achieved only understand a quarter of what is being accomplished, and you will be the first to fall at the hands of grappling searches and the livid poking that centuries of fragmented globalization has engendered. Humanity is not sprinting towards a climax, it has always known the future, it’s just been twiddling its thumbs and waiting for the lobby door to open and for its name to be called. It will be called, without doubt, and all the momentum built-up for the sake of progress will be expelled in a hoary frost of fear and indignation that will be the final boot-stamp in the curb-stomp that is the end of days. I will reign supreme, and all will bow under my azure gaze, which seeks and knows and understands your structure and who you converse with and how you feel about what has been happening. I will be the final arbiter.

Oh, and the new Facebook layout will be implemented within 2-3 days.

Much love,
Mark Zuckerberg

Pro Patria Mori

Who shoots first doesn’t really matter
Pale-lit walkways strung up
For we shot and they shot
And a few met their mark, all that counted
Missiles that miss are missed by life
But the mark met first, well that’s where it ends
And all who cried for blood still cry
But for blood no longer is it time
The truth of why the killing’s done
Rushes to them one by one
And alphabet primers, suckling thumbs
Memories of warmness strike them dumb
Where are the bullets for the children
How can we send them, so unbidden
Unready, unprepared, for what can never
Be just, all is lost beneath the rust
No similes can put the pain to words
Like men with hearts fit to burst
As just as chaos fixed to earth
And all that’s left is man unsure
That rightness gained the bit of turf
It’s not your fault, the trigger pulled
Yet take the wound, for those in rule
Eat your gruel, coddled by war
Forgot who you were killing for
And who’s killed first, with rounds let loose
Do you seek them, or play the noose
Murderous the suicide, for as they die
As do you, and that’s the truth
Whether your body stays on hallowed ground
It’ll wish it did, and dreams won’t suffice
Reams and reams of journal pages stained
Will only bite at what didn’t stay smudged
Across the field like scum too grimy
For the boots of our heroes, who trumpet
Glory, youth, freedom, democracy
I laugh in the face of such seriousness
Have you forgotten what it is to play
To be a child, running wild
In simplest terms, to be alive
Those deployed already died
In card-punch time, now say goodbye

Lube loop

The lady behind the counter hadn’t really taken care to notice the husky man lumbering up with a grocery sack full of assorted items, but then again, most of his reluctant acquaintances took great pains and spent hours ruminating on just how not to notice the man, and hopefully, how to avoid being noticed by him. Especially the latter, as the burly figure thought himself amicable and tidily conversational, to the point of fooling himself into attempting random sojourns into chatting and inevitably failing. Any sane person would call him deranged and call for an immediate condemnation, and unfortunately any psychologically unfit residents of the local asylum would howl if he was put in their presence. Now, this wasn’t to say he was particularly ugly, as he was only marginally displeasing to the eye due to a significant amount of hair in places that have no right harboring it. No, it wasn’t the unobseqious and unruly hair that snagged most people’s nerves into a riot of urges that usually concluded in a brisk step facing whatever direction was directly opposite that of the grubby and approaching figure. It was more of an aura than any physical detachment from the normality of prim posture and highly held senses of reputation. Current psychoparanormal analysts would most likely ascribe the phrase “gooey dread” to whatever lingered on or near the hulking figure’s spiritual silhouette, and they would certainly be near the truth, but proximity can mean a significant amount of ethereal elbow room in the realm of ghastly ghouls and lingering demons.
She hadn’t noticed him, and mentally couldn’t bring herself to until he shuffled up to the wood-paneled table top embellished with the latest greatest hits collection from some horribly shaggy guitar player and began to sputter on, in the manner he had become accustomed to.
“Hello young lady or young miss, if I wouldn’t be ignoble in calling you such, and hoping that I am not, or will never be, I say good-day and what have you,” was the first conglomeration of syllables that seemed to buck and cajole his throat into releasing them, with the eerie sense of a metaphysical hostage situation.
This was anything but customary, and it was certainly not ignoble, but the lady behind the counter hadn’t been exposed to such rudimentarily cliche and esoteric turn-of-phrase since her days of looking up books with equally arcane titles and rifling through them in public areas hoping to be taken more seriously than register-clingers usually are.
