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 Jan 2020
Ryan P Kinney
The first Holy Book of The Word
In Nonsense we Trust

Assembled from pre-existing works by John Burroughs, Ryan P. Kinney, Jack McGuane, Cee Williams, Don Lee, Susan Grimm, Joe Roarty, Russ Vidrick, Dianne Boresnik, Mitch James, Tanya Pilumeli, Julie Ursem Marchand, Vicki Acquah, Terry Provost, Adam Brodsky, Lennart Lundh, Raymond McNiece, Hannah Williams, MaxWell Shell, Tim Richards, Ayla Atash, RC (Bob Wilson), Chuck Joy, Katie Daley, Solomon Dixon, Mary Weems, and Gordon Downie
Mostly taken as quotes during live poetry readings. Some stolen from other sources.
Additional content from predictive text by JM Romig, Linkin Park “Powerless,” “Saga of the Swamp Thing” vol. 1, T.S. Eliot, Amalgam Mythos, Kurt Vonnegut, Kevin Smith, and Psalms (chap.):13
Added original content by Ryan P. Kinney, Lennart Lundh, Barbara Marie Minney, and Gabriella Ercolani

“Lords Temple Basement Men,” it says on the door in a badly photocopied sign, replaced freshly each week. The original was built from torn up pieces of bootleg band vinyl stickers left plastered all over the windows of some teenager, surely passed into decaying adulthood long ago.

They gather in the bottom of an abandoned house in the heart of mostly warehouses. Something, someone long ago forgot to bull doze in the wake of morbid industrialization and the zeal to just get more men more jobs while giving them no life, no place to live. They built in their own obsolescence

A Man stands outside; half catcalling, half showman barker; daring, tempting, bribing people to worship with him. In paint stained torn jeans, long shaggy hair with the bald spot landing pad directly in the center of his head, and shoes barely hanging together on his feet, he bellows out The Word. Somewhere between slam poetry performance and theology lesson, he entices and seduces people to enter. Here, they do not call him Father, or Brother, just person:  Man.  “Hey, Man,” is how they great him.

“This is the original Church of the world's scraps.
The body of the body of the body.
Burning in the sun.
‘Me and my son were born in the sun,’ They say.
He is willing to do it.”
The Man says, in a soothing voice.

People enter a crooked doorway. The Man pulls the peeling door behind them, scrapping the ground as he does so, and leads his flock down the concrete stairs to the basement. They come to a dingy dirt gravel floor and spread out; filling the space like gas expanding into a cylinder.

Background chatter already fills the room with low whispers before the performance-service,
“I am happy to hear that you are safe”.
“I am not sure that you are”
“You will be missed.”

The Man steps upon his usual milk crate to open the service. He intones the Capitalist Mantra,
“God Save the Queen
Long live the King
Hail to the Chief
The Lord of all Lies”

And the people chant, “I will not kiss you. I will not bow. I will not bow. I will not be moved.
I love the idea of what I have to be”

Mama Evil steps forward to explain their purpose here,
“This is a strange, mad religious service. Everything is out of place, nothing and no one seems to fit together. We all gather here, but no one seems to-gether. This is less a sermon and more a discussion where the gospel is debated. The Word is critiqued, modified, disputed, and changes between its members at each meeting. At any time for no reason, people can interrupt The Man to deny, confirm, suggest, or challenge his statements. The group then decides on the next bit of gospel to be made up on the spot or if what has already been said is still the current phase of perspective. There is no central thought or plan, just a plan for thoughts. We, people, call this Faith. Our membership makes up a multitude. There are Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Agnostics, Atheists, Satanists, Buddhists, Capitalists, hippies, goth kids, Starbuck’s sipping bloggers, just plain weird kids in the back working on their latest D&D campaign. We are just people. And he, is just a Man. The only interconnecting philosophy among us is, ‘Anything is possible at any time for any reason.’”
“As the recovering Catholic Kevin Smith wrote, ‘It’s not important which faith you are, just that you have faith.’”

The People are ready to receive The Holy Spirit and his unique brand of performance poetry,

“In the beginning, there was only The Word, a word. And then more. Which were collected into a story; The Story. And from The Story came creation.
And then came the questions. And The Question was man. Who are we? What are we? Why? Who am I?”

The Man explains,
“The whole point of The Word is to make up new ones. To defy God’s Word by creating ourselves.”
“Do you see the animal’s asking questions? Wondering who they are. They simply know that they are.
There are no fish in Purgatory. Only us.
The Garden of Eden is colonized by serpents
There was no place for the demons to go, but further in.”

A Hindu Yoga instructor rights himself from walking on his hands and decides to take the first initiative, “Puff the Magic Dragon says, ‘Jesus loves me, but I need to talk to a human.’”
A furry cosplayer responds, "I need to talk to a human."

A Wiccan Princess retorts, "Nature is not as inventive as she thinks she is; Neither is God"

The Man answers,
“We are a beautiful blasphemy to God’s word (because we question).”

“Heavy is the crown that wears the head,” says the child prince.

The Drag King quotes, “Psalms (chap.):13
You will tread on the lion and the cobra.
You will trample on the great lion and the serpent.”

"...And God teaches the cricket how to play his music," says the bookish-looking woman sitting in the corner, trailing off as she adjusts her literal Coke bottle frames.

A gym rat, wearing a holey muscle shirt, extends arm to point as he says,
“Humans begin as *******.”

