Neptune Bilgewater

This is known as the leap before the windmill, wherein dusty tunes and warbled rhymes skitter prettily from virgin throats ululating, crashing towards the grassy knoll. Never enough, yet barely inching towards the satisfaction of fulfilled lust. Crescent pills and half-moon powders line flushed nostrils while rheumy eyes weep nectar. That playground love shuttles bullets belatedly into cocooned brains lacks the surprise of the first shattered hymen.

This is known as war in place of truth, wherein battered shields and shattered city spirits illuminate the glossy intentions of labor-backed class infiltrators. Smeared berry face-paint marks tribal mask unities and loyalties to local chiefs, particularly the likes of Gompers, JP, and burly Tweed. This just in: journeymen and artisans revolt against the government, driven by poor nourishment and a feeling of civil abandonment. Headlines spread like buttered jam on toast too thin to swallow without gin.

This is known as stage left, wherein the only possible exit is a body-bag and hastily scribbled directions in Latin. Past the juicing of our efforts and the usefulness of our faith, Christ the magician followed the demarcation exeunt with a mummer's fervor. Shuffle off to Nicaraguan soil, embroiled in the corruption of Reagan-time Rocky smacks and Old Glory-emblazoned shorts stitched into being by brown skins.

This is known as parallelism, wherein silken sheeted shadow shows depict political misdealing and heavy-handed jingoism under the guise of fatuous animation. Stark corruption careens into the annals of comedy when bellowed from within the patina-pocked throats of crooning robots. Who can operate under the standard human rights act when the black-lacquered lingerie catalog creeps into congressional paws and beckons howls toward the blood-curdled moon?

This is known as banality, wherein we stomp from street-corner to peddle-station with able-bodied citizens pelting rations of amphetamines along the divine portcullis. Jesus be thy name but we bend the knee so quickly upon hearing the ring and clink of opaline studded coffining. Arms crossed in salutation to the Tower of Babel, wind-swept culture death defines the albums and provisions of military decisions.

This is known as inbred assurance, wherein purity remains color-free and minorities descend readily into infighting in the face of white-bred pejoratives. The N word is only a weapon in their hands, yet the claws of brethren mark cheeks once kissed warmly. Simple sentences and collegiate imperatives, declaratives, and sweepingly vacuous details of impoverishment shown through this Jacob Riis lens haunt my dreams in steadfastness.

This is known as wormwood's clause, wherein brittle bits of mettle-tested kindred spirits are mended through the commercially acclaimed healing effects of screw-tape. Each chunk of text reprints itself endlessly, a merciless, inexorable gratification committee patched up merely to regulate and up the intake of tax payer greenbacks.

This is known as finality, wherein the charred remains of scripture and elusive, alliterative allusions to confusing fusions of prime-time literature and midway mangled mass-produced mainstream television are sewn as one to better transition to the last period of punctuation, a penultimate hope that the assuaged mind reaches catharsis and a sense of enlightenment at having formally met the ending scrawl.

Listen, here. Listen, hear.

Can magic and meaning coexist? That lingers long on the mind when watching the dust settle between the shoulders of reluctant viewers, nebulae in collision all the same. Making little of madness requires great effort, so rather than strain I exhale, hear the click-and-roll of industrial projectors, and allow the cool sluggishness of my expectations to encapsulate the experience.

But were it for a lack of phone or a misplaced signal, I would not be here. Were it for a mid-road collision, an offday, or a home game, the same applies. Though none of that occurred, and with buttocks in seat I watch. And watch as a life becomes unraveled for experimentation, curiosity mingled with the occasional visit to unprecedented violence. Youth becoming man, man remembering youth, and all the bittersweet happenings smudged in twine that cement the conditioning of one to the idea of death.

Troubling bits of life displayed. Stolen undergarments and jaws rubbed to the callous by frustrated, wrinkled hands. Coughing elderly women, coffee the scent of French fields, punctuated by a Kodak slide-reel of grey terrain, clicking with quarter-notes to the beat of a tone-deaf whistler. Our feet pump city streets almost effortlessly, yet if we could float we would seek the end of all need. Sunrise in the Antarctic. Images of blasted lands, and a single Cello yawns with the silent ferocity of spirited wind.

There's something oddly comforting about sharing darkness with others. It's as if I rolled into a blanket and found strangers waiting inside, but without the awkward bumping and feeling that would normally accompany such a gesture. Ignoring the synchronized snot-rumbling, and barring the unnecessary chittering, phone-checking, and teeth clacking, the darkness is a communal sector for spiritual ease to be attained. I'd share it with you anytime, in fact we have, and it didn't strike me at the time but keeping the black to ourselves meant much more than I cared to know.

