A duality of elan vital, two people
Spectres of emotion
Intertwined by a fuselage of bruised skin & tendon
Tissues become orbital, gushing towards grafts
Helixes of snot, **** and lymph
Boy & girl
As they embrace the animating principle and eachother, they fuse
A one piece tapestry adorned seamless with no hem, beginning or end
Always was, always is
Patiently turning to liquid as their being unzips
Lying figures of runny makeup and genetic *****
Quintessence, a texture of synaptic potential
Corpus Callosum
An entirety of self, lost in imbued disintegration
Theory of mind, looped & bound
I will water the thought
Roots envisaged in dystopian amygdala
Piercing data packets with a frost-like intensity
Forgetting our obsolescence moments ago
A neuron dipped in nylon
Theta waves and the non-euclidean crux of dissociation
Ghosts in the machine, your macro god
The sympathies of fractional distillation
Digitised/assimilated unto the nanosphere
Cold hands and brass backs galvanised in oscillated tears
Commodified, sold out and bought
Stretching, from purple, white and black
slowly losing its colour, amorphous in shape
brushed across a smudge, ambiguously chromatic
Monetised flesh god
An eternity bathed in starlight
Cutting an incision in the sky to allow entropy
Divided dimensions of energy
Fleeting and intangible
No longer a delirium of seperation
All semantics become light
As a rusted vehicle passes overhead
And all the worlds questions fade out of existence
Flutters of red tape and foregone growth of practice
Sinew flayed, integrated towards information
Our minds shared
In circuits and resistors
Photons and electrons
We radiate

Poetic Pyromania to prepare for NaPoWriMo 2017

Haunted by data, hounded by blog-bots, assailed by algorithms, poets have been reduced to human resources, fractionated, monetized and commodified like petrochemical residues of the antediluvian world. In keeping with that metaphor imposed upon us by ourselves, we await a mere spark to begin consuming our own fuel, flaming voraciously into poetic combustion. Through this incendiary process, we liberate the very energy that an unpoetic world seeks to label, quantify and merchandize. Flame, however, cannot be commodified—only intensified, suppressed, or extinguished. Elemental fire may be started by lightning, produced by physical friction, electro-chemical reaction, or started from a pre-existing blaze. Poetry is similar; whether sent from God as a bolt of epiphany, a spontaneous combustion, or as a transposed flame inspired by anterior works, April is our month for playing with metaphysical fire. It is thus that we, as elemental (or just mental ) poets, refuse, at all levels (lyrical, cultural, mercantile, geologic, celestial and infernal, etc.) to be co-opted, commodified, and/or in any way politically corrected.

We poetic oilmen and women are the active nihilists of a nihilistic era. We locate promising sites, then we draw up, from below the poetic bedrock, raw inspiration. NaPoWriMo allows us to drill deep into the sedimentary layers of poetry and tap into the deposits of lyrical fuel trapped within. Some gets pumped up, some comes gushing spontaneously to the surface in a crude form. It can then be refined to varying degrees of flammability and into differing types of fuel; think diesel versus jet fuel… one will take you further faster, but both are indeed fuel.

As oilmen and women, we pump our precious resource up in raw form from subterranean seas—the remains of lyric flora and fauna of a previous age buried under the silt of an inundation of data-driven global dullness. Through sheer creative will we set these deposits ablaze, to produce, out of the incoherent night that surrounds us, poetic illumination. In the light of our own flame, we cerebrate the utter uselessness of our artistic product—by continuing to create it, refine it, and then burn it up in a transcendent pyre of irrelevance. Thus, we wage uncompromising war against the powers and principalities of technoid global dominion. Our useless words, unread and unwanted, undermine the process of attempted global conquest by the unpoetic Enemy.