“Humans are also stardust.
Which means we are golden,” replies the scientist

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” says the derelict businessman hobo hero,
“God made mud in his own image and we are the leftover **** that rose out of it.
And if all life is really God’s sacred mud, then every **** storm is God’s Wrath.”

The Man quotes T.S. Eliot,
“What are the roots that clutch. What branches grow out of this stony *******. Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images.”

"The grapes of wrath transmuted into the harvest of imagination,” illustrates the painter

The automaton states, “**** the earth, to make a certain sense of it all.”

The Man attempts to regain control,
“Some future digger after truth,
alien or human, kneeling with
trowel and brush at this grave,
will note in clear, careful script
the wonder that a people would
be so deliberate with the smallest
of their gods' creatures,
and so careless of themselves.”

A soccer Mom asks,
“They say I shouldn’t be so tired.
They say I should get a job.
They say I should get off this couch.
They say I shouldn’t be a blob.”

“It takes but one step to enter the grave,” says The Man.
“So much can be lost in crossing that threshold. How did your grandparents, born in separate countries, meet? Did your mother kiss your father first, or vice versa? These are questions we don't think to pose, but without the asking or other evidence, Death will redact the list of begettings. Are you prepared for that void in memory? Or have you made notes for your children to leave theirs?”

"My Dad keeps their honeymoon receipts in the family Bible,” says the Unknown.
“After Mom moved on, he would take the Bible off the shelf every evening after supper.  He would first stare at it for what seemed forever while pouring himself a huge tumbler of bourbon and lighting a huge cigar that smelled like month old underwear.  Eventually, he would open the gold clasp and raise the deeply cracked leather cover of the Bible and first look at the family history written inside the front cover in the delicate and intricate handwriting of Mom, before pulling out the well worn honeymoon receipts, which he would shuffle through like a deck of cards before spreading them out on the worn and scratched kitchen table like a kind of dead man’s hand.  Sometimes, he would weep quietly.  Other times, he would pound his fists violently on the table shaking the cans of beans and potatoes on the shelves above.  That is when I knew it was time to make myself scarce.  He never ever opened the Bible any further than the front cover, which made me wonder about the nature of the book itself.  I always pondered the same questions over and over.”  
“Is Bible a filthy word? Is it the animal? The Man, The Woman? Should we burn the book?”
“Is the Word filthy?”, asks The Man, “What are the filthy words? What are the power of Words mired in ****? Who do these words define? Who are you?”

Mama Evil commands a presence,
“****? ****? ****? *****? Broad? *****? Are these the words you use to define me? When that which defines me is the holy chalice, life's catalyst, mia figa, my ****: stand us all on our heads and we all look the same. Regardless of our skin color, or the shape of the bones in our face or the skin around our eyes or the texture of our hair, those folds of flesh, that tunnel to the precipice of the universe, that little happy happy joy joy button, these are what we all have in common and what the whole world simultaneously wants and reviles. It has that much power. A lexical reclamation is taking place. One that will lift up the collective feminine spirit instead of dragging it down to the depths of all pejoratives. ****! The taking back of all pejoratives is an essential part of the reclamation of the collective self-esteem of woman kind! She is a Hindu Goddess! She is the Roman Goddess who is the protector or newborn infants. She is cunctipotent. She is all powerful and creates and destroys the world with her blood sugar **** magic. She is the princess and savior of the Mahabharata, renowned for her hospitality, who willingly receives any traveler who requests food and lodging. She is that benevolent. Durvasas bestows upon her a powerful mantra as payment for that hospitality and with it, Princess Kunti has the power to call on any God in heaven to lie with her and she will bear a son then by the next day. When her husband is rendered sterile as punishment for shooting the Stag King as he mated with his queen, Princess Kunti bears three heirs for the kingdom. She saves the kingdom. She saves the day. She is **** magic at its finest hour and she dwells in all of us who have ever been slandered. So go on, you ignorant *******. Call me a ****. Only you in your infinite small stupidity are skint the knowledge that you have just called me a princess and a savior.”

A comic nerd asks, “What of Power? What is power?”

Mama Evil holds up a single flame, spewing from a cheap blue lighter in her hand. She asks, “What is the power of The Word.” Is it in the book? Or in the air.”

She answers, “The power to choose. Do I set the world on fire, or put out
the flames?”

The room goes dark as she abruptly steals The Man’s usual send off,
“The Word has evolved, my friends.”
 Jan 2020
Ryan P Kinney
The first Book of The Word
In Nonsense we Trust

Assembled from pre-existing works by John Burroughs, Ryan P. Kinney, Jack McGuane, Cee Williams, Don Lee, Susan Grimm, Joe Roarty, Russ Vidrick, Dianne Boresnik, Mitch James, Tanya Pilumeli, Julie Ursem Marchand, Vicki Acquah, Terry Provost, Adam Brodsky, Lennart Lundh, Raymond McNiece, Hannah Williams, MaxWell Shell, Tim Richards, Ayla Atash, RC (Bob Wilson), Chuck Joy, Katie Daley, Solomon Dixon, Mary Weems, Cat Russell, and Gordon Downie
Mostly taken as quotes during live poetry readings. Some stolen from other sources.
Additional content from predictive text by JM Romig, Linkin Park “Powerless,” “Saga of the Swamp Thing” vol. 1, T.S. Eliot, Amalgam Mythos, Kurt Vonnegut, Kevin Smith, and Psalms (chap.):13
Added original content by Ryan P. Kinney, Mitch James, Ellie St. Cyr, and Evan Spooner

“Lords Temple Basement Men,” it says on the door in a badly photocopied sign, replaced freshly each week. The original was built from torn up pieces of bootleg band vinyl stickers left plastered all over the windows of some teenager, surely passed into decaying adulthood long ago.

