At the mountain's top
I roar to deafening winds
That I am alive.

I sit in this room, day after day, rotting and rotting and rotting away.
The sun that I see is snuffed by smog,
Transferred to LCDs in parks and streets,
Reminding the coughing passers-by
Of what it looks like to have a blue sky.
And I... I don't want to work a 9-5.
I don't want anyone to.
I don't want to participate in a cancerous system
That consumes continents of life just to churn out some ******* paper and oil.
It sounds apathetic, but it isn't.
I don't pity myself in the slightest:
I pity having to exist in this ****** up world
Where you're nothing more than an exploitable resource,
And where you are among the billions of others that will never be remembered,
Lost in the vast swathes of "disposable" humanity
That live and die in a rigged system
Built for and by those on top.

I just want to get away.
I don't want to be a part of this place.
I don't want to see another school get shot up.
I don't want to read another sensational headline.
I don't want to hear about a "just" war.
I don't want to breathe the toxic air.
I don't want to be see another skyline built by slaves.

I just want to be away.
Every second of every day I feel a desire to get away.
An incessant wanderlust for some place else,
Somewhere that isn't dark, cold, and bland,
Somewhere that wasn't built by poor immigrants.
Somewhere that wouldn't pave a forest to build a ******* parking lot.
Somewhere that isn't here.

I've been under the influence
Of a grand delusion for years:
That humanity was in need of saving,
That I could do something to change things.
But the vast, sanguineous swamp of civilization
Swallows you whole,
Indiscriminately forcing you to adapt.
Ripping your flesh from the bone,
Until you are a twisted phantom
Of who you once were.

The ants,
Though,
They work together.
Their colonies are, essentially,
A single organism:
An immune system of warriors with grotesque chelicerae,
With foragers and scavengers radiating from the colony's center,
Bringing back sustenance,
And the queen, ceaselessly pumping out generations.
They all live and work and die seamlessly:
Cogs upon cogs, organic machinery.
So what am I?
A blockage in an artery?
An aimless foreign object,
Doomed to be consumed by everything around me?

I don't know.
I wake up and I put my contacts in.
It's usually past noon,
And some days I can't get out of bed.
Don't ask me why.
But I go to class and I take care of things
I'm trying to at least be mobile,
To have options and use them.
I've got a wanderer's spirit
And a saint's moral code.
Why must so many go without? I ask.
Why do we cause so many of our own problems?

Again, I don't know.
We're naïve, hairless apes with nuclear weapons,
Cosmological Protozoa at best.
Our cities are staunchly divided:
The haves and have nots,
The grime and the detergent.
The ghetto is potholes, shattered glass, And faded, forgotten dreams.
This is not the succinct society I see in ants;
This is chaos, disorder, malignant and cancerous.
This is ecological genocide.
This is systematic exploitation and manipulation.
This is rigged elections and clandestine empires.
This is **** Sapiens circa 21st century,
And I want nothing of it.

The torrents of restless dreams and shallow seas
Where we were never meant to leave.
I hold you with me,
This incessant menagerie of craving and sin
Skin to skin, pulling each other in grasps and gasps and melting hearts
Melding in toiled sheets in dim rooms
With a TV on mute,
And Phantogram on repeat.

You reach for me, lips to lips
Fingertips like lightning
Eyes afire with depthless desire
Your arching back and pulsing waves
Revolving over me, dancing
With that playful gaze
That I still love.
I think of fireworks on the coast.

You've sent me to another world;
Every avenue is steamy sensation
Flooded with these animal cravings
And when you scream my name
To every god above
And every demon below
They will know
That we humans are not merely flesh and bone
But beings of sense, of touch and taste,
Of sight and sound and pheromone

We master the art of our nervous systems
In these bedrooms,
Or wherever
And become the envy
Of every lifeless atom
That knows not the glory,
No active participation
In this grand existence.
No exploding nerve endings, quaking every muscle
And no simple, splendid mornings with a lover asleep in your arms.

By: Forrest Jorgensen

Clouds shift across rearview windows
Of ten million untouched cars.
Hesitant steps over uneven asphalt,
And the deep drone of interstate
Spanning the continent.

Dilapidated city centers,
Abandoned buildings and frayed neighborhoods
With all those chemicals still inside,
So birth defects are on the rise:
Another casualty of industry.

While there's shiny new shoes,
Couture wardrobe and golden rings
With a wood floor in the renovated loft,
And a computer that knows your face.
This view of the city is nothing new,
Though the price says otherwise.

Rain sweeps carcasses off oil black streets.
Excrement piles in the gutters.
Billboards like clawing monoliths.
The senseless beat of trekking tire,
And a really ******* big American flag.

Endless parking lots,
Suburban sprawl,
Incandescent spires,
Nonchalant death,
Distant eyes,
Mass demise,
Corporate ties,
Institutionalized,
No integrity,
No empathy:
A quiet suicide.

An ethereal Voice
From Tomorrow's horizon
Opened the sky
And sank the sun.
Now every star
Shines like the one
We've always known
Since so long ago.

And they do not fade
They do not stray
They are here to stay
They will never die
So It says.

The stellar era
Is timeless incarnate,
And life will forever thrive
On those lonely, drifting worlds

But I have heard,
In the whispers
Of some ancient breeze,
That the Voice will have me
Return its secret,
And with it,
The sun will rise --
Like it once did --
And the stars beyond;
They will be lost,
They will fade,
And we will never find them.

We will wither in the darkness.
We will wear and weather.
And long after the sun has died,
No more suns will ever rise:
Life that once blossomed
In every direction
Is now little more
Than a few particles,
Alone, eons and eons
Away from one another.

This is the Forever Dark.
This is the death of our Universe.

So burn me now,
While the universe still breathes.
Cast my ashes into Autumn's wind;
I care not where they land,
As long as they're here on Earth,
Where it is bright and warm
For at least a little longer.

Do you remember those old days?
Glamorous nights and masquerades;
Lights and music and smiling faces
Stuffed with champagne.
I want to know what it was like
On the verge of collapse.
I want to see the doped masses,
The blinded eyes,
And I want to watch them
As they wake up in those mansions
On that late October morning,
With hangovers and wet clothes,
While they hear on the radio
That their little world,
Filled with excess and spectacle,
Would so very soon
Be no more.