'i've only ever really read one poem. i, i have to admit.*  
You know, that, that one poem that everyone’s read, whatsit,
Howl by Ginsberg, 'best-minds-of-my-generation-destroyed-by-madness,-starving-hyste­rical-naked,' , yeah, that one;'
'It's just, I identify with it so strongly.' she says,
'That poem is soo me.'
It's funny how commentary on a generation 60 odd years ago come across as timeless insights..
how we learn that true spirit of rebellion and counterculture three generations ago,
  as it is taught to us by two generation ago countercounterculture academics.
but I guess, inevitably
                                         we
                                                  return,
  to those half drowned pontifications inevitably decried into transcendental truth by the onward spilling ratchet of cultural recognition;
  that sense of universal oneness generated by the unwashed ramblings of beat-generation hipsters dense innuendo in run on sentences running, running from their upper-lower-middle-class New York homes and their privilege of true vacant meaninglessness and despair,
   to those nervous tucked in shirted clean shaven scholars swooning over the same seme drugged, melancholic bearded men profussing the deepest of opaque truths only found up the furthest reaches of their own *****.
  As we push through to our lectures, the mosaic in motion of blazer wearing mac-users and mac-pac wearing blazers,
  As we hysterically interpret the formatting conditions for our reports, which could hang in the balance of whether the dreams we once had will ever be actualised,
  As we felt lost and found and found and lost at those park benches under the stars, where occasional strangers strolled by offering sessions and life-stories,
  As we paid exorbitantly to get out of our parents homes, and into tin-can flats with broken windows, absentee landlords and cracked paint only held together by all the moss, (the empowerment that is wage slavery,) for in our youth, poverty is not an ever-present pejorative, but the rite of passage to show that we are alive,
  As rituals of manhood are defined by two things and two things only; how much insomnia one can accumulate to meet insane and inane deadlines, and how much one can illuminate the walls in ***** from all the beers, spirits, cheap wines and questionable home-brews,
  As the government dismantles the human-rights commission, and we nervously attend the rallies initiated by the radicals, and the man on the megaphone calls on the crowd to chant and we can only mumble and laugh nervously at ourselves,
  And when the next speaker runs onto stage feeling the need to plead to this already nervous, placid mass that this is in-fact a PEACEFUL PROTEST, and that we are all true patriots and they insist everyone start singing the national anthem and we all look down and we again mumble, or pretend somehow not to hear them,
  and when, in this biggest independent rally around a unified cause our generation's ever seen, we have never felt so alone ,
  and isolated,  
                                  we
                                             remember,
                                                                    those earlier days,
  When we'd bleach our hair; we'd poison ourselves white, in the vain mystic hope that this was just the transition period to the time when we'd get true colour into our lives,
  Remember our wonder at the Eurocentric Asiatic television representations of the Abrahamic faiths, given transubstantiated holy revival by the medium of Saturday morning digital pastel pasture; when we were children staring excited and wide eyed into the Metatrons Fire of Sinai 'Random Almighty Mega Damage'; as Dante and the seraph class Tyrant-infused-Michael inevitably made battle with YHWH, -in the one True End,- as we grinded within the monolithic emerald obsidian halls, Mystical wonderment spilling forth from our reddened hollow eyes, at the beautiful unlimited expansive world contained within our console/consoling digital unit discs; conformally mapped and etched into the convex hull of our minds,
  Where we were gods, doing battle with every possible creature in morphospace, filleted into overpriced cards and cartridges, for which our strategies meant so much to us though none of us really understood the game,
  When we could quote verbatim every piece of dialogue in GTA2, and get concerned glances from our parents as we conjured veiled imagery of bukake-ladled innuendo which we didn't really understand until six or seven years later,
  When sexuality was a special secret club our elders and the kids in the years above came across so wise for being a member of, rather than an anti-turing test; a farcical ritual where everyone tries their best to imitate the hyper-reality of MTV while hiding the nervous feelings that this whole thing was really meant for someone other than us,
  When creating a whole new lexicon for our self-hood (be it artistic, ******, political or philosophical) felt like existential emancipation; a transcendental rebellion against the normalising identities and semantics of old, rather than an impenetrable circle-**** taxonomy,
  When one day we'd unveil a new term in some text, and it would completely change our outlook on every corner of our lives,
  Or, the next day, when we'd give up and just sit back on rolling banks, and look out at a veil of stars,
  Or the next day, when we'd wonder desperate and painfully, which of the last two was the real pursuit and which was wasted time? (Or was it this day, the day spent building an illusory dialectic between them?)
  Remember when we were in kindergarden, and you had to pass through the kitchen, -the adults zone,- to get to the toilet, and you'd feel both shame and wonderment listening in of the snippets of conversation muttered by these titanic figures; discussing abstruse issues from the newspaper in foreign yet noble tongues?
  Remember when we were teens, and every form-checking observation and question from these same adults was so painstakingly pedantically banal and asinine, that one could only respond with monosyllabic grunts and silent hysterics?
  And remember as 'young adults', when we'd inevitably entered this same dull Aristotelian world of forms, how we'd ask the same adults for advice on filling these paperworks, at once still asemic gibberish, and at once the fine-print that contained and predicted our lives?
  Remember when our dreams for the future were not bounded by the economy of our grade point averages and just how much debt we were willing to incur
                                …
I've seen the best minds of my generation climb into pre-packaged little boxes; and pay through the teeth for the privilege of doing so.  
  Akin to a 'Howl' they call it? Our cry for selfhood? What a scream.
It's not even a cry. Barely a whimper.
More of a zombified groan, completely aware our intrepid Journey of Self is just a pricey guided tour. (Tv Ad's static commodified existential emancipatory platitudes; 'your place in the world' / 'well it's my place and it's my time' urgh.)
And so we march asleep; all lame all blind.
  Trudging through the mind-fields; arguing, unravelling the semantic distinctions between the empty boundaries and the boundaries of emptiness.
  Transcribed down for essay deadlines,  /  assessing our lives trajectory as dead lines,
Becoming increasingly aware,
  We are not the living beings, the dasein, the Übermenschen being actualised; we are the machinery through which the institutions, the factories, the markets and education facilities actualise themselves.
  (While the only acceptable language we can breathe in opposition to these ratcheting pedagogical machines is the lexicon they provide us..
  ('oh, you hate systemic neoliberal alienation; the deestablishment of ontological anthropocentrism? Tell me more about the esoteric uselessness of academic culture.') bluh.)

