Like a psychotic docent in the wilderness,
I will not speak in perfect Ciceronian cadences.
I draw my voice from a much deeper cistern,
Preferring the jittery synaptic archive,
So sublimely unfiltered, random and profane.
And though I am sequestered now,
Confined within the walls of a gated, golf-coursed,
Over-55 lunatic asylum (for Active Seniors I am told),
I remain oddly puerile,
Remarkably refreshed and unfettered.  
My institutionalization self-imposed,
Purposed for my own serenity, and also the safety of others.
Yet I abide, surprisingly emancipated and frisky.
I may not have found the peace I seek,
But the quiet has mercifully come at last.

The nexus of inner and outer space is context for my story.
I was born either in Brooklyn, New York or Shungopavi, Arizona,
More of intervention divine than census data.
Shungopavi: a designated place for tribal statistical purposes.
Shungopavi: an ovine abbatoir and shaman’s cloister.
The Hopi: my mother’s people, a state of mind and grace,
Deftly landlocked, so cunningly circumscribed,
By both interior and outer Navajo boundaries.
The Navajo: a coyote trickster people; a nation of sheep thieves,
Hornswoggled and landlocked themselves,
Subsumed within three of the so-called Four Corners:
A 3/4ths compromise and covenant,
Pickled in firewater, swaddled in fine print,
A veritable swindle concocted back when the USA
Had Manifest Destiny & mayhem on its mind.

The United States: once a pubescent synthesis of blood and thunder,
A bold caboodle of trooper spit and polish, unwashed brawlers, Scouts and      
Pathfinders, mountain men, numb-nut ne'er-do-wells,
Buffalo Bills & big-balled individualists, infected, insane with greed.
According to the Gospel of His Holiness Saint Zinn,
A People’s’ History of the United States: essentially state-sponsored terrorism,
A LAND RUSH grabocracy, orchestrated, blessed and anointed,
By a succession of Potomac sharks, Great White Fascist Fathers,
Far-Away-on-the Bay, the Bay we call The Chesapeake.
All demented national patriarchs craving lebensraum for God and country.
The USA: a 50-state Leviathan today, a nation jury-rigged,
Out of railroad ties, steel rails and baling wire,
Forged by a litany of lies, rapaciousness and ******,
And jaw-torn chunks of terra firma,
Bites both large and small out of our well-****** Native American ***.

Or culo, as in va’a fare in culo (literally "go do it in the ***")
Which Italian Americans pronounce as fongool.
The language center of my brain,
My sub-cortical Broca’s region,
So fraught with such semantic misfires,
And autonomic linguistic seizures,
Compel acknowledgement of a father’s contribution,
To both the gene pool and the genocide.
Columbus Day:  a conspicuously absent holiday out here in Indian Country.
No festivals or Fifth Avenue parades.
No excuse for ethnic hoopla. No guinea feast. No cannoli. No tarantella.
No excuse to not get drunk and not **** your sister-in-law.
Emphatically a day for prayer and contemplation,
A day of infamy like Pearl Harbor and 9/11,
October 12, 1492: not a discovery; an invasion.

Growing up in Brooklyn, things were always different for me,
Different in some sort of redskin/****/****--
Choose Your Favorite Ethnic Slur-sort of way.
The American Way: dehumanization for fun and profit.
Melting *** anonymity and denial of complicity with evil.
But this is no time to bring up America’s sordid past,
Or, a personal pet peeve: Indian Sovereignty.
For Uncle Sam and his minions, an ever-widening, conveniently flexible concept,
Not a commandment or law,
Not really a treaty or a compact,
Or even a business deal.  Let’s get real:
It was not even much in the way of a guideline.
Just some kind of an advisory, a bulletin or newsletter,
Could it merely have been a free-floating suggestion?
Yes, that’s it exactly: a suggestion.

Over and under halcyon American skies,
Over and around those majestic purple mountain peaks,
Those trapped in poetic amber waves of wheat and oats,
Corn and barley, wheat shredded and puffed,
Corn flaked and milled, Wheat Chex and Wheaties, oats that are little Os;
Kix and Trix, Fiber One, and Kashi-Go-Lean, Lucky Charms and matso *****,
Kreplach and kishka,
Polenta and risotto.
Our cantaloupe and squash patch,
Our fruited prairie plain, our delicate ecological Eden,
In balance and harmony with nature, as Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce instructs:
“These white devils are not going to,
Stop ****** and killing, cheating and eating us,
Until they have the whole ******* enchilada.
I’m talking about ‘from sea to shining sea.’”

“I fight no more forever,” Babaloo.
So I must steer this clunky keelboat of discovery,
Back to the main channel of my sad and starry demented river.
My warpath is personal but not historical.
It is my brain’s own convoluted cognitive process I cannot saavy.
Whatever biochemical or—as I suspect more each day—
Whatever bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity,
My weltanschauung: my world-view, as sprechen by proto-Nazis;
Putz philosophers of the 17th, 18th & 19th century.
The German intelligentsia: what a cavalcade of maniacal *******!
Why is this Jew unsurprised these Zarathustra-fueled Übermenschen . . .
Be it the Kaiser--Caesar in Deutsch--Bismarck, ******, or,
Even that Euro-*****,  Angela Merkel . . . Why am I not surprised these Huns,
Get global grab-*** on the sauerbraten cabeza every few generations?
To be, or not to be the ***** bullgoose loony: GOTT.

Biomechanical protocols govern my identity and are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic and optical white rooms, cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations manned and ready,
Standing at attention and saluting British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click, ramrod straight and cheerful: “Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous, lusting for something, anything to process.
Any memory or image, lyric or construct,
Be they short-term dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all in deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious, most vaporous;
Others--the scary ones—eidetic: frighteningly detailed and extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts; recollected so richly rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.

The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless, places and things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from biomechanical storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral repositories and vaults,
All the while the entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that all-subservient British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data in batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working in seamless syncopation,
Self-referential, at times paradoxical or infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but there’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
A curse and minefield for the cerebral:  metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
But the information technology of thought that baffles me,
As adaptive and profound as any evolution posited by Darwin,
Beyond the wetware in my skull, an entirely new operating system.
My mental and cultural landscape are becoming one.
Machines are connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:
It is the information technology of who I am.
It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape.
It is the machinery connecting the two.
This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition--your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear:

“LISTEN:  The machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or not at all.
(Incoming TEXT from my editor: “Lighten Up, Giuseppi!”)
Reminding me again that most in my audience,
Rarely get past the comic page. All righty then: think Calvin & Hobbes.
John Calvin, a precocious and adventurous six-year old boy,
Subject to flights of 16th Century French theological fancy.
Thomas Hobbes, a sardonic anthropomorphic tiger from 17th Century England,
Mumbling about life being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Taken together--their antics and shenanigans--their relationship to each other,
Remind us of our dual nature; explore for us broad issues like public education;
The economy, environmentalism & the Global ****** Thermometer;
Not to mention the numerous flaws of opinion polls.



And again my editor TEXTS me, reminds me again: “LIGHTEN UP!”
Consoling me:  “Even Shakespeare had to play to the groundlings.”
The groundlings, AKA: The Rabble.
Yes. Even the ******* Bard, even Willie the Shake,
Had to contend with a decidedly lowbrow copse of carrion.
Oh yes, the groundlings, a carrion herd, a flying flock of carrion seagulls,
Carrion crow, carrion-feeders one and all,
And let’s throw Sheryl Crow into the mix while we’re at it:
“Hit it! This ain't no disco. And it ain't no country club either, this is L.A.”  

                  Send "All I Wanna Do" Ringtone to your Cell              

Once more, I digress.
The Rabble:  an amorphous, gelatinous Jabba the Hutt of commonality.
The Rabble: drunk, debauched & lawless.
Too *****-delicious to stop Bill & Hilary from thinking about tomorrow;
Too Paul McCartney My Love Does it Good to think twice.

The Roman Saturnalia: a weeklong **** fest.
The Saturnalia: originally a pagan kink-fest in honor of the deity Saturn.
Dovetailing nicely with the advent of the Christian era,
With a project started by Il Capo di Tutti Capi,
One of the early popes, co-opting the Roman calendar between 17 and 25 December,
Putting the finishing touches on the Jesus myth.
For Brooklyn Hopi-***-Jew baby boomers like me,
Saturnalia manifested itself as Disco Fever,
Unpleasant years of electrolysis, scrunched ***** in tight polyester
For Roman plebeians, for the great unwashed citizenry of Rome,
Saturnalia was just a great big Italian wedding:
A true family blowout and once-in-a-lifetime ego-trip for Dad,
The father of the bride, Vito Corleone, Don for A Day:
“Some think the world is made for fun and frolic,
And so do I! Funicula, Funiculi!”

