I dream of living to see the next revolution,
And of the men who will not live through that revolution,
Of the air humming electric static heat in anticipation of the inevitable riot,
Of the holy barricades standing in defiance of Heaven,
Of the enlightened kicking down the doors with guns and masks, asking;
"ARE YOU GONNA BE A PART OF THE PROBLEM OR ARE YOU GONNA BE A PART OF THE SOLUTION?"
Of gallows for the dogs of war,
Of guillotines for the capitalist pigs,
Of a firing squad for every reactionary content to oppose the wheel of history even as it crushes their bones down to nothing,
Of the end which justifies  the blood staining the cities red as the hammer and sickle cells that divide and multiply fevered in the streets,
Of the ghosts of iron men long dead still insisting that we take not one step back,
Because men get arrested, animals get put down
And God,
God made them as stubble to our swords, boys
And with blades clenched between their teeth so climb the dregs of the Earth to the surface to taste the apples they shook from the trees,
In 24 hour news cycles the slogans repeat to infinity:
"NOT RESISTING ARREST"
"NOT COMMITTING A CRIME"
"I WAS NOT A THREAT, WHY DID YOU TRY TO **** ME"
You can only force people to paint the smallest target possible on their own backs for so long before you end up in the crosshairs
I have seen the faces of  my saints painted on the walls of eternity -
Of Trotsky,  million headed proletariat staring daggers through the hearts of the tsars,
Of Cromwell, crusader for the ungovernable force of will,
Of Robespierre, headsman of divine terror riding on the wings of the Angel of Death,
I have seen the end and the means played out in countless dramas across millennia,
And the only question that remains unanswered is this:
Are you gonna be a part of the problem or are you gonna be a part of the solution?

For vanity's sake, I write to ****

And for sanity's sake I bite my tongue

The holy name misspoken,
The divinity of the poem bastardized,
The fool's reward dripping down his face into his beard

Waking from wet dreams of Sylvia Plath,
At the dawn of the new age christened in the blood from the believer's fists pounded into cement floors,
Rise the son and heir of conflict, connection, the infinite mundane war,
The cowards ready to die with gold plated switchblade and crossed fingers behind their backs,
Stop me if you've heard this one before

The consummation of the union devoutly to be wished -
The obvious overlooked,
The punchline ignored,
The ****** disappointing,
The falling action drawn out ad nausea until the audience starts to wish you'd just hit the ******* ground already
But you've just got so far to go
I write to ****,
But you never needed my help

There are preparations being made for another funeral in my hometown and I am late again for a fitting,
I pass by a familiar old man on the street corner, still stockpiling ****** and ammunition and I think it is beautiful that he still has hope,
So I give him the last of my money,
$1.60, the price of a rematch never won, not nearly enough to pay for the guilt of privilege but the best I could do nonetheless,

In sickness I watched the faith of my drunken friends run down their faces among half full glasses of red wine and bummed cigarettes, and it is this same divine tragedy that runs feedback loops through my deluded cortex every night between bouts of drowning clarity,
'There may be hope for you yet,' whispers the phantom poet of my fever dreams,
As I notch another eventual demise into my belt,
While the white washed pages of bloodied history sneer back at me, asking,
'What are you gonna do about it, punk?'
I don't know how to answer that question

Somewhere out West my shadow firewalks with the best of the fallen heroes, and I begin to understand that feeling I heard sung about in my youth
I never could've imagined it would feel this bad
Of all the things we do to find people who feel like us, this is by far the worst

Cracked screen, broken glass, combat boot on the neck of the pulse of the revolution, the ghosts of fascists haunting skyscrapers staring back at me with eyes that stopped working in the 80s, protest signs written in dead languages I can't begin to understand, I can already tell where everybody stands - I can see it in the Eyes and on the t shirts and on the blog posts and on the graffiti tagged windows that read like picture books in a school for deaf children,
The orphaned poets, the ******* sons of *******,
Hell is wherever you're wasting away come Rapture, where you are now is where your ashes will be scattered,
Your memorial beneath your feet defaced and unbegotten by the seed of the ****** wind, and here you will be returned at the end of the day, your trail of tears turned to paths of lilies and roses and the desert sweeping your suffering underneath the centuries-
This is how you will be remembered, sand piled upon ******* sand

From the concrete purgatory of my burdened decades I hear them,
From the capital run over, drowned in the tide of righteous pandering fervor I hear them,
From the streets taken to by shock treatment portraits of deaths un-died, I hear them:
The mournful howl of the 108,000 in waiting,
Terrified for the fate of their soon to be brothers, sisters, competition for the future,
For the divine rewards the privileged will promise themselves for their narrow compassions,
For the killers slapped on the wrist while the innocent remain condemned to a life that no one asked for, without the consent of anyone involved,
Yes, the street preacher cries,
Yes to life,
Yes to opportunity,
Yes to the future promised to all of us by this great nation,
(Well, all of us, not all of you)
But when the destitute mothers of a generation abandoned reach out cupped hands for help,
He's left his wallet in his other ideology,
Divine privilege only applies to you before you're born,
After that you're on your own
All lives matter, until they're alive