But

       the more we follow those phantom images we built of ourselves,
the more we become aware they are but sirens; hypnotic dreamlike figures luring us to our doom,
  and as this awareness dawns; and the cognitive dissonances and schizophrenia grows,
       We


                                just try to keep calm and carry on regardless.

Can we really claim the arrogance of having a better path?
The conceit that there's a better cliff we should be guiding ourselves to to top ourselves off?
I don't know,
I reaally
really
just don't know.

My ****** is tired.
Tired of having to explain why she wants to be left alone,
Tired of men thinking they are entitled to her simply because they buy her things,
Tired of women who shame and police her,
Tired of being commodified,
My ****** is just...tired.

My ****** does not owe anyone ***.
She will take up arms to protect her agency and have it recognised,
She will let whomever she chooses inside her,
She will most certainly not explain her decisions to a soul,
My ****** does not owe anyone ***.

My ****** will not alter herself for a man's pleasure.
She defines beauty and serves other worldly aesthetics,
She is a queen who possesses the ability to make you see God with her warmth,
My ****** will not alter herself for a man's pleasure.

There are a lot misconceptions
When it comes to ***
And connecting ourselves in intimate
And healing ways
Enjoying and reveling in the pleasure
Being able to be in the moment
Truly awake and feeling ourselves
Feeling our bodies
And connecting with each other
*** has the ability to be a very powerful thing
It can transform two hearts
It can be a very powerful and uplifting thing
But unfortunately we have repressed ourselves
Even though we have a hyper sexualized society
We still repress ourselves in a lot of ways
We have commodified ourselves
And our bodies
And commodified *** as well
We need to be able to open ourselves up
To the possibility that there might be better
More whole ways to connect
Connecting with ourselves fully
Connecting with others fully
In healing and intimate ways
Because the way things are
It's Only propagate loathing of yourself
Loathing of your body
Even loathing of the feminine
And anything sensual
We need to break free of this
Because if we don't
We will continue to have people
That are lost and disconnected
From themselves
You will continue to have ****
And you will continue to propagate
The separation between the masculine and feminine
Not allowing ourselves to connect
In healing and sensual ways

Passing through mid-century
these jazz oneironauts reached Apollonian heights
while society drifted into Dionysian drunkenness
the merchants caught on too soon
The most beautiful parts of humanity
enamored to serve the ugliest:
The merchant class, the bourgeoisie
Buddha’s undeserving in charge
If only in past centuries
those noble princesses embraced
even more lowly patronages
all this potential today could be staved off
Saved from the drive to be commodified
People stopped buying jazz as it reached its height
No more smiles to appease the whites
Jazz for the few
the noble, the individual in the know

Until this too becomes the simulacrum
The Ornette Coleman on the bookshelf
to signify your snootiness
your refinement from wealth
Aging Dads in thousand dollar sweaters
kicking out their 22 year old kids
for being ****** addled hipsters
meanwhile Bird on Verve is nodding out
and Dad’s girlfriend pops a Percocet
to deal with all the stress

As culled from an arts magazine, 13 March 2019

Socialist Realism - The official doctrine in Soviet art and literature after 1932 that evolved from the traditional commitment to social and civic concerns into an all-pervasive general ideological mandate.

            -Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 20th Century Russian Poetry


collective exhibition space vibe community
interactive narrative brown neighborhood
defined commodified Indigenous
identity tone-deaf decolonial
narratives populist intertwined
exhibition curatorial vision
culture local artists arts district small galleries
DIY spaces speaking out against
gentrification displacing shelter
studio space elsewhere late stage capitalism
collective mantra underdog art savior
corporate entity partnering insensitive
ignorant collective brown people art
contemporary work that may not fit
into establishment art galleries
media advisory venture collaborate
creative community authentic
local statement of expression excitement
creative energy arts district project
many levels collaborate local
creative important creative
community what that collaboration
looks like ongoing local artists going
to be engaged in planning commissioned
project community buy-in consulted members of the creative community Indigenous artists curators museum
directors professors burgeoning landscape
cultural framework critique talk individuals
entities inclusivity open
dialogue opportunities project
conversations collaboration discuss
your projects share our work with you
common ground work together healthy sustainable
accountable decolonization

The light quit working in the jukebox,
the melodies' surrender,
a commonplace extinction,
against the salt and the breeze
of your false Mediterranean.

The burden of your rational soul
in a world of extremes
has torn your spirit to tatters-
tatters littered across
your Toronto abode.
Divided amongst the heirlooms
and emptied bottles.
This desolation you
sought to translate
for the harmonious pulse
of the dial tone.