America: love it or leave it; my country right or wrong.
Sure, we were citizens of Rome,
But any Joe Josephus spending the night under a Tiber bridge,
Or sleeping off a three day drunk some afternoon,
Up in the Coliseum bleachers, the cheap seats, out beyond the monuments,
The original three monuments in the old stadium,
Standing out in fair territory out in center field,
Those three stone slabs honoring Gehrig, Huggins, and Babe.
Yes, in the house that Ruth built--Home of the Bronx Bombers--***?
Any Joe Josephus knows:  Roman citizenship doesn’t do too much for you,
Except get you paxed, taxed & drafted into the Legion.
For us the Roman lifestyle was HIND-*** humble.
We plebeians drew our grandeur by association with Empire.
Very few Romans and certainly only those of the patrician class lived high,
High on the hog, enjoying a worldly extravaganza, like—whom do we both know?

Okay, let’s say Laurence Olivier as Crassus in Spartacus.
Come on, you saw Spartacus fifteen ******* times.
Remember Crassus?
Crassus: that ***** twisted **** trying to get his freak on with,
Tony Curtis in a sunken marble tub?
We plebes led lives of quiet *****-scratching desperation,
A bunch of would-be legionnaires, diseased half the time,
Paid in salt tablets or baccala, salted codfish soaked yellow in olive oil.
Stiffs we used to call them on New Year’s Eve in Brooklyn.
Let’s face it: we were hyenas eating someone else’s ****,
Stage-door jackals, Juvenal-come-late-lies, a mob of moronic mook boneheads
Bought off with bread & circuses and Reality TV.
Each night, dished up a wide variety of lowbrow Elizabethan-era entertainments.  
We contemplate an evening on the town, downtown—
(cue Petula Clark/Send "Downtown" Ringtone to your Cell)

On any given London night, to wit:  mummers, jugglers, bear & bull baiters.
How about dog & **** fighters, quoits & skittles, alehouses & brothels?
In short, somewhere, anywhere else,
Anywhere other than down along the Thames,
At Bankside in Southwark, down in the Globe Theater mosh pit,
Slugging it out with the groundlings whose only interest,
In the performance is the choreography of swordplay and stale ****** puns.
Meanwhile, Hugh Fennyman--probably a fellow Jew,
An English Renaissance Bugsy Siegel or Mickey Cohen—
Meanwhile Fennyman, the local mob boss is getting his ya-yas,
Roasting the feet of my text-messaging editor, Philip Henslowe.
Poor and pathetic Henslowe, works on commission, always scrounging,
But a true patron of my craft, a gentleman of infinite jest and patience,
Spiritual subsistence, and every now and then a good meal at some,
Sawdust joint with oyster shells, and a Prufrockian silk purse of T.S. Eliot gold.

Poor, pathetic Henslowe, trussed up by Fennyman,
His editorial feet in what looks like a Japanese hibachi.
Henslowe’s feet to the fire--feet to the fire—get it?
A catchy phrase whose derivation conjures up,
A grotesque yet vivid image of torture,
An exquisite insight into how such phrases ingress the idiom,
Not to mention a scene once witnessed at a secret Romanian CIA prison,
I’d been ordered to Bucharest not long after 9/11,
Handling the rendition and torture of Habib Ghazzawy,

An entirely innocent falafel maker from Steinway Street, Astoria, Queens.
Shock the Monkey: it’s what we do. GOTO:
Peter Gabriel - Shock the Monkey/
(HQ music video) - YouTube//
www.youtube.com/
Poor, pathetic, ******-on Henslowe.


Fennyman :  (his avarice is whet by something Philly screams out about a new script)  "A play takes time. Find actors; Rehearsals. Let's say open in three weeks. That's--what--five hundred groundlings at tuppence each, in addition four hundred groundlings tuppence each, in addition four hundred backsides at three pence--a penny extra for a cushion, call it two hundred cushions, say two performances for safety how much is that Mr. Frees?"
Jacobean Tweet, John (1580-1684) Webster:  “I saw him kissing her bubbies.”

It’s Geoffrey Rush, channeling Henslowe again,
My editor, a singed smoking madman now,
Feet in an ice bucket, instructing me once more:
“Lighten things up, you know . . .
Comedy, love and a bit with a dog.”
I digress again and return to Hopi Land, back to my shaman-monastic abattoir,
That Zen Center in downtown Shungopavi.
At the Tribal Enrolment Office I make my case for a Certificate of Indian Blood,
Called a CIB by the Natives and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The BIA:  representing gold & uranium miners, cattle and sheep ranchers,
Sodbusters & homesteaders; railroaders and dam builders since 1824.
Just in time for Andrew Jackson, another false friend of Native America,
Just before Old Hickory, one of many Democratic Party hypocrites and scoundrels,
Gives the FONGOOL, up the CULO go ahead.
Hey Andy, I’ve got your Jacksonian democracy: Hanging!
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mission is to:   "… enhance the quality of life, to promote economic opportunity, and to carry out the responsibility to protect and improve the trust assets of American Indians, Indian tribes, and Alaska Natives. What’s that in the fine print?  Uncle Sammy holds “the trust assets of American Indians.”

Here’s a ******* tip, Geronimo: if he trusted you,
It would ALL belong to you.
To you and The People.
But it’s all fork-tongued white *******.
If true, Indian sovereignty would cease to be a sick one-liner,
Cease to be a blunt force punch line, more of,
King Leopold’s 19th Century stand-up comedy schtick,
Leo Presents: The **** of the Congo.
La Belgique mission civilisatrice—
That’s what French speakers called Uncle Leo’s imperial public policy,
Bringing the gift of civilization to central Africa.
Like Manifest Destiny in America, it had a nice colonial ring to it.
“Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent,
Allotted by Providence for the free development,
Of our yearly multiplying millions.”  John L. O'Sullivan, 1845

Our civilizing mission or manifest destiny:
Either/or, a catchy turn of phrase;
Not unlike another ironic euphemism and semantic subterfuge:
The Pacification of the West; Pacification?
Hardly: decidedly not too peaceful for Cochise & Tonto.
Meanwhile, Madonna is cash rich but disrespected Evita poor,
To wit: A ****** on the Rocks (throwing in a byte or 2 of Da Vinci Code).
Meanwhile, Miss Ciccone denied her golden totem *****.
They snubbed that little guinea ****, didn’t they?
Snubbed her, robbed her rotten.
Evita, her magnum opus, right up there with . . .
Her SNL Wayne’s World skit:
“Get a load of the unit on that guy.”
Or, that infamous MTV Music Video Awards stunt,
That classic ***** Lip-Lock with Britney Spears.

How could I not see that Oscar snubola as prime evidence?
It was just another stunning case of American anti-Italian racial animus.
Anyone familiar with Noam Chomsky would see it,
Must view it in the same context as the Sacco & Vanzetti case,
Or, that arbitrary lynching of 9 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891,
To cite just two instances of anti-Italian judicial reach & mob violence,
Much like what happened to my cousin Dominic,
Gang-***** by the Harlem Globetrotters, in their locker room during halftime,
While he working for Abe Saperstein back in 1952.
Dom was doing advance for Abe, supporting creation of The Washington Generals:
A permanent stable of hoop dream patsies and foils,
Named for the ever freewheeling, glad-handing, backslapping,
Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF), himself,
Namely General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man they liked,
And called IKE: quite possibly a crypto Jew from Abilene.

Of course, Harry Truman was my first Great White Fascist Father,
Back in 1946, when I first opened my eyes, hung up there,
High above, looking down from the adobe wall.
Surveying the entire circular kiva,
I had the best seat in the house.
Don’t let it be said my Spider Grandmother or Hopi Corn Mother,
Did not want me looking around at things,
Discovering what made me special.
Didn’t divine intervention play a significant part of my creation?
Knowing Mamma Mia and Nonna were Deities,
Gave me an edge later on the streets of Brooklyn.
The Cradleboard: was there ever a more divinely inspired gift to human curiosity? The Cradleboard: a perfect vantage point, an infant’s early grasp,
Of life harmonious, suspended between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
Simply put: the Hopi should be running our ******* public schools.

But it was IKE with whom I first associated,
Associated with the concept 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I liked IKE. Who didn’t?
What was not to like?
He won the ******* war, didn’t he?
And he wasn’t one of those crazy **** John Birchers,
Way out there, on the far right lunatic Republican fringe,
Was he? (It seems odd and nearly impossible to believe in 2013,
That there was once a time in our Boomer lives,
When the extreme right wing of the Republican Party
Was viewed by the FBI as an actual threat to American democracy.)
Understand: it was at a time when The FBI,
Had little ideological baggage,
But a great appetite for secrets,
The insuppressible Jay Edgar doing his thang.