They gather in the bottom of an abandoned house in the heart of mostly warehouses. Something, someone long ago forgot to bull doze in the wake of morbid industrialization and the zeal to just get more men more jobs while giving them no life, no place to live. They built in their own obsolescence.

A Man stands outside; half catcalling, half showman barker; daring, tempting, bribing people to worship with him. In paint stained torn jeans, long shaggy hair with the bald spot landing pad directly in the center of his head, and shoes barely hanging together on his feet, he bellows out The Word. Somewhere between slam poetry performance and theology lesson, he entices and seduces people to enter. Here, they do not call him Father, or Brother, just person:  Man.  “Hey, Man,” is how they great him.

“But when your empty heart is weighed”
"What are you really worth?
These people call this Faith,
bring them to my table
the next bit of gospel
I wrote on a napkin”

People enter a crooked doorway. The Man pulls the peeling door behind them, scrapping the ground as he does so, and leads his flock down the concrete stairs to the basement. They come to a dingy dirt gravel floor and spread out.
The people in the room greet one another, then swarm around one woman,
“You will be used to the treatments.”
“I am not sure that you are.”
“You will be missed.”

The Man steps upon his usual milk crate to open the service. He intones the Capitalist Mantra,
“God Save the Queen
Long live the King
Hail to the Chief
The Lord of all Lies”

And the people chant, “I will not kiss you. I will not bow. I will not bow. I will not be moved.
I love the idea of what I have to be”

Princess Mommy steps up to explain their purpose here,
“This is a strange, mad religious service. Everything is out of place, nothing and no one seems to fit together. We all gather here, but no one seems to-gether. This is less a sermon and more a discussion where the gospel is debated. The (holy) Word is debated, discussed, dissected, compromised, altered, changed, shredded, reused, updated, recreated. It is burnt to cinders, then rises as a phoenix, built out of the broken pieces of all that was said before; what used to be true, but is now casually agreed to be fallacy. This Faith makes up a multitude. There are Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Agnostics, Atheists, Satanists, Buddhists, Capitalists, hippies, goth kids, Starbuck’s sipping bloggers, just plain weird kids in the back working on their latest D&D campaign. We are just people. And he, is just a Man.”
“As the recovering Catholic Kevin Smith wrote, It’s not important which faith you are, just that you have faith.”

The People are ready to receive The Holy Spirit and his unique brand of performance poetry,

“In the beginning, there was only The Word, a word. And then more. Which were collected into a story; The Story. And from The Story came creation.
And then came the questions. And The Question was man. Who are we? What are we? Why? Who am I?”

“I am the mask wearing the man of eternity. In me, you see the face of history. A history we make up as we go.
The God of fallen leaves, leaves us... waiting for eternity to begin.
The Prophet Vonnegut says, ‘The question echoes back through time and disappears.
History. Read it and weep.
Tonight is a verb.”

From the crowd come the First voice, reading from his screenplay, "I was the table of contents, a footnote... running away from the beginning of the book. Perhaps no one knew we were living happily ever after until the book was over."

The Mallrat replies,
“Of all the words of Mice and Men the saddest words are ‘It Might’ve been.’
No need to despair
It was
It has
Somewhere else
Your soul is saved
All that Might’ve has already happened. ‘

“We are charming little liars,” retorts The Man, “We are a beautiful blasphemy to God’s word.”

The comic nerd slowly whispers, “All is truth, but every man is a liar. Sell me another artificially-derived slow suicide.”

A scientist cleans his glasses as he recites, “A world full of smoke and mirror nonsense -
It’s a religion of smoke and mirror nonsense
Only The Word is true and we make it up as we go.
In Nonsense is strength”

“So it is spoken, so it is true,” The Man energetically agrees.

An alien voice asks choppily, “Touch me
if you want to
believe in me
and the nothing I know”

“Sing the praises of the Holy Unknowing,” croons The Man, “We know nothing, therefore, we know all.”

And then, he drops into a haiku,


A bi-gender beauty asks no one (for permission), “Let me sling a little freestyle verse,

I'm steeple chased because some animal church wants to make me foxtrot in tempo with the braying boy
Pinnochio wants to make me hog its slops like Pigpen McSomething grateful and dead.
A fountain of youthful talent chemically imbalanced.
...with a grey skull full of He-man."

"Look at him!" they say.
"Give him a gun!" says another.
"A bomb!" a third spurts.
"Shows us your trigger finger!" they yell.

"My little boy," Princess Mommy whispers below the rush of gruff voices, her words staccato.

They answer her, "So I CAN taste the infernal darkness,” as the crowd falls silent

Princess Mommy chides them, “We know there is a sweetness in that which we cannot see. We know there is danger in that which we cannot hear.
Our bodies shake, our minds quake in anticipation of his words. It is almost time.”

The Man speaks again.
"Surely it is known, my brethren, that we are the Third Coming, the Breaking of the Seventh Seal that will signal the end of our oppressors. When we emerge victorious from the fires of battle, there will be no value left in the binary. No twos, only two or more. The Old Ways shall perish. We will shake off the chains, pull out the nails from our hands and feet, and the world which rejected us will rise anew under our leadership. Surely, it is known. Surely, it has been spoken. Jesus themself is at our back, and therefore we shall not fail."

“What a wealthy country, but no one’s coming to pay my bail,” sings the rainbow man, “They’re bragging they own my soul.”

