Galloping Horses

Dehumanized,
riding
towards
disaster.

Nature,
no longer
a comrade.

Mankind,
no longer
astonished.

Luminosity rests,
a sickly grandfather,
drinking down his warehouse
of history –
taking a nightly stroll
through half-deserted streets.

The horses have been
unleashed,
they are kicking up dirt
in the dead land.


Now that the Revolution has begun

Material things
lose
definition –

Our eyes,
indefinitely hold
back
fear and trembling –

Bludgeoned
into assimilating
with consumer
culture –
though disinterested in the
charade of
selling one’s soul
for wireless, high speed
illusions –

While the promise
of enterprise
mystifies us
and forces
participating
in the madness
of serial murder.

It is belief in
the fraud
of these illusions
which destroy us –

We live in an age
where everything
we’re told
is a blatant lie.


No Future

The future
is already on fire –

Though
we tell ourselves
it is just a dream –

We fall back asleep,
without questioning
or figuring out

why the fire
is spreading

or why the sirens
will never stop

and that pretty soon
there will be

no more people
and no more beds.


Waking the Dead in the Land of Make-Believe

I am turning a concept of reality over in my mind.
Dragging it blindfolded through dead streets,
dissolving it in puddles of blood
and leaving it out in the rain.

I am lighting it on fire,
then saying a prayer to heal it.
I am giving it away to the homeless,
then grieving in the darkness for hours.

It is a lonely concept, this reality.
I am watching it through the keyhole of a church door.
I am looking through a spyglass atop a skyscraper.
Smoke rises from its breath,
and it sounds like the revving engine of a wrecked car.

Smoke curls appear around it, like the tail of a dragon.
It is everywhere, and inside of everything.
It is everything I am at my core and the absence of what I am.
It is immeasurable and microscopic.
It is every drop of rainfall over the ocean –
It is a pledge of freedom on a despondent planet.

It is living in the brains of the people of my town.
Breathing like a prisoner held quietly at gunpoint.
It is crying so loud, I cannot understand what it is trying to say.
It is the grotesquery of this modernized world.

It becomes a flock of white birds and then a giant albatross,
as it glides overhead –
Its body has changed so many times.
It splits and duplicates itself.
It even disappears for a time
and reemerges from the darkness as a billion drops
of October rain.

It is unexplained and mysterious,
the last man who tried to solve its riddle
lost his mind and became a shepherd.

It is in that body, pirouetting on the tightrope
over the edge of civilization.
It is in the oil soaked banknotes

It is in the gaze of women in dark sunglasses,
intensely reading, while curling her hair between her fingers.

It is turning itself around to face us,
becoming more and more like us,
opening a can of worms and seeing it there
inheriting our thoughts and emotions,
replicating our ideas and imagination.

It is leaving the school of wisdom
and setting the past on fire.
It is spreading out its vampire wings,
shedding its suit and tie
and flooding through the opened gate of the underworld.

It is in the condemned warehouses of time,
where heretics are placed to wander the streets after a nuclear holocaust.

It is the cracked hands of a pianist, a writer, or a painter
who remains, trembling beside the tomb of a pharaoh.

It is the stirring of life, in a reality upside down.
It has been diagnosed schizophrenic.
It is in no man’s land,
collecting shoes and dog tags of the dead.
Walking through the kingdom of creation completely disoriented.

It is a winter long bout of delirium.
It is a lifelong battle of xenophobia.

It is the energy of light, traveling across the cosmos.
It is a wink of the eye,
it is in piercing cry of the lunatic
as he wakes the dead in a land of make-believe.


Chain Gang

Let down
that curtain,
which shrouds
reality –
Reveal
these chains
around our
heads,
feet,
and wrists –
We are
incarcerated here,
in comfortable
cages,
which lull us
passively
into a state
of acquiescence –
Why is it
that the circus
distracts us so?
Why is one’s soul
exchanged
for handfuls of ash?


Song for the Postmodern Void

I am playing possum,
indoctrinated by shareholders,
and corporate elite,
whose aim is to devour my soul.

I am alien to this body;
this fleshy machine of wilderness.

I serve, as a cog in their bomb,
which aims to destroy everything alive.

Humanity has adopted
this system of order
and exploitation,
which serves to maintain
the illusions it creates.


Cognitive Dissonance

There are nights
I almost forget
theses shackles
on my hands and feet.
I almost feel free –
Then I remember
the streets are still on fire
and there are no firemen.
I watch years pass
into madness,
as the fires rage to destroy.
No one talks about the rising smoke clouds
engulfing the sky and blotting out the sun.
No one is ready to confront the avalanche
of violence and fear.
No one believes it is going to destroy us.


Death Waltz

We are waltzing instep to a cold wind,
blowing us toward extinction.

We are waltzing, in the glow of computer screens,
while specters haunt our American Dream.

We are waltzing, because we support illegal wars every day,
with our tax money and by pretending they don’t exist.

We are waltzing, while innocent civilians submit
to the brute force of our military.

We are waltzing through shopping malls,
while foreign cities are bombed to ash.

We are waltzing quietly,
unaware that our government,
which preaches freedom and equality,
is the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.

We are waltzing, with our hands held
tightly over our mouths.

We are waltzing, because the American Dream
is really the coma of consent.

We are waltzing through massively corrupt systems
of monopolies and oligarchies.

