American Book of the Dead: Portrait of a Lady

The coca leaf makes lovely tea, for breakfast.  Hemp or Laudanum in rosewater, sweetened, before bed.

But when you concentrate and manufacture, process, condense into concoctions, you lose essential properties to gain – what? what is it, what?  What is is you want of Life it obviously cannot (will not?) give?

Our captains of industry, Your shareholders and CEOs;  Our entrepreneurs, Your technocrats and managers; Our hard machines, Your brittle gadgets, “crunching” numbers unto bland abstraction.

Your “hectic modern lifestyle…”

Heaven help you and your cartoon Nietzsche, cut-and-paste Marx; your quarter billion dead and maimed.  Your managers fiddle while you burn.  And don’t play innocent with me, Mr. Elvis impersonator, Miss “Queen of pop”…

Your homilies and homespun da da do.  Democracy as “will of god,” and what a god! Great Lord Nasty Sky.  Big Mr. Hegemon.  Suffocating, toxic.  Bebop-a-loola, be my baby; the details, the “me so horny” and all that…

To crucify Oscar Wilde was bad enough, but to clone him?

Your bumbling cryogenics (guilt perhaps?), a step too far…

My calling-card prominent on the escritoire of Henry James, supper-prattle virtuoso;  connoisseur of  tawny port and muscular young men…

Your filth, but no smoking; drink and dine, make merry, but don’t drive home: “stay a while for cakes and coffee,” or “peanut-butter-cups and fat-free milk,” or what-have-you…

“Kill me!” shouted from your roof-tops.

“Kill us!” in your savvy snake oil visuals.

“Kill ‘em all!” surround sound stereo intrusion.

“Market corrections” on your laptops, Ada’s sickly urchins, inflamed, one and all, with virus and infection behind bright, crooked Gates and gleaming Windows…

Oh, brutal you! Brutal you!

Passive, plodding, inert at the extremes of pain and fear.

I’m so damn sick of you.  I loathe you.  I’ve never known you, you mustn’t be. You aren’t but the ashes of my cigarette, heaping, as I sip my coffee and look longingly to Spring, but see you, you, only you: The Future.

Devolution and extinction of my world.

Beau Cephalus, Writer-in-Residence at /dev/null, is not afraid to speak the Truth to Power. So long as there's a viable exit-strategy. Read other articles by Beau.