IKE: of whom we grew so, oh-so Fifties fond.
Good old reliable, Nathan Shaking IKE:
He’d been fixed, hadn’t he? Had had the psychic snip.
Snipped as a West Point cadet & parade ground martinet.
Which made IKE a good man to have in a pinch,
Especially when crucial policy direction was way above his pay grade.
Cousin Dom was Saperstein’s bagman, bribing out the opposition,
Which came mainly from religious and patriotic organizations,
Viewing the bogus white sports franchise as obscene.
The Washington Generals, Saperstein’s new team would have but one opponent,
And one sole mission: to serve as the **** of endless jokes and sight gags for—
Negroes.  To play the chronic fools of--
Negroes.  To be chronically humiliated and insulted by—
Negroes.  To run up and down the boards all night, being outran by—
Negroes.  Not to mention having to wear baggy silk shorts.



Meadowlark Lemon:  “Yeah, Charlie, we ***** that grease-ball Dominic; we shagged his guinea mouth and culo rotten.”  

(interviewed in his Scottsdale, AZ winter residence in 2003 by former ESPN commentator Charlie Steiner, Malverne High School, Class of ’67.)
                                                        
  ­                                                                 ­                 
IKE, briefed on the issue by higher-ups, quickly got behind the idea.
The Harlem Globetrotters were to exist, and continue to exist,
Are sustained financially by Illuminati sponsors,
For one reason and one reason only:
To serve elite interests that the ***** be kept down and subservient,
That the minstrel show be perpetuated,
A policy surviving the elaborate window dressing of the civil rights movement, Affirmative action, and our first Uncle Tom president.
Case in point:  Charles Barkley, Dennis Rodman & Metta World Peace Artest.
Cha-cha-cha changing again:  I am Robert Allen Zimmermann,
A whiny, skinny Jew, ****** and rolling in from Minnesota,
Arrested, obviously a vagrant, caught strolling around his tony Jersey enclave,
Having moved on up the list, the A-list, a special invitation-only,
Yom Kippur Passover Seder:  Next Year in Jerusalem, Babaloo!

I take ownership of all my autonomic and conditioned reflexes;
Each personal neural arc and pathway,
All shenanigans & shellackings,
Or blunt force cognitive traumas.
It’s all percolating nicely now, thank you,
In kitchen counter earthen crockery:
Random access memory: a slow-cook crockpot,
Bubbling through my psychic sieve.
My memories seem only remotely familiar,
Distant and vague, at times unreal:
An alien hybrid databank accessed accidently on purpose;
Flaky science sustains and monitors my nervous system.
And leads us to an overwhelming question:
Is it true that John Dillinger’s ******* is in the Smithsonian Museum?
Enquiring minds want to know, Kemosabe!

“Any last words, *******?” TWEETS Adam Smith.
Postmortem cyber-graffiti, an epitaph carved in space;
Last words, so singular and simple,
Across the universal great divide,
Frisbee-d, like a Pleistocene Kubrick bone,
Tossed randomly into space,
Morphing into a gyroscopic space station.
Mr. Smith, a calypso capitalist, and me,
Me, the Poet Laureate of the United States and Adam;
Who, I didn’t know from Adam.
But we tripped the light fantastic,
We boogied the Protestant Work Ethic,
To the tune of that old Scotch-Presbyterian favorite,
Variations of a 5-point Calvinist theme: Total Depravity; Election; Particular Redemption; Irresistible Grace; & Perseverance of the Saints.

Mr. Smith, the author of An Inquiry into the Nature
& Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776),
One of the best-known, intellectual rationales for:
Free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism,
The latter term a euphemism for Social Darwinism.
Prior to 1764, Calvinists in France were called Huguenots,
A persecuted religious majority . . . is that possible?
A persecuted majority of Edict of Nantes repute.
Adam Smith, likely of French Huguenot Jewish ancestry himself,
Reminds me that it is my principal plus interest giving me my daily gluten.
And don’t think the irony escapes me now,
A realization that it has taken me nearly all my life to see again,
What I once saw so vividly as a child, way back when.
Before I put away childish things, including the following sentiment:
“All I need is the air that I breathe.”

  Send "The Air That I Breathe" Ringtone to your Cell  

The Hippies were right, of course.
The Hollies had it all figured out.
With the answer, as usual, right there in the lyrics.
But you were lucky if you were listening.
There was a time before I embraced,
The other “legendary” economists:
The inexorable Marx,
The savage society of Veblen,
The heresies we know so well of Keynes.
I was a child.
And when I was a child, I spake as a child—
Grazie mille, King James—
I understood as a child; I thought as a child.
But when I became a man I jumped on the bus with the band,
Hopped on the irresistible bandwagon of Adam Smith.

Smith:  “Any last words, *******?”
Okay, you were right: man is rationally self-interested.
Grazie tanto, Scotch Enlightenment,
An intellectual movement driven by,
An alliance of Calvinists and Illuminati,
Freemasons and Johnny Walker Black.
Talk about an irresistible bandwagon:
Smith, the gloomy Malthus, and David Ricardo,
Another Jew boy born in London, England,
Third of 17 children of a Sephardic family of Portuguese origin,
Who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic.
******* Jews!
Like everything shrewd, sane and practical in this world,
WE also invented the concept:  FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The lyrics: if you were really listening, you’d get it:
Respiration keeps one sufficiently busy,
Just breathing free can be a full-time job,
Especially when--borrowing a phrase from British cricketers—,
One contemplates the sorry state of the wicket.
Now that I am gainfully superannuated,
Pensioned off the employment radar screen.
Oft I go there into the wild ebon yonder,
Wandering the brain cloud at will.
My journey indulges curiosity, creativity and deceit.
I free range the sticky wicket,
I have no particular place to go.
Snagging some random fact or factoid,
A stop & go rural postal route,
Jumping on and off the brain cloud.

Just sampling really,
But every now and then, gorging myself,
At some information super smorgasbord,
At a Good Samaritan Rest Stop,
I ponder my own frazzled neurology,
When I was a child—
Before I learned the grim economic facts of life and Judaism,
Before I learned Hebrew,
Before my laissez-faire Bar Mitzvah lessons,
Under the rabbinical tutelage of Rebbe Kahane--
I knew what every clever child knows about life:
The surfing itself is the destination.
Accessing RAM--random access memory—
On a strictly need to know basis.
RAM:  a pretty good name for consciousness these days.

If I were an Asimov or Sir Arthur (Sri Lankabhimanya) Clarke,
I’d get freaky now, riffing on Terminators, Time Travel and Cyborgs.
But this is truth not science fiction.
Nevertheless, someone had better,
Come up with another name for cyborg.
Some other name for a critter,
Composed of both biological and artificial parts?
Parts-is-parts--be they electronic, mechanical or robotic.
But after a lifetime of science fiction media,
After a steady media diet, rife with dystopian technology nightmares,
Is anyone likely to admit to being a cyborg?
Since I always give credit where credit is due,
I acknowledge that cyborg was a term coined in 1960,
By Manfred Clynes & Nathan S. Kline and,
Used to identify a self-regulating human-machine system in outer space.

Five years later D. S. Halacy's: Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman,
Featured an introduction, which spoke of:  “… a new frontier, that was not,
Merely space, but more profoundly, the relationship between inner space,
And outer space; a bridge, i.e., between mind and matter.”
So, by definition, a cyborg defined is an organism with,
Technology-enhanced abilities: an antenna array,
Replacing what was once sentient and human.
My glands, once in control of metabolism and emotions,
Have been replaced by several servomechanisms.
I am biomechanical and gluttonous.
Soaking up and breathing out the atmosphere,
My Baby Boom experience of six decades,
Homogenized and homespun, feedback looped,
Endlessly networked through predigested mass media,
Culture as demographically targeted content.

This must have something to do with my own metamorphosis.
I think of Gregor Samsa, a Kafkaesque character if there ever was one.
And though we share common traits,
My evolutionary progress surpasses and transcends his.
Samsa--Phylum and Class--was, after all, an insect.
Nonetheless, I remain a changeling.
Have I not seen many stages of growth?
Each a painful metamorphic cycle,
From exquisite first egg,
Through caterpillar’s appetite & squirm.
To phlegmatic bliss and pupa quietude,
I unfold my wings in a rush of Van Gogh palette,
Color, texture, movement and grace, lift off, flapping in flight.
My eyes have witnessed wondrous transformations,
My experience, nouveau riche and distinctly self-referential;
For the most part unspecific & longitudinally pedestrian.

Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools,
I’ve been using to shape & make sense of my environment,
Have reared up and turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain & central nervous system.
Remaking me as something simultaneously more and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin and septic now, a cluster of implanted sensors,
Content: currency made increasingly more valuable as time passes,
Served up by and serving the interests of a pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human; simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn--

Humanoid.

The  spotlight  is  on the  broken  coastline
porous - like  archers  spilling arrows
into  the vanquished hinterland.
In the ancient West  Mercia
wooden bridges collapse
uproar, as the King's regiments
long disbanded , ghosts
into fading memory.
Our  defenders, our  loyal subjects
enmeshed into the  wider  fear
our  citadels breached,
and where  is  the  valour
the self reliance of  our  septic isle?

Guitar Chords.


G/ I want to make my thoughts  
Am/ get louder

G/ you can listen to what
Am/ I fear

G/ Amplify my darkest
Am/ demons

Am/ So you got something new
G/ to hear


              chorus

F/ My mind is a septic think

C/ blood shot eyes that never blink

F/ My mind is a septic think

C/ blood shot eyes that never blink



G/ I want to make my mood
Am/ get colder

G/ so you can feel it when
Am/  you’re near

G/ glaciate my inner
Am/  torments

Am/ then you'll have something new
G/ to share


            chorus

F/ My mind is a septic think

C/ blood shot eyes that never blink

F/ My mind is a septic think

C/ blood shot eyes that never blink


G/ I want to make my sloth
Am/ more docile

G/ so you can see that I'm
Am/ my lair

G/ emphasise my lack
Am/ of caring

Am/ hibernating like a
G/ bear


           Outro

F/ I went to sleep in the foetal

C/ position

F. I went to sleep in the foetal

C/ positon

G/ unwind me if you

Am/ care

G/ unwind me if you

Am/ care

... on the other side  :P

Money don't grow any greener
The mean streets are getting meaner

Come and get me pretty please
When you find some grow on trees!

Wake up! Smell the Dunkin Donuts!
We're in the Twilight Zone
like robots...

Every cloud is silver lined
Even one that's in your mind

And when you find
fate's shut the door
You'll find a hatchway...

... in the floor!


SoulSurvivor
(C) 7/16/2015

I
a flicker of warm light
and your face is all that I see.
Thunderclouds are silenced,
burned away and
my chest is left open to
our place under the opal sky.
The light is our soft romance
and our candlelit meal for two...

II
'Spiritui Sancto'
A Benedictine Monk
alone in
cold stone chambers sees
an ascending soul,
holy company,
a solitary light in all the
emptiness.
'Sed libera nos a malo'

III
Scorch-marks
drip
love - bites
drip
but please don't stop...
drip
In his lust,
Mould moments of my skin
and keep them
forever.

V
'Waxy fingertips!'
'Put that down,
PUT THAT DOWN!'
Mum told us
If you play with fire
you're going to get burned.

V
30 miles
they say
is the mathematical distance
you can see a flame in the dark

VI
This is the symbol of our nation.
'Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit'
This nine branched lamp symbolizes that our Israel.
has courage, those may be their Qassam rockets,
but those are our sirens.
and that humming you hear is our drones
over their heads.

VII
buuuuzzzzzzzzzz
What enchanting light...
zzzzzzzzz
what God are you? Oh
zzzzzzzzzzzz
wondrous beauty
zzzzz
what magic do you hold, what glory...
zzzzzzzzzz
come closer str.....

VIII
What died so I could read?
The tallow is a pig
the squealing embers
fat pig.

IX
here comes the candle to light you to bed,
And I curled, vulnerable to the shapes in the window
with my feet creeping further under the duvet.
The shadows were melted, cut, distorted on
my bedroom walls.
A primal evil will danced by the light of the flame
until I shut my eyes so tight,
that I slept it away.
here comes the chopper to chop off your head.

X
'No Jennifer, I just feel candlelight just adds a certain

ambiancé

to a room

No?'

XI
'Quickly, before it turns septic.'
'This wont hurt boy'
'The fire, pass the fire'
'Quarterise it quick or he won't last long'
'bite down hard my lad, bite down hard'
'AHHHHHRRRGGGGHHHH'

XII
Children hurtle down,
a Bombay slum to hear that.
'King Rama has returned,
light his path!'
The open sewers adorned in Ghee lamps
find such intense beauty as each quivering flame,
although so fragile, breathes the story
of the power of human spirit
unshakable against overwhelming odds.
*'The King of Ayodhya
Has Returned
Show his path for the Festival of Light!'

Immerse yourself until wholly submerged
in my unholy divergence;
Poor form tormented soul - 
Roll your pain in a J
then dip it in chloroform
Embrace my urges to purge
the remnants of sanity,
Spilling and screaming
all these profanities at humanity

Confuddling all posers
with my bastardized prose ~
Please, continue badgering
and nagging me
with your ****-******* menagerie
of trivial drudgery
I’m in misery so
go ahead and bludgeon me
Square in the noggin’
So that I can jog it,
whilst juggling all these nails
from my coffin

I’m awfully harmful and cruel
got these scoffing jealous skeptics
Acting a fool,
coughing up a lung-full of fuel
for all of the putrid mind puke I spew
My mixing *** skull’s
where the ingredients accrue
Just stew with me for a little
while longer though won’t you

I’m a cancer-ridden addler
babbling mad adages,
ravishingly tenderizing my meat
Laced with some dust from space, yes, no lackage/absence of it lining
within my nasal passages see
spun off some of that absinthe
In a cloud of burning trees
Please tell me you feel me

It’s staggering how I’m both crazy batshit,
**** smooth as rotten laxative cheese
Brain’s melting acidic beef
I’m like Randy Savage I got
Bombastic fat ******* in heat
Straight making my **** go flaccid post-weep

Don’t get offended women
just imagine
How painfully average the package
is within my lap that I’m packin
But now it’s wrapped
and I’m ready to fucken
fully send it no cap
My turnaround is lightning fast
In and out of your *** quick as a wink like The Flash

Faces contort in ghastly panic, actually
Dastardly antics unleashed in vast swarms
Plague the masses in pandemic proportions with them massive casualties factually once more
Give ya some relaxing action 
And skull-**** y’all
with such a passion *******
Your corpse falls to the floor
and right through the trapdoor

Candid, my pen-chance enchants
Heavy-handedly inanimate
in suspended animation
Supplant reality augmentation
Machinations of my imagination;
Implicating **** ransacking  
and seafaring through crab infestations 
Wreaking havoc and bequeathing vengeance
I’m a fire breathing grim reaper reeking of ****** ~

- Off is the nearest direction in which to ****
Dissect my ******* with your tongue
Turnt up ******* plumpies in the rumpus 
Just for the fun of it until I erupt
Remember, I’m avid for dismembering appendages
I expect you’re exceptional at accepting
a barrage of septic bombardment
Chance of success: logistics analysis zero percentage
(Cos I done ******* on all those *******.)

Superbly superlative and speculative
So fast on Adderall
I make Mad Hatter’s head spin
Quicker than you can snap: 
Giving your family heart attacks
Smack you in the face, 
While fapping my fabulous lap rocket

Thunderously plundering under covers
Spring-loaded with faux pas’ so hot
Make your mother’s ***** pop out
and say “hello”
like a Jack-in-the-Box

& U kno Those foxy grandmas
be jaxing off my **** -
Bingo wings beckoning me to flock
Choppin’ up rocks round the clock
with the glock in my pocket til I rot 
Undoubtedly
Caught em wit the molly-whop eyeballs pop out they sockets all dramatically
Whole squad **** swap the rod, on God
Blow my whole *** when I start spitting them double entendre fatality snowballs
Zippity-zop like Cosby’s special BBQ sauce
Bet I’ll dip my puddin’ pop and stay fresh with the drip til I drop
Y’all just holler when you want me to stop

Palpable, these **** butts malleable as putty
Barbarically barrel rolling into dat ***
rip it to shreds like confetti
Power Pole extend
Face pressed into your *******
Inhaling the wafting aromatic stenches
of distant French fish factories

Clearly getting dome from your dearly betrothed violently
Now she bridal and my seeds spiraling virally
Vital signs finalizing
Bounce that *** like jello
Swell; I’m in your hair like gel
Now swallow my jollies and don’t bother
Unless you hollerin’ and giving me dollars
Zealots idol my harlotry

If nose goes go slow grow low
Throwing those yoloing hoes out windows
This ***** simply bonkers
I conquer fear me

***** DON’T HARSH MY MELLOW
SWEAR I’LL MARSH YOUR MALLOWS

I last saw her in Santiago
******* drunkenly in a Sub urban taverna
parading conceited pride in a twisted union
with that *******  heinous maniacal harlequin
each in vainglorious throes of their imagined septic mindfuck
Debauch celebration of collaboration of succubus and incubus

Some days she is saying Haloa in Hawaii
adorned as Sainti Maria the ***** now as Madonna
spewing words like a dove acting like a Nun in a Convent
the fiendess with two faces hiding her ****** like the ace in lace
the malignant serpent crawling in the duality of her neurosis

I last saw her in Santiago
In a sanctity of the poisoned insecures with exiguous minds
consumed with flaming fears she begs acceptance for inclusion
******* for percieved reflected glory from her fathers' jailers
The subjugated souls of chai wallah lives on in grandchildren

So when Santi Maria flirts from honey to beehive
Ready to ***** and part thighs and brain for minor pointing gun
Feel sorry for a damaged child devoid of a prime core never made
only obeisance to past rulers whose discarded cast-offs she wears
Her poems  enchants but its virulent tools she takes in her body

I last saw her in Santiago
A slaved two-faced pretender who sings like a nightingale
In sub urban dives she postrates to friendly pats and gropes
Melting creeps and hot tigers begging subs for a heady drink
Brilliant yet blindsided to **** on knees as her children will too



Copyright@LaurenceA20thSept2018Allrightsreserved.

