Driving while Nominally Human

in the rain,
in the pouring low visibility rain,
while precariously driving
your motorcar,
that is a very good time to check one's cellular phone,
with laser focus, without a care,
even immediately after
one has turned
through a four-way intersection.
because, because baby,
life is short
and you don't wanna miss out
and you don't wanna be alone,
or behind the curve,
and you need a spike of endorphines
and you're young,
made of unbreakable matter,
and have never known
anyone who had a serious accident
or died in a wreck,
and really, it's probably impractical to
actually masturbate
while steering.

little cell,
little sell, where are ye gwan

i am motoring along.
One of these old-fashioned people,
that's me,
concerned about death and
needless accidents,
fretting still in my quaint, worrisome middle age,
over the social contract
and the contagious anger and shame
i feel at witnessing all
this sociopathic, narcissistic behavior
that has grown by titanic leaps and bounds in 20 short years
since these devices began to wrack and ruin
our already miserably self-absorbed
model of society.
Since the internet
and cell phones 
and 1001 Streaming Services
and murderously well-refined first-person video games
burst from the depths
of the MIC,
fully prepared to murder and confuse everything
with their buttons
and the infinite cozy womb for the
savage ego
which they all provide.


i looked to my left.
a college student, female, doing
what we have all come to expect from their
selfish, feckless breed:
Poorly conducting her car in the rain
while looking at her phone,
even though she only has approximately
3-4 seconds to do so,
if she is to be at all careful or sane about
the process,
having just merged through a sluggish
four-way clusterfuck
of civilization,
or at least of modern living.
We learn by
grotesquely repetitive example,
that these 3.5 seconds are
an irresistible temptation for the youth of today,
and also for the 35 year olds.
That ninety degree turn
is too valuable
a span of time to waste
on merely driving.

I say to Femalehood:
we menfolk accept that you are
more gregarious than us,
more social,
more inclined to burbling like shaken
soda pops
into whatever sound-transmission device is near at hand.
We accept that your social chops
bind society and the family together,
and that the limitless gossip
in your hearts,
this eternal tendency to talk
about social matters,
and even to talk shit in
a rather uniquely bottomless female way,
is not altogether
bad or reproachable.
But even still,
enough with the cell phone use whilst you are
driving upon
the roadways.
It's an unnecessarily costly, homicidal
act that can only be
explained as a vanity
now indistinguishable
from sociopathy,
in late 2019.

But then...
I look to my right,
and see a 58 year old man, driving
under the same wet, dicey conditions,
gazing into his precious phone.
A national craze of death-wishing.
Into the shredder,
and between the cheeks,
the contract goes.

as individuals we
are ever more
steadily reduced to shit.
People are lame,
people are unspeakably lame.
So that in the end we must simply cringe
and whisper it,
or scream
about it at the top of tired lungs,
in the clammy privacy of our own automobiles...
or do it like me, and mutter at
a level close to singing,
stringing together harsh invective sentences,
as if anyone cared.
People are lame,
bring on the comets and the reset
and the next season

there is neither enough time
in life
to examine or appreciate its beauty,
nor to develop a sound method
of dealing with human society
as it sinks
blindly into its mass grave