At a certain point, somewhere between critical exhaustion and the failure to achieve nirvana, I threw my hands up and expelled weakness. Strength became a credo, better yet, a necessity. But even at that point, strength couldn't heal, reveal, unwind, and make short wind of the stress that plagues us all. Strength can be the best rallying point, but it is surely the worst camp. Strength will never be a home, if only because a home requires a hearth, warmth, surety of grace, and the crinkles that cap off grins.

It is just as well, for linoleum doesn't make a home either. No, more than brick, mortar, sweat, labor, or a hefty contracting job, a home builds itself, supported by the backs of those within it. A gesture one remembers, a picture taken in the backyard, tears shed on carpet flooring, a stain to mark zealous coffee consumption; these are all photographs in time, and seconds flung off the hands of the clock upon which our memory's eye feasts.

Days of struggle are behind and promptly in front, with the resolute residing soundly betwixt. The middle makes all, and the fortitude, willpower, and tenacity of those who push through the failures of the past and stride onward into a halcyon future are all founded on a fondness for the present. Feel the walls you think might be crushing you. Sniff the breeze that could carry a sickness. Breath in one's lungs and feet on the ground are so beautiful it's heart-crushing to think of a time when we could be without one or the other. Mentality bridges our bodies to a world of all-forgiving light, and the bulb hearkens unerringly.

The Hempire Strikes Back

Sitting idly in the cradle of brimstone fires and mushroom cloud philosophies, I wonder, what could really be the purpose of this sickly green herb that inflames and tames. Flung across several galaxies via THC, the only divinity I seek gets wrapped in sleek packaging in the pursuit of inhaling ease. See, humor is a tumor, and comedy is a disease that I hoped to excise with a scalpel in self-inflicted surgery, the result being a twisted, hemorrhaged frontal cortex and a chuckle for the breeze that cracks through my teeth, setting my brow tersely.

At times all we wish to do is bellow earnest apologies from church pews and cling to Christ's feet as he ascends to totality, waking up to find that the grime still lounges lazily and the haze you thought you'd be escaping is only increasing in the taking. Though stricken with the curse of Cain and the venom of forced rhyming schemes, religion continues to creep inside my dreams, reflected in my subconscious projections, the hypnagogic imagery of Buddha, Krishna, and Sumerian deities.

Spidery tendrils of smoke wrapped around the idols I worship. Toes kneaded in prayer, rocking back and forth, sweat cascading down my nose and a neck chaffed by clanging jewels. Like pearls before swine, I reject the commonplace happiness set forth by providence and seek evidence of a higher form of existence to no avail. A confusing time for puzzled men, when the amount of technology in our possession almost makes the search for truth appear to be a shadowy punchline, the joke being that God really has been dead, and the man with the mustache exorcised his grace neatly.

I was once convinced in archaic beliefs. It was a burden of the mind, so I struck them down with the stroke of a pen, and after hours of intense soul-searching emerged from my gilded perch anew, the product of 21st century Atheism, hopeless and derided by everything yet now knowing truly nothing. False knowledge reeks of ignorance, yet ignorance at times reminds of humility, while the only quality I harbor is superciliousness, ah yes, ignorance truly is bliss.

No qualities in a man can be accurately displayed over a web-page and given to the public in bite-sized quantities for simple mental transitioning. In a room, quietly and without practiced ease, he leans over the painting of some shoddy horse and wipes dust till the end of his days. A rather lovely thing at once becomes a sickening sight, as brain and carefree, fey personalities drip over chairs-of-twine and time clicks forward unceasingly.

Yet those who would claim that an herb can annihilate entire cultures still sip heartily on the rotted fruits of their ancestors. Keep preventing wisdom from washing on your shores and the only result will be an early grave bedded by forgotten memories and the bitter tears of a breathalyzer. Wisdom is the conjugate of prayer, whether it be in meditation, on the bottom of an ashen bowl, or in supplication to some higher being. There is no wisdom in restraint unless said restraint is in the pursuit of said higher being. Austerity for austerity's sake can only end in mounds of hair pulled and an explosion of animal ferocity the likes of which humankind only witnesses in century-spanning intervals.

Sympathy for the revel

There are two paths through life; the way of murder and the way of distaste. Perched atop my throne of calcified limbs and dapper grins, I mangle mango-rinds and toss fiber-filled skins to the gripping palms of sweat-caked peasants lingering below hungrily. From the point of view of an insect, all is magnificent and splendid, but appreciation is wasted on antennae. For man, each megalith is barely satiable, and with each achievement comes a rekindled desire to create more and to stoke the flames of our synapses.