Hazy,
is this ancient mind,
a smoking fallout of
yesterday's parties
to be discussed over
lukewarm coffee
and cigarette butts,
while the shivering streams
and green plains become
commodified for a higher power.

Dan, my dearest friend,
I loved you
ferocious and freely,
fanged and supremely,
and as your mind coagulated
on a couch,
microphone in-hand,
I felt nostalgic for
your clumsy alcoholism,
and clumsier guitar strumming.

The white fog descends,
the city is hungry--
no longer can it expand.
Toronto eats itself
with you inside,
shall I write you a postcard?
Shall I kick down your door?
Shall I let you join the bones
you so beautifully alluded to?

Whisper, my friend,
amidst the soft croon of
the saxophone,
whisper, my friend,
of a Europe gone defective,
whisper, my friend,
for an apocalypse of sun
to release us all from
the white fog slowly burying
our Toronto.

I did not die in the country I was born in.

I died much, much later;

had my American ashes
scattered all over Bangladesh;
traversed it's many vessels of water.

I swam the Brahmaputra River,
floated upon the skin
of The Ganga; the half-naked
children waved and I couldn't tell
if they were saying hello
or goodbye; but those
waves spread until
I was far out into the sea.

I was forgotten
as swiftly as I was welcomed;
and was loved as easily
as was I avoided.

I looked back on my American
life with discontent. I saw nothing
but tangled knots of thought
laced with consumption,
and accumulation; self-interest
and seclusion; even
sadness was commodified.

The discontent was the push
and pull of a rope
tied to my soul.

I died before I ever left;
but discovered another self
on foreign soil

It wasn't till I had aged
beyond the average life
span for someone like
me in America; did I realize,

I wasted all this time,

dependent on what others

thought of me; what they

expected of me; and what

they considered was best for me.

I was forever exiled from darkness;

but at least I got a little sun
in Bangladesh.

What's to be said about
A culture that commands us
To get rid of our love
handles?

What Education?

they Want To Triple The Fees

Truth Commodified

We are stardust in a unified field
There is no you and me
Even so, I love you

I practice loving myself daily
Though they make it hard
Love, and life itself having been commodified

Transformation is my self-love
Rebirth - it’s Spring!
My least favorite season
Songs of wishes raging

From Love comes constriction and
Pain that leaves no path backwards
Thrusting into the open
New again in the calm radiant silence

Sometimes it is hard to know how to forge
     ahead.

The news has never been good, but recently it seems increasingly bad.

The grass is still green here, mom.

But it's drowning in rivers of red there.
Dead and brown and gone in other words and
other worlds that are even
still
part of this
     one.

What are any of us to do?

How can any of us bear not to bear witness?
And in bearing witness,
How does any of us retain the strength to live as though all is normal when it is so painfully obvious that it is not
so painfully obvious
that this cannot possibly be considered normal
or that if it is considered normal
then it is so painfully obvious that it should not be
that we should not want to be part of a world where this is normal.

So I return again to the question of how
is any of us supposed to forge ahead in a world at war?

Sometimes I take comfort in the idea that this, too, is the human condition.
We are a communal species, but a species that has always been at war with itself.

Nation against nation, tribe against tribe, clan against clan.

The only difference now is the scale.
We have globalized and commercialized war in a way that people 200 years ago would have found incomprehensible.
We have COD-- excuse me,
COMMODIFIED is what I meant
it into video games and movies and bumper stickers of AK-47s and how
how I ask is any of us to press on in a world so on fire that cities are burning and children are lucky if we can pull them from rubble and somehow hope that they, too, will not later seek to wage the destruction they were born into and borne out of.

And yet still,
The grass is green here, mom.

I barely know how we can love this world.
I hope that maybe we can still manage to love inside this broken plane. The myth of a phoenix is a beautiful one. Born of the ashes made from fire in a world that cannot cease
fire.

Always we hope for rebirth.

Somehow we must find a way to love
something or someone or some place.

In a world where the grass is still green..
And hopefully,
maybe,
can be green in otherwheres, too.

Grass does not grow if it is not watered.

And yet
we have poured a monsoon of kerosene on the plains of dead grass in a drought amidst famine.

Recall--god gave Noah the rainbow sign, said no more water, the fire next time!

What recourse do we have other than to love?

Love that which has burned
Love that which is not burned yet and which we hope to protect.

Love one another and hope against hope that this time,
Maybe this time

The grass will grow green there, too.

There aren’t beings, just bodies.
Just skin
and parts to be conscientiously coded
as we are packed into boxes
like commodified corpses.
Carcasses eroded. When will we learn?

Can we still learn?
Learn to look at all beyond the body.
Or are we doomed to linger, these living corpses?
Oh, if only we had greying skin,
broken out of wooden boxes
and, in doing so, break into the Code.