We are waltzing through decades,
suspended in consumer hypnosis.

We are waltzing up to voting booths,
believing lies, fed to us by puppets.

We are waltzing, while a handful of corporations
control the music of the dance.

We are waltzing, while our media provides
the chanting drone of obedience.

We are waltzing, because denial reigns,
like a pistol, butting everyone over the head.

We are waltzing through our empire of illusion,
too petrified to act out against it.

We are waltzing, while waves of false history
knock us back into the Middle Ages.

We are waltzing as serfs and peasants,
on the manors of dark lords.

We are waltzing on vast plantations,
working for ruthless masters and demonic butchers.

We are waltzing, like zombies down dead-end streets
with faded promises tattooed to our eyelids.

We are waltzing through a luxurious ballroom,
without realizing we're on a sinking ship.

We are waltzing, though the glass ceiling is caving in,
and water is slowly rising around us.

We are waltzing, without realizing that we are dancing,
with entities of death and annihilation.

We are waltzing with blindfolds on,
oblivious to the emergency,
with nothing but apathy in our souls.


Premonitions of Fascist U.S.A.

The black out
has begun.

The public,
never wonders

though they surrender
each day
little by little

to a silent
totalitarian reign

of fascist USA –

Submitting
to brute force
and corporate interests,

to shareholders
and moguls,

who force us
into quiet obedience –


Witnesses

We are witnesses to the domestic terror ensued by television.
We are witnesses to the ignorance of our news media to report the truth.
We are witnesses to the destruction of our basic civil liberties.
We are witnesses to the corporate takeover of our lives.
We are witnesses to a conformity, which has stripped away the roots of democracy.
We are witnesses to the abolition of privacy in the name of Counter Terrorism.
We are witnesses to the hijacking of our government by warmongers.
We are witnesses to a foreign policy, which has everything to do with spreading corruption.
We are witnesses to the torture and violations committed by our government.
We are witnesses to the bailouts of bankers who continue to usurp the Free Market.
We are witnesses to the financial destruction and suffering of domestic citizens.
We are witnesses to a New World Order’s global dominance and opponent’s submission.
We are witnesses to the Ruling Class, which continues to profit off our blindness.


Quiet Bones

Will passion continue
to be traded
for a cozy end?

Caged in relaxing suites
of ether
which lull us,
passively into the land of the dead.

We glance back on the world
recognizing all that was transparent –

We vanish from this world
letting our quiet bones listen and hear
the drone of electricity.


I am the Gutter

I am the gutter of elegies,
reading the last rights
to a dying planet.

I am a starving, homeless
subway musician
singing about a radiant future.

I am the gutter of fossil fuels,
swimming in a great black sea
of misrepresentation.

I am the gutter of corporations,
giving away my best years,
to a humanity hating enterprise.

I am the gutter of catastrophes,
television composes
most of my cultureless identity.

I am the gutter of deficiency,
raised in a boomtown
of arsenic and cancer.

I am the toxic minded, low-test scorer,
who grew up drinking
contaminated groundwater.

I am the gutter of illusions,
observing the demise of rationality,
while human life evaporates,
sprayed with insecticides.

I am the gutter of stock quotes,
of Frankenstein soldiers –
of systematic failures
and greenhouse gases.

I am the gutter of the future,
drowning in debt,
singing to the walls
of a glass prison.

I am the gutter of the disenfranchised,
sawing at the invisible chains which keep me bound
and nailed in a cemetery of complicity.

I am the gutter, retaining dead leaves of summer,
holding them deep within my lungs until they suffocate me.

There’s a gutter wind blowing,
as a cavalry of goblins spring up from the sewer.


Outside Edward Hopper’s New York Office

It is a neutralizing void,
outside the window that spooks me.

It lies there,
inside the emptiness
of cracked sidewalks

Where shadows scream,
like an animal,
born with its umbilical chord
tied around its neck.

It is on these streets
where one feels alienated,
into a vortex of bones.

This city is not alive,
but a glass dungeon of the mind.

I hear it in the sound
of unthinking people,
where consciousness has been severed –

I see it on faces,
grieving this unknowable loss,
a spiritual castration –

Tonight there will be a florescent glow
hovering above buildings –

As subjugated masses, align themselves
and bend over for the faceless machine.


Wall Street

We make camp in a
deserted part of town
where pockmarked buildings
stand empty and unrecognizable.

We search the ruins
for a sign of life,
but nothing is found.

At dusk, a ragged man
appears on horseback.

He’s dressed like a general,
from a war that ended
decades ago.

The horse he is riding
looks like a marble statue,
until it starts to urinate
in our drinking trough.

The man stares at us
through eyes that have seen
an apocalypse in full bloom.

He tells us
we look to him
like a troupe of amateur
carnival performers,
wandering around
on a makeshift stage.

He tells us the building
we are using as a latrine
used to be the epicenter
of western finances.


Blueprints for a New Imagination

In a flash, it came
with thunderclaps and rain,
the birth of a new imagination.

A night of darkness
becomes engulfed by vision.

In the silence of light
we’re given eyes of clarity.

Everything appears as it is,
upside down, and backwards.

A necessary angle returns,
to light the fire, which burns away
the constraints of dead reality.

A hell of repression extinguished,
the silence shattered
by the sound of humanity
kicking through its coffin door.

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