"I don't want to bother anyone with my prayers,” prays the bi-gender person, secretly proud of leading the riot.

Sensing it is time to take to the streets, The Man closes the meeting with the same send off,
“The Word has evolved, my friends.”
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
by Ryan P. Kinney and Aaron Shinkle
With additional content assembled from Eli Williams and Lennart Lundh

The fall of man

It was the end of monsters
The end of mothers
The end of haters
Of lovers
Of pain and suffering
Of bliss and ecstasy

Nothing to hide under the bed
No terror floating in your head
Just the buzzing and swarming of insects

There was just the animalistic need to survive
And Gaia had decided
It was best for her survival
If we did not

Truth be told
We did it to ourselves

Some future digger after truth,
alien or human, kneeling with
trowel and brush at this grave,
will note in clear, careful script
the wonder that a people would
be so deliberate with the smallest
of their gods' creatures,
and so careless of themselves.

One never sees the monster
Hiding in the open
No one ever suspects that we are hiding something
When they are staring it in the face

We walked upon the new Earth
Like we did on the Old
Tugging along our gravel hearts
On broken asphalt
Our eyes slowly
Moving towards the new sky
The clouds, like curtains, unfolded
Our feet freshly cleansed of old
Traditions and assumptions that we
would never make it to this moment
But no one knew what was past
That port of no return
The ship sailed away,
Faded out of view

Another layer chipped away like
Hardened clay
The people here aspire to be
Nothing more than alive
The lives of the New World
In the hands of strangers
Coexisting within each other
For fear of never existing again
This is their lifeline, their blood
They are all in this repopulation
Together

we see others as they are
we see ourselves at every age
and all at once
supplicants, praying for tomorrow.
Everything from nothing.
And to nothing we return.
To the whole of the way,
We hastened our downfall through an illusion of control.
Only through letting this run its course
And stepping to the center could we hope for survival

The lights one by one dim
The music softens
The actors bow,
We close the curtain on this world
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
Hammer
by Ryan P. Kinney

Picks up Hammer
Swings Hammer
This one’s for every woman who didn’t love me
And for every one that ever did
This one’s for every person who has ever doubted and underestimated me
For those who ever thought my life should be a mirror of their journey
‘Cause theirs worked out SO well for them
SMASH
This one’s for my Father,
Mother,
Brothers
My brother’s keeper,
Sins of the Father,
And inheritance of Mother’s malice
This one’s for every time I’ve had to prove I’m the GOOD son
SMASH
This one’s for the bigots,
Racists,
Hate-spewing monsters
For the ******* morons
This one’s for those who assume I’m gay
‘Cause that’s SUPPOSSED to matter
SMASH
This one’s for those who have passed their petty judgments
Based on the surface of my face
Or my visible scars
Or my hidden ones
This one’s for those who have called me freak
For those who judge me on who I was
Not who I AM
SMASH
This one’s for those who lack the ability to see in color and shades
Locked in their boring black and white senseless absolutes
There aren’t just gray areas
There are tints of every shade we a capable of perceiving
This one’s for the LITTLE people
SMASH
This one’s for those who patronize my intelligence
But yet are so easily fooled into acceptance
With a pair of plastic black frames
This one’s for IRONY
SMASH
This one’s for those who have let me down
Disappointed me, failed me
Failed to live to their potential
This one’s for EVERYONE
SMASH
This one’s for me
For not living up to my own potential
This one’s for who I AM
SMASH

And this one...
These tears...

Drops Hammer
Looks to the sky...

This one’s for my son
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEJep5vmtrM
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkjJ76rjI_8
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
Analog Man
by Ryan P. Kinney

I am the analog man
Do not give me your zeros and ones
Black and whites
I'll take a red two any day

Old fashioned old school
All chivalry and filth
That mars the scars
Customized dirt
Nothing is written in stone yet
(or in the dirt)

I wear these glasses,
This fraud,
As armor,
A filter
Against that which I am forced to see

I am not in or out
Black or white
I am live in TECHNICOLOR
Excited electrons
Ebbing and flowing
From the extremes of existence

I do not fit the pattern
Nor am I a predictable algorithm
Put your garbage in me
You will not get garbage out
I will turn and twist
Create while destroying
And shine your **** into my gold

I will thrive off of what is wrong with this world
And make your leavings better than you ever were
Also see "Half Life"

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xAq6gncIy4
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
Half Life
by Ryan P. Kinney

Welcome to the digital age.
Where man’s best friend is Internet ****
And a woman’s only friend is her *******.

We’ve traded a heartbeat for an electronic pulse.
Blips and bleeps in an imagined humanity.
Forgetting that living means leaving the house.
And that sandals and boxer shorts are not formal wear.

We live in the information age
Full disclosure is no longer optional
We are sharing information.
We are contributing to the death of the self.
Or are we finally mastering intelligence?

There is an epidemic of inaction
Entropied Progress
The mobius sloth slides down into its own gluttony
And I just want to have *** with someone who is still alive

Have you seen the latest episode of Walking Dead or Breaking Bad?
Have you looked in the mirror?
Reality shows?
Who’s reality?