**** the Code!
Yet, no mind is bold enough to learn.
To unpack brains overflowing with long forgotten boxes.
After all, it is your body.
In the end, it is your skin.
And it’s you who dwells in this corpse.

But please, oh please, do not pity the corpses!
Empty shells enslaved only by a code
of laws as pliable as skin.
And despite lessons past, they never learn
to take hold of horns hitched upon the bull’s body.
But, instead, cower and corrode in the comfort of an illusory box.

A cadaver’s box
fashioned by corpses.
Bodies led by bodies
no more fit than the next to conjure an unquestionable code.
But they never learn.
Where is the sanity beneath that skin


so telling? The different skins
in color-coded boxes
with the definition of difference never truly learned.
There are only corpses.
Existing encoded
as senseless, sightless, and soul-less bodies.

Let us skin the corpses!
Trade the boxed remains for lessons learned:
The mind and the soul, beyond the body. We are the Code.

how often do you see the students actually watching the teacher

Teacher outta focus Eyes are on the screen

the notes are in the mainframe,
the words have been recorded
on a mic and uploaded to cloud
outta sight on a site to humans
not loading.

credits are commodified, computers offered on sale,
upgraded  technology further modified
so that students can come in and not fail by
bringing their phones and tablets, pen and paper so ratchet
code the information, and procreate like rabbits.

that external source stored with our teachings and
now all that we really teach is that our children do that same.

I used to joke about printers printing printers.  
Now reality is the joke.

These metal rectangles are now filled with the vast sea of knowledge
we were meant to live with.  They learned through our sacrifices
of time, effort, and focus, unto the techno gods who will replace us.
lets hope we taught them worthwhile values.

it has always been funny to me
that they call it
sin city

because it follows that
sins are commodified, justified, or monetized

speaking for myself here
if my sins were contained to
a place, or given a context
a simple time and place
they would lose meaning
if there is any in the first place

my sins are old
my sins are new
my sins are whatever

I’ve

seen love

In movies, viewed parting

lips, glances

through a glass—

To know:

I’ve never felt

the heartbeat of another

sync alongside

mine

But my

mind, it holds

Skin, salt, of sea

waves who may feel the scratch

ofthe sand for-half

A second, to then

be dragged

away,

how many,

I ponder, are alike? It must

be an ocean wide,

those

For whom this

ache is commodified. I fear—I am

A blossom, bearing

fruit, which knows

it will fall

soon;

It is but a

matter of time before

I am crushed

underfoot... .

“I suppose I’m just shy”
I think to myself,
As I cave into myself,
Or rather fold into myself.
I look up at them.
Some I am fond of,
Such as the retired nurse,
Laugh lines creased in her face.
Others I am subtly repulsed by,
Vitriol bubbles up in me
As I observe his behavior
That I find unseemly,
Especially since vestigial emotions
Of lust
Are connected to him in my psyche.

I don’t know,
I don’t know how to feel.
That’s a funny way to put it,
Because is there a particular way a person must feel?
I wonder from where our final decisions originate from.
I wonder why I am internally perplexed,
Not satisfied.
I wonder what can help me.
I see people who also suffer
With my sense of discontent and disconnection
But their ways of dealing with it
Don’t seem to heal
Their dissatisfaction.
If anything,
These people who seek therapies
For their woes
Only seem to fall further into the pit
They had found themselves in.
The labels psychologists
So frivolously bestow onto them
Have become a ball and chain
On their identity
Causing them to fall
Down the endless void of their suffering.

I just so vividly perceive a sickness in society,
And it makes me want to jump out of my skin
I don’t know….
Because oft times I find myself
Surrounded by people
Who easily pontificate,
Stepfords who don’t
Show any sign of a spark of Life
People who religiously
Play out their learned roles
From childhood,
Until their last moment on earth,
Never really going off script,
Never really having a desire to.

Now, I feel as if it’s almost unfair
That I had to feel these ways I do,
That I can see the world for what it really is.
But when I say this,
I know in a sense I am wrong,
Because my mind is just one mind
Synthesizing my reality through the
Scope of past experiences .
But why do I have to have this orientation?
Why can’t I just live a simple-minded life,
Like before?
Why must I always be searching for truth,
Searching for the reason why we’re here,
Searching for purpose,
For a deeper meaning behind all this?
Can I just forget?
Can I just forget and go back to a simpler time?

A simpler time
When the real world
Was the only world I was truly concerned about
It’s simple, straight-forward beauties
Nourished my soul enough.
I didn’t have any pressing need to
Explore unknown realms of the esoteric.
The natural world already had so much available to explore
And discover.
I was satisfied.
I was content.