I want to make a thought
get louder

so you can listen to what
I hear

Amplify my darkest demons

they’ve got something new
to fear


              chorus

My mind is a septic think

rapid eye movements

but I don't blink



I want to make my wrath
get colder

so you can feel it when
you’re near

glaciate my boldest felons

they’ve got something new
to share


            chorus

My mind is a septic think

rapid eye movements

but I don’t blink


I want to make my sloth
get lazier

so you can see that I
don’t care

emphasise my narcolepsy

hibernating like a bear


            Chorus

My mind is a septic think

rapid eye movements

but I don’t blink

             <>

Not finished, be back.
with chords soon.

stuck pig
injecting
in a tiny house
on a green island
raining
a jungle of
cable
internet a
septic
tank
I run a
maze
grow bananas
wait for delivery
departure
line up
for my plastic
sippy cup
eat
pancakes
stack
Bromantane
for breakfast
nootropics
family
replacement
new tropical
smoothie
maker
prime member
of the Amazon
got to stimulate
my work in the garden
see that
water feature
it’s a duck pond
no it’s
an empty kiddy pool
but on a tree
I’m over it
an antler bromeliad
hunting trophy
a certification
of my triumph
the plot
next to it
my head
in the mail
a miniature guillotine
to repatriate
my body
and tail
still moving

There was a town beyond the woods,
Ne’er there any water stood,
Alas, a Well, of the purest kind,
The aquifer under, is here described,
Beyond a thousand gallons under
The diamond-esque rubble and sunder.
But one bucket, at but one time,
Kind, the town, taking turns of rhyme,
This essence, used to bathe and cook,
To drink, to create, a cozy nook.
-
The happy town, the gorgeous shire,
The crops grown there as green as Ire,
No law exists, they live but civilly,
A fetching, quiet community,
But always there exists a one,
Who would want power, want this undone,
So it was said regretfully,
Poisoned their Well, emotionless he.
-
Now this village was quite secluded,
No one not there born, ne’er intruded,
Deep in the forest, behind a mountain,
Over a peak, under a cloudy curtain,
It existed in secret and abolition,
And one did seek its demolition,
Knowing the only flaw to here exist,
The essence of life, no man resists.
-
He crept at night, while the guard did sleep,
Promising the pure water to weep,
Dropping the genocide with bucket and crane,
Releasing its Demonic Alchemic Strain,
The Well did hiss as the poison moaned,
Recoiling at this unwanted drone,
The assailant then brought to his steady lips,
A cup and was first to take Devil’s Kiss.
-
On the morrow of the mentioned crime,
Busy bodies awoke to start the day’s time,
Queuing at bucket and awaiting turns,
Each family there a portion yearned,
Not one did from the water strafe,
Each then bathed, then drank, unsafe,
No one could tell different taste,
Water is water, but not today.
-
The plague did start like any disease,
Sore throat, fever, stopped nose, displeased,
The people sought the witchdoctor,
But he from bed, would rise no longer,
He caught ill too, and wouldn’t budge,
Afraid for his life, afraid of this grudge,
He knew this sickness, had heard before,
But told no one, the end was sure.
-
In a week, vomiting and nausea,
Nasal passages sealed, no nostalgia
Brought to memory of any like sickness,
The virus brought about decrepit afflictions,
But slowly and steady, worse and worse,
The people became, some saw the course
But kept silent, to avoid alerting,
The so many children in need of comforting.
-
In two weeks’ time, the pathogen,
Had taken wits of sensible men,
At night, they screamed in somber fright,
Their deepest fears, real now, and bright,
The lutes died out, the bards not singing,
An unfortunate time, but this was only beginning.
-
Fingernails rotting off at the cuticle,
Too much blood for any receptacle,
Leprositic, the fingers came next,
One by one, extremities hexed,
Children lost their legs to run,
From mothers’ faces rotted, undone,
In every other step, heard were bones breaking,
Kneecaps cracked open, shins splintering,
Eyes turned cadaverous, awake, but not seeing,
Cataracts formed, blinded from viral being,
In cradles were witnessed toddlers there suffering,
Their mothers watched with empty sockets, but listening
To the cries impossible to stifle,
The pain too much for these tiny disciples.
The dogs normally to their masters zealous,
Became of them mortally jealous.
They bit the hands that fed them well,
For watering them from the cryptic Well.
Men watched their sons dive right under,
The bridge that harnessed a valley of blunder
Hundreds of feet above sharp rocks and stumps,
Their namesakes leaped, impaled in clumps,
For those lucky enough to still have eyes,
Cried tears of acid for images despised
Sickness was spewed upon the walls,
Entrails adorned the Gathering Halls,
Some had turned to mutilation,
Blood-letting for some, abomination,
Some crazed enough to “cure” themselves,
Clawed throat and stomach til flesh dissolved,
Some rich with elixir tried to embezzle,
Upon some of the poor, tired and grizzled,
Riot broke out amongst the walking dead
Fortune or lack of, irrelevant,
Black pustules broke out that looked Bubonic,
But the cure for that failed, how ironic,
That it rather hastened the steadfast curse,
Faster than iambic verse,
Molecules turned to embryo,
Rising like a great Pharaoh,
They became flesh parasites,
Taking internal organs, slow and precise,
They started with the liver and spleen,
So there lasted hours of wretched screams,
The intestines of some would close and then
Becoming septic, they passed, bile in stem,
A few had throats seeming cauterized,
Friends watched friends closest, strangle alive,
There were in fact, some optimists,
Among them, talk of being “rid of this”,
They too died while clutching life,
Endeavoring their eternal flight,
From noses, there dripped blackened murk,
Thicker than combined oil and dirt,
It then secreted as sweat from all pores,
Fatigue then struck those left to the floor.
Upon broken knees some prayed,
Usually the skin under ribs was flayed,
Trying to understand what went wrong,
Dissecting the dead was not headstrong,
It only furthered viral progression,
The open corpses breathing infection,
The cadavers would move still, the fleshbugs active,
The horror of lifeless movement, corrosive,
The minds of the weak, it pure happenstance,
One found eating dead flesh for a cure, no chance.
All in all, this lingering curiosity,
Provided once good people with animosity,
One man turned good people to hate,
Their neighbors in ways that were irate.
-
The chaos was not anarchy,
For, as I said,
It was civilly,
But verily, I do decree,
That no one knew such misery,
The inhabitants of this village,
Did not suspect innocent visage,
Or perhaps, their cherished Well.
To be culprit behind this hell
So they drank and drank to remedy,
To recompense this malady,
To no avail did blood get thicker,
Alas, they got but sicker and sicker.
-
This hell, the townsfolk then realized,
Wouldn’t end til they all were nullified,
Eliminated they were, eradicated at that,
This pathogenic virus had verily spat
In the faces of the people here,
Decimated they were, not quenching their fear,
Murdered they were by a systematic
Suicidal psychopathic,
Inflamed in the mind of darkness thereafter,
Only satisfied by his own laughter.
Not many, til now, know of this town,
From lowly peasant, to “Godly” Crown.
An explorer found the deserted hamlet,
Body parts and questions then found the hermit,
He had heard of a town like this, he wrote:
“It was a new age Roanoke…”
But the village, not a town to cause commotion,
All that was left of them, a tree scratched, “CROATOAN”.

you are sinking,
into septic shallows.
seemingly spacious and safe,
you stay: slowly slipping.

sadly, static sounds in your ear.

you seep into ****,
believing it to be:
serenity.