We are social creatures
And social control is how you keep the pigs in their pen
Until it’s time to offer us up as sacrifice at the altar of decadence

We willingly give them our intelligence
Our spirit
For another video game
Another TV show
That promises a better reality
See it all in HD
While we dubstep to our doom
Up Jacob’s Ladder
Built out of the 15 minute prophets

Sell me another artificially derived addiction
Masquerading as sustenance
Trading them like baseball cards
Tell me how much I need it
Need you
Preach it with the fear of the unorthodox on Fox News
While everyone’s getting high on your life

Televangelist CEOs
Sell us the next salvation
The anarchists are screaming,
“Legalize it.”
And the stoners aren’t helping

The half-life of modernization guarantees that if enough of our individuality decays
There ceases to be anything worth calling human
See also "Analog Man"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xAq6gncIy4
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
by Ryan P. Kinney

It was the end of monsters
The end of mothers
The end of haters
Of lovers
Of pain and suffering
Of bliss and ecstasy

Nothing to hide under the bed
No terror floating in your head
Just the buzzing and swarming of the insects

There was just the animalistic need to survive
And Gaia had decided
It was best for her survival
If we did not

The fall of man

Truth be told
We did it to ourselves
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
by Ryan P. Kinney and Aaron Shinkle

It began with a wail
“Bring the Hammer. Bring the Rage.”
And with a boom, smash,
A few cuts, bruises, burns, and scars,
We forged our lives

Together we were an alloy of absolute, disheveled chaos
A folded steel of unstoppable imperfections
Clean, because we knew how to get *****
Stronger, because of our magnificent flaws
Pure, because of our willingness to flaunt our impurities

Our emotions boiled to extremes
Represented as terrifying visages of paint, mud, blood, dye, and pieces of glass
Peppering our bodies as proof that we can feel
So real, so raw, so unlike the mundane, moderate identities we are forced to live
That no one passes without gawking in amazement and terror
Our mild manners are just masks for our superhuman madness

The rage comes and flows through us
Fills us
Finally with a conduit
An exit strategy
In the effigies of our commodified existence
They crack with the spider web of safety glass
Explode into splinters and shards
And trail across the sky in a dance of magnetic iron oxide

We are twisted and mangled and sick
Mangled into some image of another
Twisted in the rubber band tension just moments before it snaps
And sick of being told not to feel

We broke who we were to make who we will be
The endless shells of molds fractured
Shatters like our porcelain dreams
Their shards still present in our skin years later

We destroyed what held us back
Or held us in
The prisoners using their own shackles,
And bodies as weapons against their inanimate jailers

Like the flowers that bloom from the blood-soaked battlefield
Where the shattered pieces of glass become the strands of horse hair on an artist's brush,
Where the pigments of blood and paint are intertwined onto the canvas of a mad artist's carousel
of orchestrated mayhem.
The American Dream is a shattered amalgam of trading people for things
Experiences, for proof of them

We will clear away the rubble of ourselves
Move away from the pieces that hold us back
And forge ahead with the fury of an exploding gas tank

When the sun goes down
And the flames go up
We will finally break
The last dismantled icon of glass, plastic, electrons, and lies
This will be an end
There will be no more funeral processions
No more grave markers
We mourn our lives no longer
There will only be rebirth
A beautiful emotional breakdown
Where rage finally gives way to hope
Witness the fall of a man
A property, a thing
This will be our legacy of beautiful destruction
One last time
Then we will pick up the pieces
And build the rest of our lives
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
I wore a blood colored effigy of her
Straddled between that *****’s legs
Wrapped around my neck
While she choked the life out of me
- I broke

I wrapped myself in my sins
And flaunted them
As a badge of survival

From a smoking wedding bouquet
I blew my brains into the ether
And let the fumes ooze into my veins
Filling me with the vitriol of an alcoholic madman
Forced sober to reality his whole life

The poison danced and cascaded into the water
In a downward feral magnetic spiral of broken promises
My pieces littered the lawn in a prismatic shower

Yeah, my work here was done
And I was going out with the combustion impact of a flare gun hitting five gallons of gas over shattered cinder blocks
I doubled her wager
With a halogen explosion of razor sharp glass.
I bet on her broken promise with an even bigger lie-

I AM OK.
 Oct 2019
JM Romig
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will be live-*

The revelation will be streaming through your Windows
laptops and smartphones.
The revolution will be blogged
Tweeted, liked, shared, RE-blogged RE-tweeted
and Stumbled Upon in between
midnight ******* sessions
sandwiched between funny cat memes.

The resolution will be HD.
It's evolution will be high speed.
The whistles will be blown at with frequency.
The revolution will be commented on;
Scrutinized.
Vandalized.
Scandalized.
Stylized and advertized.
People will pay attention -
People will forget to mention
that some stand up, occupy, riot
and die.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution be streaming live
through the filter of your choice.
The facts will be democratized.
The democracy will be corporatized.
The corporations will personified.
People, objectified -
Spied on and villainized  
The powers that be will will lie, deny, and try to justify.
The people will be disenfranchised.
Prisons will be privatized.
Death drones will be utilized.

No one will bat an eye.
Because revolution will be multiplied, over-simplified,
The violence, normalized.
Lives, sacrificed
to satiate the Golden Calf's appetite.

