I have no energy left but for revolt — the revolt of the one who abandons the climb, turns his back, and goes back down the hill toward the water.

**** Cheney ate my flesh and shat upon my skeletal remnants. Obama came after him, unzipped his fly and emptied the pale dilution of his bladder-wine onto me (it was warm and sparkling at first, but soon became cold and fetid).

I do not want to be treated by your white-robed functionaries who take me to the precipice’s edge, deliver a pill to my mouth, a hand in my pocket, and a push on my back. I do not want to be educated by your masters of delusion, your demons of standardized measurement. I do not want to be fed by your factory corpses who sit like workers in cubicles, unmoving and covered to their hips in excrement and despair. I do not want to be employed by your treadmill machines that turn time into regret and obedience into tears. I do not want to be informed by your chyron streams that feed the wells of desolation and ignorance. I do not want to be a part of your economy that fills the fountains of palaces with the blood of innocence, where investment is a tout sheet that dissolves into electrons as the getaway limousine races toward the mansion.

The sheer and final exhaustion of the rebel is his last and only triumph: he drops the knife of his cause, gently lowers the stiffening body of his holy purpose into the receptive dust, clears aside a few stony pieces of the rubble, and kneels in submission to the earth and all the teeming beauty that lies beneath it.

For then he knows: it is I, too, like these others, who have walked among the dead.