Nah you were a corpse with a noose around your neck with just a blip of a heart beat on an EKG made of trees laying to rest.

She's a scared little girl and the only way she knows how to survive is off the blood and life of other people.

So I tease and tease the needle injecting, inspecting the vein liquid.

Laying up in that bed for hours with your kidneys being your friends and your head ripping your chest from your intercostals tossing your throat out your teeth through the grate lain cross your open gape

A chamber we both never wanted you lain.
Gas chambering hospital of mucus and babies puking their dead guts out.

Septic ulcer, septic shock, sepsemia.
All the bacteria love you like your their mother inlaws.
And finally you set us free from mine
That caniving, ruthless wretch watched you in the bed.
Floated above ours watching us both.
Escaped we did and finally we won't go back.
Anorexic we starve ourselves now of sharing carbon and gravitating space pits.
The blankets still make dips where we lay but they aren't the same blanket, the threads aren't long enough to cross and make up the same fabric between 100 miles so that an immediate affect between the atoms can be felt between us.

My babies still kicking though.
That's safe.

I fell asleep
To the smell of antiseptic,
Sterilizer, biogesic,
And the cold touch of metal
Rods that only seem
To grow colder
With the touch of hospital
Left in the student's
Ward - a whistle

Permeates the silence
Of seniors
Painlessly sleeping away
Hours upon
Hours until graduation -
A coming of age -
An escapism from past papers
And teachers who have
Themselves given up
On them.

And the lights you
See are as bright
And as empty as those blinking
Feebly
In that of the school doctor's
Office, one not really
Blinking more of
Washed, and supported
Wobbling by daylight
Seeping in through peeling blinds,
Unable to see too much -
The headaches and stomachaches
Have rendered him numb
To the feeling.

And lunch comes
And out blows the whistle to
Signify the end
Of playtime for
The young ones, start
Of playtime for
The older ones,

Whistle blowing muffled
By the septic tank glass
Doors of this sacred outhouse,
Wards muffling the cries of children
As they flee the quadrangle,
Once mad, twice elated,
Still innocent, untired,
Not needing to fake sick
And rest their heads softly

Upon thin soft beds with
Towels wrapped haphazardly
Behind their backs,
Nostalgia, it was

Laughter, I swear it was louder
When we used to run,
When our eyes lit up like
The sun petering in through
The doctor's orifices,

When our bruises and bumps
Smelled like betadine,
Not sleep
And cups of sterile water downed
To mask the scent of
Fake cough syrup,
And cuts gotten from fiddled syringes,
Bruised ankles
Bent over undersized beds,

And not running over
Uneven pavement,
Ankles brushing tablecloth,
Schoolbag,
Basketball and frisbee,

And the screaming.

Oh, how I miss
The screaming.

you got those eyes from the gorgons themselves
big and begging
to be seen

the pools of coal abyss are your pupils and they form into
cerberus's frothy, unpure mouths

gnashing and howling until the
bloodletting roars
devour me

This woman I know had a fox that lived in her root cellar. She'd knock on the door to let it know she was going to enter, and the fox would vacate temporarily to allow her time to store or remove canning jars. She ceased to leave her root vegetables down there, as they would nearly always become part the fox's nesting material. The fox had raised several litters in that cellar and my friend was always certain never to bother her distinguished guest while she had pups. The root cellar was under the house which was built half off a cliff and was cattywampus. It had lots of cracks in the siding and in places was missing planks altogether. This allowed mice easy access, and since my lady friend was such a fine cook, there were hoards. This served the fox well, who would keep at least the underside of the rickety cabin free of vermin. My friend could never keep a cat because of the fox naturally, though she did try to employ several. They would never stay. I had always tried to make repairs on the cabin, much to my friend's chagrin. Seemed she had an aversion to any change she didn't instigate herself, and was quite particular about not having any modern materials come her way. Any suggestion of modern convenience and you'd be read the riot act. She liked things, "organic," and her whole lifestyle, with the exception cheap cigarettes and tequila, exuded such.

One day, county officials came and put a red tag on her house. This meant the home was not in accordance with sanitation laws, on account there was no septic, just an old outhouse down the hill past the garden. Being that my friend had little to no income really, her "lifestyle," was in sudden jeopardy of being uprooted. Some kindly folks pulled together to be certain our friend did not lose her home. She got a new indoor toilet, a septic tank, and some siding to keep the mice out. Never once did she use that toilet, always kept the outhouse. The fox left on account the mice population dwindled. My friend keeps her root cellar well stocked now and whenever I visit, we laugh about that fox and enjoy some fine pickled snap beans. Change isn't always easy, but living easy is sometimes worth a few changes.

A leaf spirals downward,
Over covered heads and uncovered cars,
Children sleeping in grass
Drool dripping from their gums,
A football field seeing practice
Where someone's leg
Was recently snapped in half,
Overflowing sewer grates,
Dilapidated septic tanks,
Wastewater disposal facilities
With a runoff into
A river filled with needles and rocks
And bodies,
And it hits the ground with a silent explosion,
Until the wind sends it off and sets it somewhere out of sight.
Like when a glass bottle
Shatters on a bar top and
Sends shards soaring
Into the eyes
Of onlookers,
Everybody knows what's next.
Did you hear?
Fall is here.

The boy who starves so that he may be warm
And the girl who freezes so she may not starve
Have a chance encounter
And bask in mutual despondency.
They share their warmth,
And they share their food,
And neither has enough of either.

But even at their demise,
The sun still goes up and down
On the horizon,
Painting a scene of ignorance
Or apathy,
And lying.
The heat will dissipate soon,
What with Winter coming,
But it does not matter:
Everything is already frozen.

A ripened sky splits and bleeds
Mangled reds and blacks;
An instant melts as heat from
Clustered newborn suns --
Blistered from the wounds --
Collects and beams 1600 feet
Earthwards from Fat Man's
Plump and pompous underbelly.

The pure-light pin-***** stopped
The city's pulse for a moment;
Collecting remnants of the
Beating hearts (of artists,
Doctors, students, parents,
Preachers, rats, and peasants)
To plant on rotting soil -
A hellish fungal pustule.

The swelling abscess breathed
But once and burst to
Ripple excess outwards
Soaking up the landscape;
Ingesting miles and spewing
Spores towards septic skies to form
A mass of mushroomed
Might and pyrrhic triumph.

Late April and only
coltsfoot—Tussilago farfara—breaking leaf litter.
Our daffodils, peonies and crocuses
are also making signs.

April is the cruelest month, I forget why.
A sweet slow Spring
no sudden changes
each leg and leaf unfolds deliberately. You can't miss it.

New York City's spring rushes like a yellow cab
into summer. One day leaves are wet,
next they’re leather. I prefer this slow dance,
birds mating on the sky, peepers evolving into frogs.

Repairs take weeks or months. Septic,
garage door, cracked windshield, clean windows,
build bridge, buy land, rake leaves off erosion control,
cut wood, prune lilac, paint lawn chairs.

More carefully inspect, identify, the insect
of the week, a fly with an ant’s body
that skirts the grass and falls in drinks.
Look more closely! It will be gone in a few days!

Then it will be the time of moths or fireflies,
mosquitoes and wasps. Mud road,
red-winged blackbird. The slashing stream
topples old trees. My legs hurt.

Meteoric Buick
Slick *****
Frantic frenetic
Majestic kick
Chick shtick
Shashlik

Nicotinic stick
Lick flick
Hermeneutic heretic
Magnetic rhetoric
Hick logic
Strategic

Plastic music
Tick click
Bucolic Bardic
Peptic druidic
Rustic emetic
Sceptic

Polymeric quirk
Sick trick
Turmeric trimeric
Septic *****
Wick crick
Derrick

I remember it like it was yesterday -
The sickly anti-septic smell,
The bright fluorescent-lit room.
The perpetual
beep-beep-beep

Your eyes are closed;
Your face at ease.
But I know,
Under the immaculate facade
Of gentle freckles -
You are in so much pain.

I gently squeeze your hand.

Your eyes open:
A bewitching light-brown.
You smile one of your illuminating smiles -
The kind that would make stars envious.
Your dimples
A perfect compliment to your picturesque features.

Goodbye, my love
                 You whisper.

Your eyes close;
Your face at ease.

I will never forget that icy sound:
The sound of finality.
The undying

**Beeeeep

You make my body burn slow,
like a stricken match in a film noir;
our legs intertwine
like muscular vine,
chests pressed so close
we can synchronize
our heartbeats, every artery
and vein pumping
like speed-of-light projectors.

You bend my senses, make them
forfeit heir coherences, force
my limbs to misplace
their native tongue
within a simmering puddle
of submissive bliss.