But the anxieties of youth
And the horrific pains
Of childhood abuse
Created within me an incessant need
To improve myself.
First it began with makeup.
I caked layers and layers of makeup
On my acne filled preteen face.
Then I delved into the mind altering world
Of drugs,
With an emphasis on hallucinogens
Which was just another way to escape reality.
Just a mask of concealer that I could hide away under,
As my mind’s fantasies--
Fantasies that I could manipulate at will,
Became more real than reality--
A reality that I had known primarily to be
Cold and unforgiving.
But eventually the drugs took control of me,
And fate made it so
That I had to stop.

Finally, spirituality.
The final frontier, at least for me.
The most compelling of them all.
Absolutely endless and seemingly
Without dangerous side effects (not so)
Just another delusion I bought into, it feels.
But not quite.
There isn’t yet an ending
For this segment of my life.
I’m not sure
If there will be an ending to it.
I’m trying to find a way to actualize it though,
Instead of it being
Just another extension
Of my hopeless orientation to get lost
In daydreams.
I’m attempting to call this new chapter of my life
That I am currently writing,
The “Love in Action” chapter.

Well,
That’s it, I suppose
I don’t know why I make myself do things I don’t want to do,
Which inevitably makes my mind
Disengage
But anyway,
I guess I just want to become “real” in this lifetime,
And heal,
And stop searching so much,
And go back to the innocence,
The carefreeness,
The quiet joy and contentment
Of my childhood.
American culture is such
That EVERYTHING that can be commodified
Will be commodified.
So, I have to cut myself free
From the hypnosis of capitalism,
From the ideologies of the white man
So I can be lighter,
Flow through life with more ease,
Unaffected by this world’s disease.

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

The anger does not fit
the cage in which you sit
when with a quick
flick of your thin wrists
you throw ****
and hit more often
then you miss.

You claim to be bereft,
that by some strange theft
your dignity was stolen,

but your religious devotion
pushes you right on your back
as it attempts to enslave,
takes the feminism you once praised
and burns all that progress we’ve made
away;

And your political affiliations
set you in a binary conflict
of liberal against conservative
as the wealthy puppeteers
put their hands up
both party’s ****** derriere
with campaign contributions
and other bribes.

While the pursuit of status
from the materials you lack,
like your Iphone ******,
your sports car crack,
and your commodified
individuality
which comes in
three different colors
a personalized
perfectly designed
clothing line,
makes you an addict
who has to pay
way past closing time
with soul sapping debt.

A resonant gratitude streams through my veins,
Consecrated to my middle school heroines, deflecting
The whispers of shame.
But they taught me that I do not have the luxury of shame;
I have a voice, and I must amplify it––that’s what my mother said.

Elles m’ont protégée, blossoming my oneness.
I am here now because of them, I harness their divine feminine
Strength.

Standing on the bones of my aunties, their anguish travels up,
Their histories following suit.
Beneath my feet, to my knuckles; charging my inner being
My spine is rigid, fortified with the duty––
To liberate, to reform, and to love.
“But my love,” she tells me earnestly, “this love, has been assumed,
Taken for granted, blended into the background of the White man’s portrait.”

My dun skin lives in the ambiguity of praise and prejudice,
And my sisters are dead. Exploited, first––then dead.
As were my mother’s grandmothers, when the Britons drew the line.
The assembly line, however, was an American invention––
Where the American Dream came to fruition. Commodified neatly,
‘Cheaply’ produced, and easy to swallow: fine [Black*] American craftmanship!

Her tomb
Stone, will be mined by her brothers.
He is unearthing the buried history, but forced to push coal into the fire,
Cremating the legacies of his own kin.

“So what are you going to say at my funeral now that you’ve killed me?”
Her lasts words, found amongst the ashes.

We ran out of places to colonize, so
Now the capitalist are after our time
Though your mind might not realize yet, our
Attention has been commodified

All these fans around me but only you, see
That eyes are as good as gold nowadays, please
Check out the newest subscription released
So I can feed my kids and escape the freeze

****** and incels fighting over bucks and *****
But free videos take advantage of ***** and
Strippers prefer cold polls to ***** cause we
All gotta clock in sucker, ***** to ****, so

We scam each other hoping to get ahead
Scheming over the same table we broke bread
Together in public we feed on street cred, but the
He said she said won't put a roof over your head

So better get famous *****, let everyone know
Your business is going swell, gonna buy some blow
Gonna sell some ****, make a scene, then go
Do anything you can to keep them eyes on you.