I saw David Johansen's straight boy drag queen heart bleeding for the state of being he left the scene in - the euphemisms weighing down the airwaves like bricks chained to the ankles of those selfless enough to take the plunge, the chaos of energy turned to profit margin and the makeup all cried off as the lights go out over the once holy cities
Richey Edwards' truth was carved to his flesh in no uncertain terms - this is real and this is happening and you are just as responsible for it as I am, the Prime Ministers guilty and the preachers guilty and the divine street youth guilty and that guilt was all he had to pack in his suitcase when he left them all behind forever,
They all watched Iggy bleeding from the nose on the pavement in the rain and they all walked away because they had their own **** to deal with and I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't have done the same,
The fight is not yet over, Trotsky closed his eyes believing the fight was not yet over but he never could've imagined how right he was, and the walls of the mausoleum called to me in my acid flashback dreams:
This is the gospel of collapsed veins and broken synapse - the Rapture clocked in at 0 Revolutions per minute and the message scribbled down from whatever could be picked out of the static
Take what you need from this place and go,
If you burn bright enough they will one day count your shattered visage among these lost martyrs -
But that's a fate I wouldn't wish on anyone

I.
The people look like flowers at last - sick thoughts of dead men strike the clock winding backwards and ignite to illuminate my approach,
The people look like,
Cigarette burns,
Bullet wounds,
Casualties of Rollins' war with himself,
Of Ellis' numb utopia,
Of the Bukowski cynic suicide,
Of the thoughtless progeny of deadbeat generations desperate to push back,
Every street corner is holy, baptized in the blood of those who died believing,
A thousand fists moved to release a thousand frustrations, and a celebrity endorsement for each overdose death,
Angel mine, abate your gutter wars and mob mentalities,
The tattoo ink has dried and the clubs are closed for the night,
Where are the revolutionaries to go now?

II.
The revenge of the skinhead minority,
The born again soul of a fallen brother,
The madman defiant in publicized rage, the faces of the enemy painted with crosshairs on TV screens,
And the damaged finally able to stand on their own,
Damaged and unrepentant,
Damaged and brilliant,
Damaged with criminal record eyes,
with paranoia brain, with X's tattooed into calloused knuckles,
with track marked arms,
Damaged, the unstoppable tide of the righteous youth - caricatured in the spray painted stencils of their testaments

III.
The spoiled children of an undefinable zeitgeist with nothing to lose,
In ecstasy binges these angels hallucinated manifest destiny through non prescription lenses,
Studying traffic patterns I remember how people are afraid to merge and everybody is looking for just the right amount of trouble,
A fire dies and another is born almost immediately,
Careless ramblings in careless county - a land I'm sure was promised to someone, somewhere, sometime
But after the gold rush nobody could cash out fast enough,
I can't cash out fast enough -
Every girl has got the guilty smile of a teenage runaway living out a Janis Joplin fantasy, and all the boys line up like addicts itching to cop,
The air is so heavy nobody can hold a thought - and when I speak, It's the accent, they say, they can always tell,

IV.
Taxi rides in laser show utopia,
Sicilian saint newly minted tells me about the ******* machine and it's ravenous posturing -
be present & be seen,
Fake it till you make it,
Cop killers singing confessions for beer on the street corner,
While the socialist manifests itself in mispronounced beverages and faux-marked Russian volumes,
avant-garde hyperrealism & ritualistic sacrifice,
There was something about *** and dying on the radio I couldn't be bothered to hear,
A drunken brawl over a bad bet made, disappointing street race, police sirens distant growing moreso,
In ****** bars where ladies always drink free, I rewatch the fall of a ***** old man from the penthouse to the street all over again,
If you haven't figured it out by now,
Don't try

V.
In dreams I walk the Pacific Coast Highway dead of night, barefooted soul alive and naked in the Western night like a Jim Morrison poem, the traveler that never arrives, watching the sunrise form halos over the Sierra Nevada, like a girl I know back East who talks a great deal about plans, the best of which never even have an aftertaste of freedom
There is the same sublime anthems playing on every radio and palm trees forming crosses for any messiah who is willing to claim them,
Last train out of Anaheim as the tessellating California skies swell and give, catch and release,
I see the roofs of tenements lit up by Disneyland,
ocean reflecting the glare from Heaven,
faces of the impoverished reflecting the glare from Heaven,
everybody getting sunburned from the glare from Heaven,
I watch the lovers depart for Santa Ana,
Elderly Asian tourists for Irvine,
Hipsters for San Juan,
and the rest of the destitute ******* for Oceanside en route to San Diego,
There but by the grace of God go the drunk kids spilling out of greyhound buses, sitting till dawn contemplating skylines reflected on the bay, finding romance in every moan of living Earth,
wide eyed at possibility of removing themselves from the equation and finding the answer,
Neil Young harmonicas drift listless above Spanish villas,
Everybody talking like something bad was gonna happen but I couldn't see much thru the windows past the tourist burly shouldered slumbering beast,
I think it was somewhere between Yuma and Dallas, with Mexico stretched out like an invitation to an anarchist rally where I was haunted first,
I'm haunted by El Campo Santo, paved over restless Indian graves in the shadow of the hanging tree,
By La Calavera Catrina blessing the sinners as they pass, hollow faced and sunken on the ***** Spanish streets of their ancestral Apartheid home,
I'm haunted by Calvary, 3000 spirits hanging around unsure of what comes next,
I'm haunted by the faces of the beggars I couldn't spare a cigarette for,
In dreams the Western night releases me and I leave California a shade lighter,
And the handful of stars that manage to burn through the haze seem to promise me:
"You may be gone, but your shadow lives on without you"