The revolution will not be televised
but Jerry Springer will...
Go figure.
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
Lords Temple Basement Men
The first Book of The Word
In Nonsense we Trust

Assembled from pre-existing works by John Burroughs, Ryan P. Kinney, Jack McGuane, Cee Williams, Don Lee, Susan Grimm, Joe Roarty, Russ Vidrick, Dianne Boresnik, Mitch James, Tanya Pilumeli, Julie Ursem Marchand, Vicki Acquah, Terry Provost, Adam Brodsky, Lennart Lundh, Raymond McNiece, Hannah Williams, MaxWell Shell, Tim Richards, Ayla Atash, RC (Bob Wilson), Chuck Joy, Katie Daley, Solomon Dixon, Mary Weems, and Gordon Downie
Mostly taken as quotes during live poetry readings. Some stolen from other sources.
Additional content from predictive text by JM Romig, Linkin Park “Powerless,” “Saga of the Swamp Thing” vol. 1, T.S. Eliot, Amalgam Mythos, Kurt Vonnegut, Kevin Smith, and Psalms (chap.):13
Added original content by Ryan P. Kinney, Dr. Benjamin Anthony, and Ayla Atash

“Lords Temple Basement Men,” it says on the door in a badly photocopied sign, replaced freshly each week. The original was built from torn up pieces of bootleg band vinyl stickers left plastered all over the windows of some teenager, surely passed into decaying adulthood long ago.

They gather in the bottom of an abandoned house in the heart of mostly warehouses. Something, someone long ago forgot to bull doze in the wake of morbid industrialization and the zeal to just get more men more jobs while giving them no life, no place to live. They built in their own obsolescence.

A Man stands outside; half catcalling, half showman barker; daring, tempting, bribing people to worship with him. In paint stained torn jeans, long shaggy hair with the bald spot landing pad directly in the center of his head, and shoes barely hanging together on his feet, he bellows out The Word. Somewhere between slam poetry performance and theology lesson, he entices and seduces people to enter. Here, they do not call him Father, or Brother, just person:  Man.  “Hey, Man,” is how they great him.

“Come in and be amongst our broken people (pieces).
Mingle with our shards.
See which cut is the deepest”

People enter a crooked doorway. The Man pulls the peeling door behind them, scrapping the ground as he does so, and leads his flock down the concrete stairs to the basement. They come to a dingy dirt gravel floor and spread out.
The people in the room greet one another, then swarm around one woman,
“You are a good worker.”
“You will be missed.”

The Man steps upon his usual milk crate to open the service. He intones the Capitalist Mantra,
“God Save the Queen
Long live the King
Hail to the Chief
The Lord of all Lies”

And the people chant, “I will not kiss you. I will not bow. I will not bow. I will not be moved.
I love the idea of what I have to be”

The woman swarm, Mama Evil, pushes her way to the front to explain their purpose here,
“This is a strange, mad religious service. Everything is out of place, nothing and no one seems to fit together. We all gather here, but no one seems to-gether. This is less a sermon and more a discussion where the gospel is debated. The (holy) Word is debated, discussed, dissected, compromised, altered, changed, shredded, reused, updated, recreated. It is burnt to cinders, then rises as a phoenix, built out of the broken pieces of all that was said before; what used to be true, but is now casually agreed to be fallacy. We, people, call this Faith. Our membership makes up a multitude. There are Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Agnostics, Atheists, Satanists, Buddhists, Capitalists, hippies, goth kids, Starbuck’s sipping bloggers, just plain weird kids in the back working on their latest D&D campaign. We are just people. And he, is just a Man.”
“Dual Spirituality is a possibility. In fact, it is encouraged. Multiple realities are possible. Poly-spirituality is acceptable. The only interconnecting philosophy among us is, ‘Anything is possible at any time for any reason’.”

The People are ready to receive The Holy Spirit and his unique brand of performance poetry,

“In the beginning, there was only The Word, a word. And then more. Which were collected into a story; The Story. And from The Story came creation.
And then came the questions. And The Question was man. Who are we? What are we? Why? Who am I?”
The Man explains,
“We are a beautiful blasphemy to God’s word because we question.”

Let me start with a parable,
“Once upon a time…
There lived a shy little boy and a chatty little girl. Though the two lived really close they never knew each other. That was until one day, the girl entered high school. They met for the first time on the school bus. The boy eavesdropped on her and for the first time spoke to her. Although she was especially irritated, the boy responded. It was with those words that a lifelong love blossomed…
‘You love me, you just don’t know it yet.’

Through the many trials and errors of high school life they grew together. And so, They lived happily ever after.”
“…Except, she didn’t. In this reality, she ran off with a rich older man while taking care of his dying wife, 5 years after those high school sweethearts were married.”
Years later, he would lament,
“It started with a broken heart. Through the crack seeped liquid fire. It engulfed me, burning away all that I was. The flames shall purify me. Boil me down to my base components, and then rebuild me. From the ashes will rise a new entity.
Who am I?”

“What can we learn from this,” asks the Man.

The first interrupter states matter-of-factly, “You are fire. You are love.”
A tie-dyed burnout rants, “Love is fire, Man. It burns. But it also warms and protects… Praise Allah.”
“Amen.”
“Bless you my son.”
“Hail Satan.”

“The last time I hear my heart…” says the bookish-looking woman sitting in the corner, trailing off as she adjusts her literal Coke bottle frames.
Now with ignition to her words, she quotes, “The last time I hear my heart was like a galactic ******. The ****** that made you and touches everything you made. Faith is attempting to live as though we are loved.”

A Drag King high fives her and says, “I liked the galactic ******.”

A torn up, steel-studded, leather clad punk continues, “Promise me you will live…
For nothing…
But the next moment.
No forgiveness, no damnation, only the match I strike on the heel of my boot.”

And then the automaton asks, “What of the devil: the original corruptor, the source of all evil?”

A gym rat, wearing a holey muscle shirt, extends an arm to point as he half sings, “The devil is a wicked man and wears a suit and tie. The devil checked in at noon and asked us, ‘What is the sleep of reason?’ You woke the devil I thought you left behind.”