Commanding machines
To do my
bidding schemes
Merely means to the end
Of all history’s themes
One more stain
Of a racial
In nature
On nations’
Supremacy legacy’s
Story creation
Remembered for glory,
And honor,
And pride
But forgotten by all
Of the commodified

What really bothers me about this whole situation is how I know for a fact he’s just sleeping peacefully right now and I’m still wide awake wondering if my thighs are too wide or my skin isn’t clear enough or my jokes are too crass or there’s some reason he doesn’t find me attractive and therefore I am just an emotional support dog he gets to use in the mean time before he can run home to his girlfriend who is just some Freudian excuse for a mother figure. And i hate that it really was a personal thing when rejected with me because when they were at their worst, he still looked other places-any places for girls other than me. He really decided that the most annoying, disposable people were better options than i am because for some reason our connection makes us too compatible, too real to be an option and now im left looking like an idiot to everyone because everyone knows im stooping to his level for him to like me and he still rejected me and i don’t understand what about me is so off putting that everyone rejects me. Did i read too much as a kid, do i ask too many questions, are my arms to fat? I dont understand what i did that he decided i was almost good enough, or good enough in every aspect except for one. I genuinely think that if i was 30 pounds lighter he would have thought of me differently, flirted with me from the beginning, and now the issue is that since we’re friends- a position only reserved for girls ugly enough to never be considered, and he sees how compatible we really could be, he chooses someone else. And what do i really see in him? I always thought it was emotional intelligence but this semester has proven it to be otherwise. I hate how i am a provider for every group i am in, i never grew up out of the eldest sister role. One friend whines to go out to the bars and i accommodate no matter how much I didn’t want to go, i make another’s dumb jokes seem funny to others, i reach out to the socially rejected and try to create space for them and yet even those who love me the most prioritize their own needs because they "don't owe anyone anything." What’s it like to have relationships where you dont live in fear that youre not worth other people’s time? What’s it like to never consider how other people are feeling when opening your mouth? I cry randomly not just for myself but for his girlfriend because she probably feels the same form of neglect that I do and doesn’t even realize why. I know i look like an idiot, but she might look worse. But should i pity her? She behaves similarly to him. I don’t think i could even survive a relationship with him, too much to change for both of us. But honestly I’ve never met a man who can match me emotionally, he’s the only one who comes close. Hes smart, and kind and values communal support over his own. But also he’s a selfish *****. That’s what i don’t understand, how can he only want to **** me when he’s drunk? How did I make all of this up? How can he tell me I’m gorgeous "platonically?" i just feel like every choice I’ve made this semester has been so embarrassing and i feel like the embodiment of the character whose faults are commodified as modern feminism or some sort of coming of age Bridget jones narrative when in reality women like me are genuinely just treated like this all the time because we’re average. Average intelligence, average looks, etc. but thats the enraging thing; not only do i know im not average, I know im buying into misogyny every time i get angry. But im always angry. All the time. I can cry at the drop of a hat because of how angry I constantly am. I hate everyone I know and i hate that i could probably do it so much better than they are. I could be a better friend, a better boyfriend, etc, and i just feel so let down by everyone i know. I hate that everyone I’ve ever kissed has been ugly to me. Why dont attractive boys like me? Am i not picky enough? Do i think im more attractive than i actually am? I used to think that my personality could carry me because i know I have a good personality, but it has come to fruition that my personality has no effect. I’ve met some of the most boring and unfunny girls in my life and they always pull more than i do. Like as someone who isn’t attracted to them i literally want to rip my own eyelashes out than actually hold conversation with them and yet boys still are drawn to them. is he even capable of loving me? Is the friend zone this damning? Is it only damning because im subpar? Is this how his past girlfriends felt? Even she was able to hook up with him, he apologizes for even considering me. Does he consider me? Has he even considered dropping his girlfriend or is that just something he says when he’s drunk? How can what you say drunk not be something you mean at all? How can you be two different people? How does your subconscious differ that greatly? Will you regret this one day? Will you come around? I literally just can’t comprehend this rejection. I was so certain. I ended a relationship after 5 years because of my certainty. I dont know what im even expecting though, dating him would be kinda weird. Is this the kind of relationship where we get together in our 30s when there’s no drunk hookups on yatch parties left to be had. If i tried to make out with him this weekend at the yatch party would he reciprocate? I hate that my literal best friend in the world would use me. That’s the worst kind of loyalty. I hate that he’s so “loyal” to his girlfriend that he’d shake me off. I hate how he’s conveniently “out of his mind” when he’s drunk and calling me beautiful but conscious enough to not cheat on his girlfriend because that would be “too far.” Why am i too far? Why is considering me so damning? Is this love to him? He says he loves me, why does none of this feel like love? I think about him literally 24/7 and i know for a fact he doesn’t consider me until im looking him in the eye begging him to stop leading me on. Why did he choose to do this to me? Why does he only want me when he can blame it on the alcohol? Am I ugly enough that you need alcohol to justify your attraction to me? Should i try to kiss him this weekend for the heck of it or will that literally push me over the edge. Will that be the final straw? I am constantly trying to prove that what i saw was legitimate that i didnt just make the whole thing up. I hate this.

my kindness has now been commodified
whereas before it triggered hate
--seen as weakness, as cruelty's plaything--
still, i saturate to what extent i can
my daily happy-dance with honest friendship,
compassion's ease, delight and pet-store equipoise.
yet my sincerity is sloganed, emptied of its worth:
trained to say 'rewards program' in stead of 'membership, account';
'guests' in stead of 'customers'
'team-players' in stead of 'employees'
'long-term relationships' as first and foremost mission statement's goal--
slither-scripted to promote a highest bottom line
as language euphemizes baby mice as 'pinkies,
fuzzies, hoppers': 'feeders' for a petted multitude
of scaly, fang-ed maws.