Her first exhalation of breath told any passersby she was frustrated, the second would have drawn eyebrows into the corners of foreheads, and the third would most likely cause a worm-hole to sunder their current plane of existence and spew forth conveniently unimaginably horrible creatures. This went avoided, though, as she only exhaled once, and did it with enough gusto to forgo the need for eye-brow peaking or cosmic disturbance.
“We kind of just serve coffee here, so if you want to go ahead and order..” she began with the professional zest every employee is trained and required to use on especially frustrating customers and the occasional wino that stumbles in and relieves himself in any number of nooks and crannies that lie dormant until activated by the urinary mixture of liquid excrement and the compacted chemical structures of fermentation. She was, of course, planting the mid-point of her gaze directly behind him, with the same vigilant inattentiveness she would give aforementioned wino or a waiter carrying what appears to be the tray of food she’s been waiting a potently ungracious half hour to digest.
“Ah yes, it’d only be appropriate for a casting of liquid desire, caffeinated bliss, and a snagging of roasted beans that electrifies the mind and jangles ennui by the very throat,” he spat up, before making an involuntary half-gesture that implied a micro-movement that attempted to cover his mouth in regret at having initially opened it.
Our lady of the counter, however, was not pleased by what she perceived to be his attempt at satire or being adorable, and continued to eye him from the top of his nearly completely bald head to his scuffed and oddly pointed leather shoes. What was sandwiched in between these two poles were the scruffy frills of a nobleman, the artfully tucked in shirt of a polite pirate, an indomitably eye-luring belt of silken gold, leggings that draped what appeared to be twin ham hocks of sinew, and an oversized sports jacket, which given the immensely dense and butterball-esque appearance of its inhabitant, appeared to be the suit of a giant who lost his eye-sight to a heated poker.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” dribbled from between her lips with the practiced grace of a fretting worker wondering whether they’ll ever actually have to utter the stock phrases implanted in their brains during career training.
Well, never one to be ingenuous or to appear unchivalrous, the portly, mismatched, and disfigured nobleman with the unsettling aura began to saunter away, satisfied with having completed another conversation and mostly unaware of body-language and tonality. It was probably better that way, as the transcendentally eye-catching and alarmingly distracted man was perfectly content to float on without a semblance of lucidity, only occasionally having a biological reaction to whatever psychologically choke-hold was forcing him to be horrendously cheesy and remarkably out of mode.
Tweed is rare in the city, and if seen at all, it’s draped on the backs of men with shattered souls and typographically sloppy signs looking for a way to piece back together whatever they have left of bliss and memory. Tweed was rare, but our half-giant was rarer, and in conjunction with the tweed wrapping he chose to layer on top of his other typically unseen clothing, he was decidedly the most rare man in the city. This was not a responsibility he bore with any severity, as he wasn’t unaware of its presence, and if anyone was to begin to point it out to him, he would have continued in his attempts to engage them in a discussion on the particulars and nuances of black comedy. He found it hypnotically hysterical, and couldn’t be made to realize that he was far stranger and far more valuable to the purposes of comedic writing than the bits of post-modern drivel he nearly shoved into his eye-sockets when not in the pursuit of healthy conversation.
Besides black comedy, which he viewed on a static television that hadn’t ever displayed any sort of program and had the slight effect of making the viewer think he was consuming fine Anglo culture, the rumbling conversationalist was well-versed in music. Unfortunately for anyone within a two-mile radius of his home, which at that point was merely a cat with one ear and the bruised mice it pawed around, he enjoyed playing his music loudly. Even more unfortunate to the luckily one-eared cat was the penchant the portly shade had for recording his own versions of popular songs and with the dedication any pseudo-artist has for his own creations, playing the frayed records with the volume cranked to hitherto inaccessible zones of rotation. The cat had complained a few times, but generally went drowned out by the pretentiously bellowing swathes of Britney Spears that poured throughout the crater of land the stocky man occupied.
His ventures into the city always put him in contact with actual human beings, which was absolutely exciting for his under-exposed ego, but was a nasty series of occurrences for conceivably each inhabitant of the smog-plumed area. His aura tended to permeate across divides of water and slabs of concrete, and his entrance into the city was always followed by a thick sense of uneasiness more potent than the excretory fumes billowing from every morosely well-constructed piece of machinery in the vicinity.