Your tongue sliding up my back?
Fosse was never so graceful.

I want to play back your moans
on speakers the size
of monoliths.

I need to pleasure you
until the wave
becomes a tsunami,
one ready to swallow all doubt
and shame and apprehension
until all that septic negativity
is trapped within our jaws,
drowning in our slithering tongues
until it dissolves as quickly
as sugar in a boiling cauldron
and there is nothing left
but our sweat and our panting
and the excitement
that these dunes of ecstasy
will repeat themselves indefinitely.

I sometimes sit and think about how I wouldn't mind if the world ended
I know its wrong of me to say that at face value, but deep down inside I know we all think it
not that the earth itself should be destroyed into oblivion, but the opposite
that the world should live on
and the cancerous growth of humanity should be cured
its a pessimistic way of looking at things , I know, but I cant help but feel this
short ride of ours on this planet is careening out of control
I'm not a nihilist or an anarchist or an environmentalist
nor a ******* for that matter
I'm not afraid to die because I believe I will no longer exist when I do
but the pointlessness of it all and the blatant disregard for others,
other species other lives other kinds other minds
disregard for the future for cleanliness leads me to these thoughts,
that a septic surplus has arisen on this singularly magnificent gift
of life in this one and only known universe and we sit here ******* all over it...
I sometimes think it'd be best if we all just left

On an Archipelago
far from septic isles,
Deep in silent azure
I place broaches and pins
in a wooden box, for safe keeping
And set her dreams on a bed of lichen,
fields of leafy pathway stretching
she’ll nestle woven toad flax and larkspur
to steadfast her conscience.
The Birds of the flock
thrush and dove, sensing her bridle
rejoice in her Mother lode,  
precious be their plenteous dawn.

MY FIRST & LAST LOVE LETTER

This I declare as my first & last love letter
Dedicated to the woman who looked at me and thought that I was better
In a sea of many men with fragile hearts and broken dreams
She chose to mend mine
In the process of putting the pieces together, she used herself as the glue & now
She is permanently a part of my new Picasso image of refined love.
A kind heart that lacks not a kind word in moments when emotions overflow
Poetry makes it easy for me to express these emotions
'Cause if I was an ordinary man I would have died in silence & left her seeking solace
Jesus would have to come back & perform all his miracles in order to reach out to her heart & resurrect my soul.
Enough about the riddle talk now let's go back to the love notes that make up this melody in my heart
The woman with a smile that brings out the life in my soul
She, the woman who invades my thoughts more than a germ invades a surface.
I find myself humming love tunes & writing love poems at the thought of you
Hoping to spend all my desired forevers with you
If only this was to be true
We all know that life has no guarantees
So I have prepared & cleaned up a small room for disappointment because of you
'Cause this love thing we have going seems too good to be true
Call me a sceptic but I've come to believe that your presence in my system is therapeutically septic
You have injected me with life but you still remain the potential cause of my fate
Explains why every time after I ****** in your presence at the dear end I end up in a faint
Totally disconnected from existence
A wonderfully dreadful experience
A once in a lifetime moment that resulted in me writing you this love poem
Which I have declared as the first & last love letter because I believe that you deserve better...   (to be continued)

best days better left behind bereft of joy
fighting in vain for fleeting fulfillment
instead seeping bile from punctured
***** appendix found septic too late
even still now hungry for real life like
stomach tapeworm eating purpose
lost along the way now empty, grey
when did time get away from us all
leaving bitter little paisan us's
stripped bare of long dead dreams
like Christmas morning c-section strippers
five dollar bills stuffed in withered *****

They sell sandwiches and little nightmares with vanity inside.
i glide to a booth and schmooze the next wet group of compromised -
And Charlotte's web
of insular jokes,
snare me from outside my comfort zone...
and i own the green eggs and ham of our sepia tone in the septic lake
of our laughing groan.
We enjoy the view.
I drink to be We and Apart from you.
But the kegs dredge.
They plunder the blunderbuss of our best shot. With Silencer.
We crowd loudly in the Big Easy of our modern strife.
We scrape with dull Lives,
save those with sharp Eyes that see spigots
as unseen Blithe !
We gather in the Hemisphere of our Wanton Anonymity,
as divulged mirrors
in a House
of Cards....

All of my Best Jokes
are Friends
With hearts....
and Then
some...

The scare is there on your chest, I see,
Where a sword once pierced your heart.
This wound that never really healed,
And left you in the dark.

The skin closed over it, blocking out
The light, air and water
Needed to flush it clean.
It has to heal from the inside out,
Not the outside in!
The pus must all come out.

The wound has become septic,
And the pain will never go away
I fear, but instead,
Will linger on,
Killing you silently,
Bit by bit, thought by thought!

Open your wounds to me,
And let me wash them clean!
Don't hide them in the dark.
Expose them to the light and air,
And let the shame and poison
out!

Opening your wounds again,
To a loving mind like mine,
Will cure,
However crazy
That may sound
To you,
Your sick and broken
Heart.

such a treasure, and a chore! I have bought the local store
out of bleach, vinegar, baking soda, ***** and kibble.
A bother, yes, when I try
to walk to the bathroom or refrigerator
without being tripped up, and I shuffle along now,
I don't dare to lift my feet for fear of hearing a wounded
yelp. And bad breath, I thought the drunk begging a dollar for a small bottle who lives under the bridge when he asked, "spare a dollar, mister?", and my
eyebrows sizzled , had bad breath. These treasures breath smells like they eat and drink from a septic tank.
Let one whimper or get on their back legs begging me to pick his or her little sticky *** up, and I put it on my chest and watch her , or him, get all cozy listening to my heart beat, and it seems worth it.

I've been looking at the world from a different perspective

IG filters and Snapchat interceptions

I was off the grid,  I am now in inception

Social media dance floors
no escape or exceptions

what do you stand for?
put your hands in the septic

so your arms can take all the **** that
Your legs normally dealt with

Apartment, complex complicated life consequences

Brothers life deciphered
into the trenches

Despite all of the help we lent him

Life can be a loan when you are alone
It can get expensive

Don't own a home,
but I could show you what rent is

I could show you what hustle is,
I'm that relentless

Slick mouth, silver tounge...this is manifested

Bike peddling, rebelling Ambidextrous

Quiet devilish, my medicine makes most hella lit

I speak in crooked tongues like most nuns who settle with

Being Singular minded there Vibes are so celibate

A courier in this Corredor settlement

How do I, in these times, stay not high but relevant

I'm confined in thin lines, tell them **** time,
if the sunshine, makes us dumb blind

Like retail and it's details with the big signs

See this conclusion is just a visual illusion
A cesspool in the mainstream visual pollution

This vortex is just a digital confusion
Digits to acidic, hash tags for the lab rats to abuse them

watch me slipstream into a hazmat suit and snap back to an audience all the toxics that I'm using

my minds a clock incapsulated in the bottom of a backpack but only in math class, I state facts for your amusement

How can you do this?! Who the **** are you kid?!

I'm Duke Nukem with a scorpion fist ready to hiduken!

I'm Isaac Newton with a paint brush when I do this

Painting photosynthesis with my sentences, I conclude with...

Nothing but a chronological order I cause a cascade of disorder

I'm on the edge don't **** with me and my border...can't **** with me I'm the best this visual mess is what your ordered

I type in that old address
expecting google not to show a house
to show the empty lot
that from what i heard
was the result of putting a dishwasher
into the kitchen
and causing complete septic failure
that flooded that entire uptown PA acre.
But, it flies me there
and I cry a little
because it's an old picture-
the house is still there,
just as i remember it;
an empty lot to the side,
the dilapidated apartment in the back yard,
the shed at the end of the driveway
(which was just a couple of cement tracks
slightly thinner than the pathfinder tires)
the apple and pie cherry trees we used to climb.
the alley in the back
where we used to skip rocks
and run from the neighborhood dogs (and cats)
looks the same as well,
every car the same,
every empty house still empty,
every tipped trashcan still being tipped each week.
I go down every street I used to walk,
they're all the same,
the bus stop is still where it was
the trails are just as long and dark as they ever were
and each yellow yard looks just as it always did in midsummer.
the ponds in the park are still the same color
with the same algae growing in them
and the same overgrowth hideaways around them.
A mile down the road;
the mini-mart where I bought gum when i had money
hasn't changed a bit,
even the pink umbrellas are still in front of the smoothie bar
but, across the street
the used book store that i would get lost in is gone
and from there i notice subtle changes:
the blackberry bushes by the middle school,
that mom made multiple cobblers from, are gone,
the maternity store moved,
the shed that my stepdad first told us would be our new house,
(before showing us this place)
has been torn down, or fell over
(as i assume it did),
and it doesn't end there,
I practiced my eye in the small details of this small ****** of the world
even though i never talked to anyone
in all the hours i spent walking.
But i guess I remember so well,
because, four-and-a-half years later
I still consider that house home.
that house where my brother was born,
where i first went without my glasses, and liked it
where I was first given the freedom of a bus pass
and permission to leave the house,
where i had my first (and only) overnighter
where i first became addicted to cleaning
where i've packed so many memories
that i can understand why the sewage line broke
sometime after that picture was taken



©Brandon Webb
2012

The beautiful entity that hides in the walls of insecurities,
Drenched in septic opinions.
Purity in a brink of lost from the influence of invisible fears,
Drowning, almost - breathless…
Little bit of innocence and its essence, survived!
Making life still worthwhile.