pre-thanksgiving christmas-trees
on either side of automatic double-doors--
styro-snowflakes hung
by wrapping-papered end-cap shelves on sale
to swipe our plastics to a higher debt--
to tinsel out the shame of maybe giving less?
reminding 'gift-time soon' and 'this could be a gift'
to ward off never having given childhood its due?
or of being less than cheerful
at incessant jingled tunes?

november fifth--decorations up;
guy fawkes night of trick-or-treater-candies
tweeting hallowed flu-shots
as my manager in elf-cap-antlers squeals in glee:
says she starts promoting christmas back in august.
i tell her that's appropriate!
given jesus was perhaps born in august.
says she didn't memorize the bible.
i tell her that part was left out anyway--
i don't mention the holiday's titular meaning;
or the waiting gnostic manger,
royal transhistoric camels,
mary on her donkey, joseph's wind-blown face
las posadas... the loneliness of exile
O mary... in her starlit tears of unknown pain and joy--
the unremitting love for barnfloor bodyheat,
todos santos
nonhominin humanity...
earthling rights day
a stranger's kindnesses
of yule-tide warmth and evergreen,
solstice-fulcrum festivals of lights
veteran's day's existential loss
and bureaucratic selfhoods shelved;
gurpurb at a gurdwara
the martyrdom of guru tegh bahadur
the garifuna settlement day
the tazaungdaing festival
fasting over christian as well as buddhist lent
the five days of deepawali, diwali:
bodhi day
découverte d'haïti and vertières
jamhuri day
chalica
zamenhof day
sadeh
pancha ganapati
malkh
soyal
mithras day
osiris, adonis and dionysus day (all dec. 25th)
humanlight
--republic day! national day! and proclamation day!
in the maldives, brazil, northern cyprus, chad, yugoslavia;
in the central african republic, burkina faso, kenya, malta, kazakhstan, niger, south sudan...
chahrshanbeh soori
modraniht
the dongzhì festival
the saturnalia of pagans (lit. "country dwellers"; "those of the heath")
dies natalis solis invicti
newtonmas
kwanzaa
watch night
hanukkah
boxing day
malanka
the day of goodwill
wren's day
quaid-e-azam's day
yeni il
guru govind singh jayanti
international solidarity day of azerbaijanis
fête du vodoun
hogmanay
Iemanjá
darwin day
milad-un-nabi
lohri
pesach
chocolate-egg-laying fertile-bunny-day-- or ishtar day
butter week, crepe week, or cheesefare week-- or maslenitsa

I sit up tonight and ponder creation,
its limitless possibilities rendering me
incapable of the act.
Like being *****,
think too much and it's gone.

At least this chilled whiskey
might warm me,
give muddled clarity
that will dissipate
before I awake the next day.

I feel that tug,
that green grin trying to charm,
and oh, it's workin'.
The seduction can't be denied,
it's implied over, over
till it's almost too much.

Suddenly I think of population's
scary multiplication,
forever piling more humans,
more, more, more, more, more
to a gasping planet.

The ice melts in my glass,
condensation gathering to the ridged sides,
even this small pour brings a grimace.
I'm scared of a clear mind,
what it will show me.
The desperate cry from capitalism's throat?
My plight, my strife, my struggle,
to obtain balance at a nation's fall.
The sheer worthlessness encompassing
anything it once stood for.

I teeter here, sips become more water,
precious water,
already commodified

From rock bottom
Feeding
Leech feasting
Deceit
Has my vanity swelled
To where deities weep
And it watered the earth
With vitality tears
And then salted its worth
In a graveyard of fears
But availed no tomorrow
Unveiled in the fog
Just foreshadowed the ashes’
Aghast acrid smog
Some would laud
As if progress
Need darken the sky
As if flawed by design’s
A commodified lie
Yet another price tag
On a plastic bag
Flag
‘Till the last human
Life bullet
Empties the mag
And dragged into
A sooner
Or later
Creator
The maker you meet
Is a fake
Simulator

the last life-extinguishing black night of the soul
can be commodified.

I sit here in perfect awareness,
which is perfect pain,
which is infinite despair,
and I tell you this:

This Poem is good for one large pizza with onions
on the planet Quiilo.

do you know some one or thing against whom brutal injustice was done?
find an agent

Be right back
Stealing Christmas
Real quick
I’ll be swift
As a flash
Not a light I’ll let flicker
On trees turned to ash
And I’ll stash the cache deep
In my cavernous lair
And it’s there it will keep
Until I reappear
In the new year
To do it all over again
Upend every tradition
And dollar you spend
On material sentiment
Commodified
As this luxury fetishized  
Marketize lie