If one wishes to conquer the accomplishments of another, the only possible choice is murder, and if not murder, then the walkway of guilt, lined with the distasteful memories of various failings. To inherit our fathers' skills we must devour them whole like titans and digest their minds. That the entirety of human history has been a tale of consumption is clear, but just where to apply that hunger has become the issue of contention splitting apart men, mushy sinew under the influence of blunt chemical reactions.

But past the grit of pears left on the ground in smatterings of saliva, John's truth remains untested and the Word that was God has become gibberish, only legible to those who sprint at walls with skulls alight, and the passion to recognize that oftentimes comatose states are preferable. A leap of faith is nothing more than a sacrifice of the soul to some greater entity, and if the self-sacrificial party is convinced enough in his savior, than that figure will appear to them upon leaping, unless they survive said leap, in which case the chance-return to regularity will be regarded as a “miracle,” and the surety of the eunuch will be cemented by pure probability.

Even when given a proper education and a list of the typical fallacies faced by man, we choose to go the spiritual route, as if by some preternatural knowledge that past the lines of type etched into pages of linen, and further than the symbolism indelibly seared into our senses of self, there exists a bridge into the ethereal, which has become a fact so deeply ingrained into our consciousness that we silently revere yogis and the art of meditation, allowing it to trickle into the divinity of western culture via the beatniks and poetic movements of the 1960's.

Yet, regardless of our simultaneous passion for inclusion and seeming need to be isolationist, there is a Puritan desire to intoxicate the rebels of our nation with drugs and the sooty underbelly of legal divisiveness. It is with the judge's gavel that we chase away pesky differences and attempt to extricate any frightening elements of a culture, boldly waving our whitewash brush and offering any immigrant the opportunity to succeed (given a hefty caveat). Appearing as children in painted faces, we hoot and holler like savages, making games to entertain, and once in our clutches, we yank their hair and spit tobacco in their eyes until they agree to jaunt by our rules and work in our mills. It is said that children know no bigotry, but it is with absolute prejudice that we train our children, socializing their once bright eyes with the dim, flinty anathema of promised democracy and social mobility.

We are criminals and crooks, but of the off-touch moral persuasion that we are somehow saints. If it were at all possible to be both a clergymen and an undertaker at once, and in fact to operate the entirety of the morgue in league with the butcher's slicer, then we would be truly just, and the circular nature of our roles in the city would be understood. For now, however, we remain shadows of the dust, memories long forgotten by moral men but basking in the insanity of lesser men, biding our time until some chance wind or accidental blow shuttles us back into the hearts of humanity and breeds the chaos necessary for our birth burial.

Albatross

Sun becomes light, light becomes man, man becomes father, father becomes son, and son becomes the universe in an awe-inspiring display of fecal repetition. Although youth is wasted on the young, true youth merely resides in the mind and the mentality of the old rots with each passing year. So much written but nothing said.

My computer contracted an STD while roaming freely in the netsphere of scrolling bits of iconography. So it's with impersonal humility and a taste for the finer things that I cast this feeble piece of machinery into the past history occupied by crushed masses of Atari and photocopied DVDs of the director's cut of Weekend at Bernies.

Though I'm not the man to pray, or to count on in times of worship, I'd easily take up the mantle of leading the imperium of man, if only to fail miserably and be cast into a cycle of aeon-spanning stone ages. Allow me to be the Otto Von Bismarck of our unified industrial Germany and infest the social ideology with striking images of the clergy crucifying innocent citizens in effigy while Walt Disney ingests LSD and burns candles of endangered whale meat.

During graduation my only two thoughts to spend kept returning to the contents of my stomach and how soon I could revert into my bed, in retrospect it was the best method of burning through a ceremony of mutual disgust and wonderment at our prosperous ability to engage in unnecessary pomp and circumstance. Born a day man I engendered bitterness and calloused my soul until emerging as a night owl to hoot at wanderers passersby and shriek at mice that scuttle nigh.

Legacies clicking away with the opportune tune of boisterous keyboards. Though in time the effects of the rhyme are diminished, we live in a land of perpetual Christmas, where the calendar sways and sheds days with the practiced ease of preset special effect companies. Insofar as I can see the level of mediocrity present in techno-mixes of rat-pack classics remains standard.

Excuse the presence of sarcasm in my voice as I tip my hat to your antiquated traditions. The road to perdition is paved with the skulls of Jude Law leering and sneering heartily at cheaply tended mustaches. In time he can come to accept that not all facial hair bearings are of great extent or magnitude, but in the meantime it suffices his sense of humor to see sickly goatees and patches of follicles barely sprouting sustenance for the aftershave paddies in which to wallow.