“The Devil is due; the Devils do,” coos his boyfriend, the semanticist-*******.

The Man answers, “Is not the source of evil the same as the source of creation. Is it not evil to be so selfish as to create, with no concern for how creation will change everything.”

The Wiccan Princess retorts,
“Creation can be bought and sold.
Motherhood is a commodity.
Venus is for sale.
The nativity is shrouded in black.

We've streamlined your desire.
She was only offering an apple anyways.
And filled in that hole in her heart.

Here, we give her to you totally domesticated.
This one is costly, but so worth it.

You never will be worth it.
Earn enough
Be enough

Taste the salt of her tears on your tongue;
the salt of the earth.
She refuses to wear this crown of thorns.

In the eyes of your maker.
You should be ashamed.
To look your Maker in the eyes.”

Mama Evil attempts to chill her blaze, “Dear, the Anger is caged. It is the custom to call children who go to war, men…children of war die like men.”

Their daughter, the littlest girl in the world, coughed. A runny nose explained it, she had the sniffles. Nothing to worry about normally, but here, now? Right now the end of the world was in front of her. Flying saucers were floating down to slaughter the entire world with burning laser jelly. She coughed and picked up a remote with a wheel shaped dial.
“i drank too much pop and i gotta ***.” She said to no one in particular.
She turned the wheel shaped dial and a chorus of voices sounded. The chorus formed itself into an immense wall of sound made of bureaucrats, lawyers and politicians from another dimension. The littlest girl in the world kept turning the dial and saw the bureaucrats wash over the saucers, sending them back into space. The earth was safe, the littlest girl in the world smiled in relief.
And coughed.  

“It seems where demons fail and monsters falter, angels may prevail,” her mothers laughed.

Still incinerated, a goddess queen shouts, “We are the granddaughters of the witches you failed to burn.”

The crowd jostles and pulses like a living being. They are moved by the words they have heard. A chatter rises from them, much like the midnight sounds of the forest. "Who does she think she is?" "She said it. She sure said it." "I'm going to tell Moira all about it." An old woman near the back takes a swig from a bottle of wine she carries under her coat before passing it to a young woman in front of her.
"From fire, new life is born, too," she smiles, a crooked twist of the lips.

Rendered speechless and impotent, The Man abruptly closes this meeting with the usual send off,
“The Word has evolved, my friends.”
 Oct 2019
Ryan P Kinney
Lords Temple Basement Men
The first Book of The Word
In Nonsense we Trust

Assembled from pre-existing works by John Burroughs, Ryan P. Kinney, Jack McGuane, Cee Williams, Don Lee, Susan Grimm, Joe Roarty, Russ Vidrick, Dianne Boresnik, Mitch James, Tanya Pilumeli, Julie Ursem Marchand, Vicki Acquah, Terry Provost, Adam Brodsky, Lennart Lundh, Raymond McNiece, Hannah Williams, MaxWell Shell, Tim Richards, Ayla Atash, RC (Bob Wilson), Chuck Joy, Katie Daley, Solomon Dixon, Mary Weems, and Gordon Downie
Mostly taken as quotes during live poetry readings. Some stolen from other sources.
Additional content from predictive text by JM Romig, Linkin Park “Powerless,” “Saga of the Swamp Thing” vol. 1, T.S. Eliot, Amalgam Mythos, Kurt Vonnegut, Kevin Smith, John A. Kinney Jr., and Psalms (chap.):13
Added original content by Ryan P. Kinney, Eli Williams, and Kadie Good

“Lords Temple Basement Men,” it says on the door in a badly photocopied sign, replaced freshly each week. The original was built from torn up pieces of bootleg band vinyl stickers left plastered all over the windows of some teenager, surely passed into decaying adulthood long ago.

They gather in the bottom of an abandoned house in the heart of mostly warehouses. Something, someone long ago forgot to bull doze in the wake of morbid industrialization and the zeal to just get more men more jobs while giving them no life, no place to live. They built in their own obsolescence.

A Man stands outside; half catcalling, half showman barker; daring, tempting, bribing people to worship with him. In paint stained torn jeans, long shaggy hair with the bald spot landing pad directly in the center of his head, and shoes barely hanging together on his feet, he bellows out The Word. Somewhere between slam poetry performance and theology lesson, he entices and seduces people to enter. Here, they do not call him Father, or Brother, just person:  Man.  “Hey, Man,” is how they great him.

"God not only loves a sinner, he prefers them.”
“Come to my parish. Sinners only”
“The lostness of the found, the blindness of the seeing, the spirituality of the atheist, the silence of the spoken.”
“The Covenant of the Sacred Heart.”

People enter a crooked doorway. The Man pulls the peeling door behind them, scrapping the ground as he does so, and leads his flock down the concrete stairs to the basement. Some newbie looks nervously into the stairwell.
From the rear, a maternal voice coos,
“You will be used to the treatments.
Don't worry about it.”
They come to a dingy dirt gravel floor and spread out; filling the space like gas expanding into a cylinder.

