Americana dream a step away from flesh-candy; shocked me from sleep, naked, shivering with touch of mortal, sensitive to the slightest things: unable to bear even routine decay; no longer firm, nor young, nor fit to profit from exchange.
The bah-sheep shorn again, poor fleeced multitudes, dead weight on my conscience, their fate burdens my soul.
Heaviness of chest and gut (doom-coronary? gas-bloat?) then stabbing pain. I’m usually too numb to fear, but verily we’re facing nasty shit, horrifying scene.
All news all the time all bad. Apocalypse not now, it’s never now; Apocalypse impending. Everywhere always. Forever-days merge to years, decades. Accumulated dates and numbers swell to throbbing threats of worse-to-come. So sudden the leap from Then to Now, bad to worse, another mile closer to The Reckoning.
Bulk of life-energy burned fighting Insane. Inevitable? Madness, I mean, not doom, which is a given at this point, one would think. Wouldn’t one?
Insipid bounty. Supply of want-something annually exceeds demand. And annually new lines of want-more are available by Christmas in a variety of styles and colors. As if, even if we knew what we wanted, we’d get enough of it to shut us up.
“You, my friend, are a cell in the toe of a dying monster.”
Well we need some damned thing. Impetus, a motion toward. Money incites extreme emotion, but always the crash, the come-down-down, inevitable, and the hangover-blues depression can last decades. Or never hit bottom, notorious black hole of fallen empires, cloven societies, lost civilizations.
Celebrities live to please but nothing pleases them, they don’t pay bills or give a damn who does. They read the papers, the obituaries, know the names, or knew them, when they were famous – yesterday. After the stiff, formal sentences and obligatory obsequies in stiff journalese, one demands, “What have they done for us lately?” Dish subtle dirt. Cheap talk. Black columns of regardless in stark relief against white possibility.
Newspapers don’t kindle forest fires, news-makers do. Just read between the lies.
Everywhere always. Coming to a theater near you.
Zealous Partners joined forever, in limited liability, to the Nation, experiment with Futures. No-money-back guaranteed.
It doesn’t matter here now this particular forever day. They don’t care what you eat or if. So long as you believe in continental drift of Empire see to blinding see, or profess such belief with enough vim-vigor to warrant nods of grudging satisfaction.
Not easy as it looks to break the will of a people straight-jacketed and bound for life in cuffs of tooth fang. Even upon receipt of custom-crucified cadaver, hollow-point bullets removed and autographed, the lucky winner demands more splash-effect photographs of inside out.
Pan camera: Eyes dead. Glossy glazed donut dead faith tender as the kid gloves stuffed into your name stamped Penance for mocking Death’s break-out air-guitar lick in the mirror.
Fool. Everybody knows damned well humor jokes wit rage impotence at, proxy comic cannon-shots at…situations you’ll return to weekly — twenty minutes plus commercials before you spend the rest of the night stoned. Not your humor. Not your rage. What you really wanna do is go out and hit somebody in some way responsible for “all this.”
Way back in flower season, before the brothel and clammy gray sheets stained blood, the Thinker, used as a site-marker for travelers, was removed from his customary position in the road. Seemed he had always been there, now he’s gone.
This ongoing pursuit of adolescent “night thrills” is a mistake. A huge mistake, yet hard to erase. It lingers, everywhere-always, like a dance tune played in all the clubs: few notice it’s there, fewer will notice when it’s gone.
Go ahead, pull my finger. See? Even a fart draws nothing but blank stares. Something’s lacking, something essential yet forgotten, hence difficult, perhaps impossible, to restore.
Doctors goofing off in surgery talk travel plans. Long vacations earned rummaging your innards for evidence, proof the operation was urgent and did make sense and thousands of dollars all around – how ’bout a cigar? – great celebration of you, for you, over you, honors you, despite you – may thy name and all it stood for – if anything – rest in penury and peace.