Let's take a moment to pray for the high-pitched Mediterranean bastard hocking silken songs written by small children and rubbing himself under the light of the ancient moon, tending to crops of olive, rose-water, and grain in an effort to sustain a family and whip into shape every deceased sack of disease on the filthy aramaic streets.

An ode to joy can only end in the decapitation of every choir member before slamming down bits of PEZ into their necks and calling it a night before the beginning of the concert. To be sure, we'd sear their corpses immediately and donate the ashes medically.

Babylon

Really am a crumpled clown at times, as the acid wash of jokes unsaid wipes down on my grin and smears the once-forgotten grimace back into place, the human race clapping in jest as I do my best to maintain composure. If there were ever a time to ask if a man was alright, it would certainly not be now and here, in this crackling corner of stale beer and raucous jeering. Chewed and maligned with a fractured spine, bent forward like an old man reaching and only achieving to the extent that my mind thinks of receiving.

The push and pull crossed pick and wave descend on days chocked with malaise that are welcome to all but enjoyed by the singular. Asthmatic attacks split my brainwaves in two as thoughts of you magnify brilliantly yet remain untouched for later misuse. Tinges of sunlight break between my shutters and crack through my eyelids like fleas unto feces, slapping grogginess away with the five-fingered effort of a fervent patriarch.

Constant beeping and buzzing from the background of perpetual Turkish soap-operas linger in the basins of my ears, complacent to the minute-by-minute gnawing at my lobes in chemical frustration. Christ-like consummations await the deliberation and decision-making of my cerebral cortex, though I respond in slow movements and anger every nearby Baptist. Some have said Heil and others say Hail, and though Alexander became Caesar, Caesar became Genghis, Genghis became Otto, and Otto became Hitler, the message remains that hail only dents and worship is quick to become blindness.

I'd welcome to the world every alien regardless of digestion-preferences and only bar the anarchists from landing ships. And that's not a statement on my political references, but rather that enough people misunderstand that movement as it is without extraterrestrials mixing in. Instead of a message of exclusivity, we'd be better off preaching including whom we seek, but messages of original clarity often shift to murky.

Steaks lined in rows of descending freshness beckon carnivorous cavemen to blast rpg's in sequence to John Williams' various soundtracks in hope of being fed fast. After images of red, medium, medium-well, and well-done strike past our lenses the only hope for our colons lies in probiotics. We need medicine to sleep, wake, shit, eat, pass judgment, and for others, pills to make it through the day without a bullet in the brain. Blasted conscious forces turns that toss him and emboss him with radial philosophies to get lost in, the only catch is that for each hour of realization he grows grim with fatigue and exhaustion.

I wake up with puppets crossing the silver lining at the end of my bed-spread and holding mock-beheadings of Louis XVI, all while I grit my teeth in terror, unaware that the more severe the images the less of a chance the fabrication exists. My only proper hope is that instead of plunging into dreams of crystalline machinations, I open my third eye to see cold-seas and hard-steel, armed with only tooth, nail, and the certainty that progress is a possibility, this I'd rather be given than the daily ration of ibuprofen to make the pain cease when the true pain is dependency.

What's become practical has switched from proficiency and entered the realm of pure, orgiastic entertainment. I propose we shoot every scholar, professor, laureate, student, applicant, and bureaucrat, then consume their flesh as wolves of Africa hungering for results but despising the exertion. Amen.

Dour patch kids

When asked about small arguments and petty tidings between the forthright constituents of a relationship, the wise man replies that it is an altogether paltry effort to merely give up, and that the path of least resistance should be followed. In practice, wisdom is to be completely ignored for the very poignant factor of human contact and the absolute necessity of companionship. A light breeze and the sway of the sweet Southern clime remains piecemeal in comparison to that same zephyr when played out between a coupling eager to rub up against soft skin and nearly ethereal hair.

There is no rift, only the illusion of distance between an intertwining primarily illustrated by the breadth of air pushing through their cores, when in reality the truth plain to those with open spirits is that the only distance between two humans is internal, and when the workings of the mind coincide, the rhythm of the hearts begins to beat as twain become one.

Could I ever begin to explain how that realization impacts one's thoughts? I don't think I could do it justice with the written word or a perfectly constructed picture, for both can reach primacy without illustrating intimacy, which is the key. For someone who can neither play an instrument (besides the occasional paralleled whistle-stop) nor compose beautiful words, it's enough to say that often times the unexplainable rushes in evolution to the unforgettable in the blink of the mind's eye.