The Man steps upon his usual milk crate to open the service. He intones the Capitalist Mantra,
“God Save the Queen
Long live the King
Hail to the Chief
The Lord of all Lies”

And the people chant, “I will not kiss you. I will not bow. I will not bow. I will not be moved.
I love the idea of what I have to be”

The maternal voice steps up to explain their purpose here,
“This is a strange, mad religious service. Everything is out of place, nothing and no one seems to fit together. We all gather here, but no one seems to-gether. This is less a sermon and more a discussion where the gospel is debated. The Word is critiqued, modified, discussed, and changes between its members at each meeting. At any time for no reason, people can interrupt The Man to deny, confirm, suggest, or challenge his statements. The group then decides on the next bit of gospel to be made up on the spot or if what has already been said is still the current phase of perspective. There is no central thought or plan, just a plan for thoughts. We, people, call this Faith. Our membership makes up a multitude. There are Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Agnostics, Atheists, Satanists, Buddhists, Capitalists, hippies, goth kids, Starbuck’s sipping bloggers, just plain weird kids in the back working on their latest D&D campaign. Dual Spirituality is a possibility. In fact, it is encouraged. Multiple realities are possible. Poly-spirituality is acceptable. The only interconnecting philosophy among us is, ‘Anything is possible at any time for any reason’.”

The People are ready to receive The Holy Spirit and his unique brand of performance poetry,

“In the beginning, there was only The Word, a word. And then more. Which were collected into a story; The Story. And from The Story came creation.
And then came the questions. And The Question was man. Who are we? What are we? Why? Who am I?”

The Man explains,
“The whole point of The Word is to make up new ones. To defy God’s Word by creating ourselves.”

The first interrupter asks, “How do you say No to God.”

The Man answers,
“You don’t like The Question. You are The Question.
We are relearning how to get lost, hoping to return to the birth of The Word.
Worship yourself and serve only humanity.
No one made you.
You created yourself.
It’s all the same story. The Story of I.”

“We are a beautiful blasphemy to God’s word (because we question).”

“How do you say No?
You don’t.
By understanding there is no such thing as,
No, I can’t. Only I won’t.
It was.
It is.”

A torn up, steel-studded, leather clad punk responds,
“we see others as they are
we see ourselves at every age
and all at once”

And the Man once again responds,
“All that we can think. All that we can imagine. All that we can write, paint, create, feel. All of this is real; somewhere. Depends on which universal perspective you are tuned to. Don’t like the current program playing. Change the channel.”

The professor sitting on the floor, shoeless, begins to riff,
“Yes, this is like that piece about imagination being the genesis of other worlds. About how imagination, all thought, is really tapping multiple frequencies from other universes. Our imaginative creations spawn, tap into, and play back all alternate universes in a non-linear time sense. Cause and effect are not in sequence. All that we think, all that we can come up with creates new worlds, but also accesses those already in effect and plays them. We create worlds that already existed by the time we come up with them in our imagination. They were already there and human minds are organic quantum analog receiving-broadcasting devices. We randomly switch channels with nonlinear frequency, simultaneously, and with varying signal strengths of each universe. We receive, but also feedback into a greater signal. So, we unknowingly create these universes, while also being fed from our own creations. Never, in order. We are the Father and the Son. Our own creators and creations. Our words are the genesis of all the other worlds, but also speak the gospel of the programs already in progress. All that we can imagine is as real as we can conjure.”

A black goddess queen asks, “Then, what do you call God?”

The Man retorts,
“You don't need his name, because you remember the man.
The idea of a memory of a man.
Perhaps the idea is better, stronger, more important than the man.
The idea of a man.
Sometimes, people are the absence of themselves.
And the absence of man is God.”

The semanticist-******* unzips its mask and chimes in, “When you name something you separate it and take ownership of it. We never name ourselves. So I ask you, what is your name? What do you own?”

A tie-dyed burnout rallies a battle cry protest chant,
“Who's the Boss?”
“You.”
“Who's God?”
“You.”
“Who are you?”
“I am (me).”

Another voice screams from the crowd, "I'm a monster, I admit it."

Like a rolling wave, the chatter once soft, “I’m a monster” becomes a chant. Faster and faster the adrenaline rises up, the voices rise up, thunderous shouting fills the room, threatening to burst through the walls and escape into the sky. No longer fearing what others might think they raise their fists and beat their chests, unleashing the monster they tried so hard to hide. Shrieks and guttural instinctual roars, animalistic crawling and seething anger, move through the crowd like a pack of wolves ripping apart a coyote.
The screaming voices spill out,
“God has left long ago and has taken no pity on the lonely wanderer.”
“We are not Abraham or Jesus. We are forgotten.”
“We are the forgotten demons pushed out of Heaven.”
“Or maybe we never belonged there in the first place.”

The maternal voice returns, feeling the scorch of the unrequited emotion, seeks to soothe, “Thus mollified she goes, harsh words forgiven, down highways in the dark by demons driven.”

The Man, the original instigator, adds more fuel to the fire,
“And what drive does she possess that we do not?  To seek out, to be blind to the trapping of the darkness within this corridor? We must look and see how we too can move past the shame and blame of others.  To move past the trappings of our own guilt.  To take within ourselves, our demons, true, but take and guide and build the new.  A new life that we can’t ignore, and when we fall, we feel the scorn.  We feel the bad faith and lies that keep us entangled in the want-to-be-with, the fear to be-without. But we also have a fear to be, to exist in the place of a true “self” and live out our dreams. Though time keeps happening, we remain stagnant, we remain in the place of an inauthentic being, a being-for, not a being-with.  We must seek to be-with.  To be-with our demons, our past, and our temptations toward the dark, toward the place in which the I becomes.  To be. To exist. In this.  That is the place where the divine can breathe.  Though we must remember to always embrace change, for everything is temporary, including our own pain.”

Having spent all his feeling and words carelessly and frivolously, The Man abruptly closes this meeting with the usual send off,
“The Word has evolved, my friends.”

— The End —