Odes to the Void:

I. 

The warm smell of bad coffee

mingles mindlessly with the

maddening crackle of permanent

white noise machines

to underscore the fact that

this is someone else’s reality

and you’re merely being forced

–like a sharecropper–

to prop it up and play along.  

The expectation of humanity

in the workplace

is increasingly like

looking for gold in a uranium mine

and hoping the fortune finds you

before the cancer.

The expectation of humanity

outside the workplace

is a fool’s errand

resulting most often in death,

of the body of the soul and

of the dreams that nourish them both.  

The void calls in mellifluous tongues

from some place I can’t discern

and the clarion call of dull static

erupting ceaselessly from the

speaker above my head

nudges me closer.  

Sartre’s hell pales to the level just below it:

Hell is the people you work for.

~~~ 

II.

Somewhere, there’s a lifeboat

without an occupant

as I grasp askance at tides

and recoil at what brushes

against my legs in the abyss.

I’d taken stock of the sinking ship

with the equanimity of a drunk

and the awareness of that drunk’s

disinterested support system.  

I elected to do nothing.  

And I watched the women and children

clinging to one another, weeping;

But there was still liquor in the ice, so

I asked the dance band for a lively one

to drown out the dying

The captain’s revolver is at his temple

and the crew is playing taps over

the waterlogged corpses of their kinsmen

The water rushes in, the deck splits,

and I realize there’s no one left to die with.

So I leap into the water,

grown ugly and whitecapped 

in my inattention

and notice little makeshift vessels

where they’ve already resorted

to cannibalism.  

May the dark deep well of the ocean wash us all clean.  

~~~

III.

It’s 9:21 on a Monday morning

and I’m already out of things to do

except stare at the blank page

and try to codify the maelstrom of my mind

(the tempest in a teapot)

into something more closely resembling

shouting madness into a drainage culvert

to comfort in the return call of an echo.  

Between A and Z is the weight and sum

of human expression;

and in that primordial soup of thought

lies an essential truth.  

Like some code in an airport novel,

the life of the mind is one of 

parsing right from wrong

until all that is left is one, true sentence.  

There are false positives.  

There are wars and crucifixions,

all on the proliferation of unreal truth.  

The destination became the journey

as invective became the whole measure

and invention became a byproduct of

the end and the dying.  

What truth there may be,

if there may be,

Is highly unlikely to amount to:

“Mexicans, go to hell.”

~~~

IV.

At the bottom of my soul,

which feels to be wedged in too-small

space between my heart and lungs,

there is a black, cancerous mass

which seems unlikely to metastasize

and contents itself with a death

by one million cuts.  

I feel the pressure of knowing

pressing at the seams of my skull

and threatening to spill out

the well of vitriol and venom

that mutated into the gnawing,

tumescent sickness of aura.  

The eventual escape of death

is merely another symptom

of the malady, carried congenitally

by the last, gasping breaths of empire.

Millions will rise to replace you;

and nothing you were born to do

matters to anyone else.  

The villainy and the tyranny

come part and parcel

the cruelty and the crassness

endemic. I hope our last hacking cough

is a miserable one

and that those who live to see it

in their billion dollar bunkers

finally fulfill their ouroboroan destiny

when the luxury food runs out.   

America (or: the unexpected virtue of virtuelessness)

The match wouldn’t strike on the wet flint strip, the tarp roof had a tear that was becoming a skylight, and the thick carpet of mold implied his food wasn’t going to carry him any further.  The little cartoon songbirds fluttered around his head and faces appeared and disappeared in the shortening light of an oncoming night below freezing.  Sam closed his eyes tight and rocked until he found the rhythm that shook them all away.  Even still, shadowy figures danced in and out of his periphery, whispering to one another about him.  Sam couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but he felt in his heart they were laughing at him.  Laughing at how he can’t even take care of himself.  Making fun of the way he can’t keep a job and how everyone he knows thinks he’s a dangerous nutcase.  Snickering about how pathetic he is.  

He closed his eyes again and pressed the heels of his palms into them until green and blue flashes crash and scatter like a thunderstorm out past the ocean’s horizon.  He presses until it hurts, happy to see things he knows he can control and things he knows are at least a little bit real.  The mist was becoming a drizzle and hopefully just became rain.  Sleet would cave the ramshackle tent immediately in on itself.  Sam didn’t have anywhere else to go.  Even in the shelter, he can’t afford his medicine, and the shelters never let him stay when they realize what’s wrong with him.  They can’t take on the liability, they say, and they try to have him taken back to the other place.  He can’t go back there.  Some people say he just won’t, but he can’t.  

Thinking about the other place makes flashes of blood and guts appear and disappear in his head.  He hears words like ‘meat’ and ‘bone.’  Sam doesn’t hurt people, but sometimes he’s afraid he might.  

The drizzle was then rain, and he could see it starting to glaze over into a slushy frost in the potholes on the blacktop.  His teeth chattered in morse code, communicating messages of comfort from God.  God would swallow him up and hold him.  God didn’t talk to him much, anymore, and he was worried he had disappointed him.  

That’s what Sam was thinking about when he froze to death under a torn blue tarp, stiff with ice.  

Thirty-six floors above him, Jeff Bezos shot a hot wad of cum from a chemically assisted hardon into his mostly-synthetic fiancee on a $2500-a-night hotel bed.  He was basking in the afterglow, thinking about ordering half a grapefruit and how cool it was when he wore that cowboy hat to space.  He wished the sirens outside would calm the fuck down.  The only voice he heard in his head was his own, telling him what a fucking superstar he was.