*© Pax

I woke up to the pious sunlight of broken dreams
drenched in the faded tear drops of yesterday
arcing like a broken rainbow down empty streets
leading to the septic tank of tomorrow.

Resplendently dressed in rhetoric
silk woven by congenial weevils
frantically fed on gypsum and diesel
weaving verbosity with loquacity
table a motion to make independence illegal;
keep the status quo unequal between certain people.

There once was a dream called change
proclaimed to be the prize of revolution by some
restrained and contained as hyperbole by others
the disenfranchised left muddled in facts unexplained
the vocal ambivalence of political unrest is to blame
as Union Jacks march on Glasgow with steel toe-capped boots
and in the George Square riots the Saltire burns in flames
as history repeats itself
and the thistle of Scotland is ripped by her roots
the first act as a welcome back
into the fold of the commonwealth .

With distance
the distaste only grew ,
with time and foreign lands my tree of wisdom only grew
from the confines of meditational winter sprung forth with the seasons change a fresh spring
that led to summers bloom and now with autumns orange face upon us i find myself back where i began ,

where i ran , it seems i was running back
where i thought i had no map , there was something pulling me to a home of sorts
more than one , too many to name , in people who live and in places that breathe
where i roamed , where i broke down walls triumphantly pulling the bricks and letting the river flow through the once more
no more ****** damns to hold back the floodwaters

i had an inkling i was running off borrowed time
or at least credit
death on credit
death in reverse
birthed rebirth
again and again

yet here i am still in deaths ruptured flow -
the unconditional love ran out mother ,
it ran out and you used it up
you used it so , i know you needed it
so from my child’s heart uninteruppted i let that one go
i held it aloft so you would know that no matter what you do , you are loves loved love

you are loves , loved love
but , it all came crashing down around my ears and around my throat a noose with no name
but a holy ghost escaped my lips in angry overtones = this argument for arguments sake
and tears hot on my cheeks filling up my mouth with anti-septic salt water drops
that doused my locks and you said “come back to me when you can speak without crying”

tears are but distilled wisdom and i am your teacher
i am your child - for a reason , i learnt much from you but how much more can you learn from me..
for i am not you - but a part - apart
and the smoke fills my eyes blurring the lines between reality

but i had enough , respect is intended - always
but i have respect in myself and that’s what you taught me.

That’s why i smile at people on the bus and talk to strangers ; because
everyone is reaching their own goals, shining their own light and love is shared , mother , love is shared.
and i try to love
but love seems to be distant
i love

four men

one - island man
two - island man
three- island man
four - out way somewhere i don’t know , never have graced , hope to grace and maybe touch his face ,

is this wrong? is this why i sit up at night with restless dreams
because whenever i see any one of them my heart turns to shreds
and i recall what that love is one more time
one more time
on more time

one - touches and lunch
two - dinner without touches, yet.
three - cheesy beans and laughter lines
four - astral planes baby ,

it’s raining again .
i’m siting under a tree in holloway
next to a knoll with hot chocolate , passport photos and cigarettes

are they not all one and the same
whom would i devote my entirety to , would you take it?
would you take it?
could you take it?

where do we stop?
why not stop..why stop. stop. what? stop loves riptide ?
not likely , not by chance , but by simplistic design
no i will not go
i will stay

please, please.. please.

i want to dance , with you who are you?
an enigma of epic proportions

i read somewhere that if a poet falls in love with you then you will never be forgotten
forever imortalized in their sonnets
and yes , it is true

lover why so shy? why so elusive , who is your soul
won’t you quietly tell me of the bruises won’t you tell me your secrets
and let me smooth down your shorn hair

two.

this world was made to share
and so is my love
so it is my love ,

we are wounded healers
and my , have i never heard anything as poetic as that.

but i cannot stay lone with all this love as it burst forth because it is mine. mother .
it is mine.

so.

dinner.

Bio-mechanical protocols govern my identity
And are implanted while I sleep.
My brain--my weak and weary CPU--
Is replenished, my discs defragmented.
A suite of magnetic & optical white rooms,
Cleansed free of contaminants,
Gun mounts & lifeboat stations
Manned and ready,
Standing at attention, saluting
British snap-style,
Snap-to and heel click,
Ramrod straight and cheerful:
“Ready for duty, Sir.”
My mind is ravenous,
Lusting for something,
Anything to process.
Any memory or image,
Lyric or construct, be they short-term
Dailies or deeply imprinted.
Fixations archived one and all
In deep storage time and space.
Memories, some subconscious,
Most vaporous; others--the scary ones—
Eidetic: frighteningly detailed,
Extraordinarily vivid.
Precise cognitive transcripts;
Recollected so richly, rife and fresh.
Visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, & olfactory reloads:
Queued up and increasingly re-experienced.
The bio-data of six decades: it’s all there.
People, countless places & things cataloged.
Every event, joy and trauma
Enveloped from within or,
Accessed externally from cloudy storage devices.
The random access memory of a lifetime,
Read and recollected from cerebral
Repositories and vaults, all the while,
The entire greedy process overseen,
Over-driven by that servile British bat-man,
Rummaging through the data,
In batches small and large,
Internal and external drives working
In seamless syncopation, self-referential,
At times paradoxical and infinitely looped.
“Cogito ergo sum."
Descartes stripped it down to the basics but
There’s more to the story:
Thinking about thinking.
The curse & minefield for the cerebral:
Metacognition.

No, it is not the fact that thought exists,
Or even the thoughts themselves.
It is the information technology of thought
That baffles me, adaptive & profound
As any evolution posited by Darwin.
Beyond the wetware in my skull
Dwells an entirely new operating system.
My mental & cultural landscape are now one,
Machines connecting the two.
It’s what I am and what I am becoming.
Once more for emphasis:

"It is the information technology of who I am. It is the operating system of my mental and cultural landscape. It is the machinery connecting the two."

This is the central point of this narrative:
Metacognition—your superego’s yenta Cassandra,
Screaming, screaming in your psychic ear, your good ear.
“LISTEN: the machines are taking over, taking you over.
Your identity and train of thought are repeatedly hijacked,
Switched off the main line onto spurs and tangents,
Only marginally connected or
Not connected at all.
Yes, something has happened to me along the way.
I am no longer certain of my identity as a human being.
Time and technology has altered my basic wiring diagram.
I suspect the sophisticated gadgets and tools
I’ve been using to shape & make
Sense of my environment, have reared up,
Turned around on me.
My tools have reshaped my brain,
Remaking my central nervous system.
Turning me into something simultaneously
More and less human.
The electronic toys and tools I once so lovingly embraced,
Have turned unpredictable and rabid,
Their bite penetrating my skin, septic now,
A cluster of implanted sensors.
Content: currency made increasingly
More valuable as time passes,
Served up by & serving the interests of
A pervasively predatory 1%.
And the rest of us: the so-called 99%?
No longer human;
Simply put by both Howards--Beale & Zinn:
HUMANOID

(Excerpt from "Confessions of a Hopi *** Israelite")

In the dusk's fading light of youth , a ghostly spectre stands tall,
An abandoned wreckage at the old dock's forlorn sprawl.
Once majestic, now decaying, she's a vessel of despair,
The timbers of her heart weathered and worn, beyond any repair.

Like a fossil of forgotten tales, she stands in solemn gloom,
Haunted by memories, whispered secrets, and tales of doom.
The ocean's embrace turned hostile, her beauty eaten to decay,
As the years wore on, stealing her magnificent colors away.

Anchored in the stagnant waters, trapped in a wistful trance,
An epitaph of dreams dashed she's a vessel caught in circumstance.
Tangled in seaweed's grasp, her sails once proud and taut,
Now a haunting reminder of a journey that was never sought.

Tempted by the tides of time, her fate was sealed,
the undying resilience broken, her septic wounds revealed.
There she lingers, forsaken, a relic of forgotten glee,
A rotting boat, a silent witness to the cruelty of the sea.