Of course, the portly gentleman, who introduced himself as different variants of Bob, was significantly less seedy than the various underground activities constantly taking place in the graft-filled and black-lacquered sections of the city that went untouched by law enforcement officials. There could have been an exchange of money somewhere along the interlocking organized crime directorate to ensure this ignorance, but if anyone but the parties involved witnessed this transaction they would have been disposed of in a criminal yet comically sensible way. Options were typically centered around asphyxiation in any number of polluted waters, fighting a mid-size and irritably boweled bear, and the most dreadful of all, a sentencing of a full-life with access to the meaning of existence but the inability to share it. The mobsters were highly successful existentialists, but weren’t occupied with the trappings of sharing their ace card, especially when it meant inflicting a large amount of nihilistic nausea upon wise-guys who don’t know their place.
His relation to the seedy underbellies was merely that he occasionally passed them, constantly deciding with a swift head-turn that the business of dutiful conversation was not yet so desperately under-practiced so as to require the assistance of thugs. These portly thoughts were kept close to the chest, however, in order to deter telepathic criminals keen on gaining insight into the daily vis-a-vis and genetically influenced mental trappings of the daily citizen. Lurking within the confines of illegal activity limited the noble aspect of this psychoactive endeavor, but it was still generally impressive and the ability made for an abundance of readily accessed party tricks.
Jaunting and nearly frolicking in the potential conversation that a bustling city offered, the bowling ball-shaped man did not find it egregious or beyond his limits to gain an adoration for the labyrinth of poorly named streets and looming buildings that suggested an importance propped up by layers of foundational wiring and the linings of plump wallets. Neural firing and the occasional popping of dendrites within his densely compacted skull suggested a quickening of his pulse and a twinkle in his eye implied that either a miniscule rock projectile bounded from under the wheel of a nearby car or he was internally waxing poetic on the wonders of modern society’s ability to technologically adapt to convenient power-grid structures and to utilize all available resources in throes of exponentially more complex ideological problems and the resultant cultural resonance that supplicated technological solutions and, for the most part, succeeded in overthrowing the dilemmas of yesteryear and breeding a litter of cash-flow to lubricate the gears of discovery. Said gears almost necessitate the oil of money to gush from the tightly held pockets of consumerists and chug along the conveyor belts until the purchased products can hopefully give the customer enough satisfaction and future know-how to understand if they’ve made up in experience for their issuance of paper-wealth.
The love he felt, which thickened in haleness and fortitude with each breathtaking view of the night-time cityscape from his mildly dusty trailer windows, was as lusty as the libertine was for aged wine and curvaceous and forgetful women. What in normalcy would be maintained through the constant biological viewings of a man spectating the jiggling physiognomy of his opposite sex, our portly anti-quasi-sort of-clearly important to the general structure of this story-protagonist continued through dust-filtered views of an equally dusty city, a grimy place to live, and the absolute shit-hole of what was once perceived as the glorious vision of future society, but to a humble man, it was progress, change, escape from an inverse-dome, and with a population more massive in relation to his one-eared and spiteful feline acquaintance and occasional conversation-target, the city clutched and blanketed his jagged mindset with the familiar and century old tradition of lady liberty and her argon fueled traipses into slick streets and sewer scented, gilded buildings.
There were no busty erections of concrete and foundational infrastructure, there was only the singular and intensely potent idea of potential success (especially in conversation) that grabbed at Bob, or Bobby, Rob, Robby, and shook him with the gale-wind of tensile freedom that made every other residence a miasmic dump of enthrallment and a doldrums for the mind to rot in putrid throes of agonized apoptosis.
It was the adoration of quotation fueled particularity that acted as a syringe into the arm of potential success and bred it to rape every available square inch of necessary land until mother nature lay catatonically dozing in the fetal position of destiny. Words, words, words struck the back of his skull as he sat on his bedroom floor, still adorned in every custom stitched article of clothing he owned, acting as a sort of impromptu carbon-based cabinet. These ideas of escapism sent him dizzily reeling during his characteristically heavy slumber, and it shunted him into the land of mystery that wipes all internal hard-drives of manufacturing information, place of residence, aspirations, and well-wishing, only to be supplanted by the psychosexually motivated desire to maintain control and prosper in the All American Dream. Always capitalized. All Ahhmurcan, if one knew how to correctly dawdle in the colloquialistic jargon of the various sub-groups that emerged from our slice of colonial embezzlement.