Perhaps I shoulds stick to the occasionally produced bits of gibberish I've become accustomed to churning out in dispassionate sloughs with weeks in between. It's either that or this, knocking out a style and attempting to find one's voice in the struggle between Victorian prudence and the modern fancy for 21st century candor. The kind of honesty that says that the author of this post hesitates with certain clothes in the morning in fear of looking a bit too chunky, and that certain meals skipped are in honor of this fear and in commemoration of the dedication to burn each cell alive like eugenics on the molecular level.

I'm using a laptop on a desk in a musky, harshly-lit room right now, directly in front of the desktop I was using naught but a few days ago, and I'm beginning to think I forgot the point of portability. It seems like with most things handed to me I revert to the commonplace, all-American past-time: apathy. Well, the truth is I do care, and heartily at that. So the witty retorts and remarks bent towards sassiness are just marks of discomfort and insecurity, as they are the case in most that tend to snap at their fellow men.

Remember, fools rush in, but it's of tantamount idiocy to attempt to effect a change in human nature, and let's be clear: we are all fools. The first step in fleshing out the full extent of our foolishness is accepting it and moving on with our damn lives. After that, we can all be merry fools and stop having to worry ourselves into high blood pressure and plummeting health in a time when we should be shuttling past Mars. Then again, this could all really be Obama's fault.

The art of self reliance

Contemplating murder on a grand scale, the intimation of certain machinations dissolves into a conversation between conspirators. Past the parlay and word-play, the sword laid on temple skulls thrusts heartily into hearts with speed, shattering only after hours of tempered use and feverish flicking. Cut into the sternum of an eclectic sorcerer turned jail-bird is the city map in ink, a noble truth projected in bitter black and jets of coolant. Droplets of thinned blood dribbled on his thumb from the nagging and pricking, never sure of whether the wound will cease or whether being deceased was in his immediate prophecy.

With chrome sparks flying from within the din of a pockmarked cave dimly lit, the grim yet wizened smith bashes crude metals into refined tools and weapons of war, chucking the products over a cliff-edge reached by path, for reasons known only to those who stand directly below his trajectory and receive his artistan-crafts directly to the cranium. Compact, practical muscles rustle atop bones and subcutaneous fat, masking the worker's body in a layer of intimidation, when in truth his listless eyes betray a desire for more than forming unused tools, wishing to fashion fragile toys for the children in the nearby village.

It'd be easier to write more if it wasn't late and I wasn't exhausted.

Adrenal Fatigue

While flimsily skulking down the conjoined paths of twin streams, I stopped to check the breeze and discovered the faint trace of unease playing across my chapped cheeks. With handouts being pressed into the chafing palms of migrant workers passersby, I barely escaped into the alcove of altruism and maintained our maxims on manual labor and productivity. Sights bred of ignorance and sounds bred of sights all mingled in my reservoir of thought while the concocted, leisurely afternoons of the middleclass pooled together into a dog-day summer reel of Kodak film and Joe Cocker harmony. The montage spun as the hourglass tumbles in the grip of a minute, and each tear focused on a memory slid ferociously until it forgot whether it was born of sorrow or infinite glee.

Collectively and internally splayed across the emotions of a generation, there is ingrained a hint of truth, only pawed at in the throes of sexual fantasy manifested in the flirtatious gossip and nonsensical blithering between youth. I can smell the bitter juice in their breath when they stalk each corner filled with life, intent on exterminating with unfaltering prejudice the last vestige of sanity we few cling to in necessity.

Physically exhausted, my mind continues to dash in divergent directions, spread far too thin over much too large a space without respite or even the motivation to uncover the origin of primary urges. I'm kept up by the prospect that I'm without prospects, and the paradox that I'm forever thinking of a time when thinking ceases. Come to pieces, yet made whole entirely, the depression of a generation could easily be welded into the wartime fervor of the next, given a surplus of Rosie riveters and an ample taste for feminist literature.

Although the complex is almost certainly doomed to digress, and impressed intellects find the wherewithal to sink into hopeless regrets, the hope remains in the subtle connection between one's solar plexus and divine intervention. We drive the chariot of deus ex machina into the bay marina, victims of the drunk ferryman Sophocles, and though we might be at ease for chunks of hours in threes, the degree of clarity seized continues to keep me tossing and turning through the days I normally sleep. Simplicity and redundancy make me fear the dropping of each individual key, and though the struggle is nightly, I'll continue tritely and end the adage before I trip over my own cookie cutter mentality.