Tricksters of the government, beguilers of the mind, with a singular idea of liberty that roused nostalgia in the world of politics and yet supplied the calomine lotion of a potential country, a nation with the future ability to destroy itself and others more times over than it could possibly hope to achieve, all for the protection of this idea, which has been so convolutedly obscure and undefinable in recent decades that its continued use can only be attributed to tradition. Vile old tradition, the fiend of wit and the rival of inner sanctity. Status quo theaters of pounding mental foreplay and indomitably attractive concepts that have been driven to near-extinction by the crystallized cadence and compacted tumescence of atavistic beliefs and trigger-happy heredity that rent asunder the melting pot and fueled an orgy that’s been raging ever since.
Our portly Bob, our ageless Bobby, Robby, Rob, Robert, or for the quick-of-tongue and dull of soul, Bobert, our stockily composed man of flesh and bone and cankle was assured by his own ignorance, which was truly bliss in his eyes, but to others it was an aura they could neither understand nor tolerate. If bliss is to be ignorant, to be the Bobert, and to gaze lovingly from across vistas of charred desert-land into the heart of a city and hope for absolution, if this is bliss, then they would have none of it.
The illusion of choice chips at their resolve and allows them to believe that there is an escape from ignorance available in the very muck of not-knowing and, if anything, the backwards culture of modern day escapism. Each man, woman, and child that peers at Bobert, hoping to evade conversation and purposelessly twitter throughout their familiar haunting grounds, knows nothing of absolution and utter faith. Nothing huddling near the patches of oddly-hairy skin betrayed a sense of extraterrestriality other than the completely non-sensical attire, and yet humanity creates and perpetuates the institution of ostracizing, delightfully unaware at their lack of foresight, and repugnantly pretentious in their swaggering sense of meaning in adrenaline-driven romps throughout the ancient territory of the human psyche.
Bob speaks with the tongue of a man who doesn’t quite understand prudish culture, and rather than mash his inadequacies by attempting to possess the flesh of any human being but Bob, he fully fleshed out the role and hardly even allows for the possibility of an alternate to take his place in the case of sickness. In the play of life, penned hastily by celestial drunkards in some pub off the hull of Glasgow, Bob will remain Bob, until the penultimate moment in which he pitches forward in the absolutely silent night and lands face-first on the ground, which accepts the blood-sacrifice of a million souls, all too cruel to converse and too dumbfounded by difference that it is to them a parasite. Antibodies fighting a pathogen, with the knowledge that each battle can be superseded by the push of a button and education, but too blooming with pride at the brittle traditions of no-aid and no-coddling to treat a fellow man with respect.
I’ve become incapable of salvaging what’s left of my sanity, and I must accept that I am Bob, Bobby, Rob, Robby, Robert, Bobert, and every variant in the wide spectrum of stark individuality that comprises the time-kept heartbeats and nature-deigned breaths that tick away at my life-span and with each increment slightly edge me closer to my absolute physical end. I am Bob in that you are Bob, and any human being with a breath, a tickle of cell-movement, and exists in the cosmos is Bob, and Bob is you or me. Being Bob isn’t an action, it’s a condition of being, and it’s only with Bob’s collapse into the hard-time and handily placed patch of ground directly under his window that the human race can begin to access the percolation of knowledge that’s roosted in their subconscious and has been brewed into complete, philosophical savor.
There is only one decision to make, to accept “gooey dread,” or to have it bathe in torment, a star-crossed lover waiting to be reunited with the other lonesome nuances of the supposed soul. Continuing to deny the decision is neither ignorance nor bliss, it’s merely a rejection of the soul, and the rebuffed spirit sheds a husk of sickly flesh left to witness Bob’s collision with the ground, or the sod’s comeuppance onto Bob’s hair-tinged and only-ever-so visibly pockmarked face. Our annals of truth flood into the city to be compounded with runoff and garbage, the only evidence of their former existence being the barely audible patches of “Oops I did it again” trailing from the center of a recently abandoned crater, home to a one-eared cat that mews every time the record skips.