you stab my back, i'll stab yours

valentine's day is a perfect day
for shattering the crazed imbecility
of True Love.
For smacking around
its childish guilelessness,
its hysterical vanities,
self-deceptions and monomania,
for blinding
its musing, mackerel-faced sentimentality,
and its starry-eyed worship of the
dull possibility of great things.
Both the full-blown condition, and
its less diseased forms,
can meet their deaths gloriously,
on February 14th,
day of darts
and perforated, ruptured hearts.

i've looked in many of the movies
and some of the
greeting and playing cards,
but only in a few dismal
poems and novels
do they have anything to say about
the dark and yawning flip void,
which we sample again and again if
we are either lucky or tricked or fatally flawed,
while searching for
perfect happiness in the loving arms and thoughts
of some
other being's
ephemeral states.
loving is just another crazy word in the vocabulary
of a sick and dangerous animal
that shouldn't bother
trying to
vocalize its madness.
All it can produce is
horrible wet and screechy sounds.
On the annual holiday for celebrating
this sublime, irresistible union
between two sexually compatible monkeys
whose soul purpose is commonly said to be
the pursuit and fruits of love,
called martyred Saint Valentinus' Day,
one can truly lift their hands to the sky
and denounce all of this sad,
destructive foolishness,
and do it
with some glad,
ironic,
sweet candygobbling
finality.

Because enduring, romantic love is not meant to be,
it should not have a crass little holiday.
but it does, if it must, provide the chance
to sever the cord
from this great human swindle,
baby Cupid's weeping dream,
the silver-clouded earthly afterlife
of nibbling at one's sweetheart's earlobes forever,
and hearing here
in the moonlight and there in the sunshine and
the inclement weather
her coos of delight
always in return.
you will feel the shock and honesty
of that callow, flinty strumpet's
eventual distaste for you
on this holiday
in the ass of winter,
and because as a race we know
the value of Delusion and Profit,
and subjection to the churchly calendar,
we intend to celebrate these happy
realizations of the heart
each and every year!

If-you-want-ta-know-about
Romantic Love, lalala,
then ask a blind person what they know
about the new Honda Prius XLE 5010.
they might describe its general shape
and that it has four wheels,
and farts around emitting toxic but
comparatively benign gasses,
and one of them can transport and be the untimely death
of at least one fool at a time,
but beyond that it is all mystery
because it can't be seen
or controlled,
and so is no better
or more worthy than patriotism,
or arbitrary calendar systems
that dwell on human sacrifice
and astrology.

i might prefer a handful of melted chocolate
to the heart of another human being
like me, and the ones I've known.

your silly damn notions of fun

you've been
carrying on about it
in this way for years.
dont tell me about your fun
because i'm not interested.
your idea of fun is a lame thing
and a selfish thing,
and i prefer it if
you don't issue proclamations about
this or that activity being
"fun," or "sounding like fun,"
when i suggest or mention them.

because what you are
really doing,
you dull, dyspeptic bastard,
is implying that you have judged
the matter, with presumed
authority and discernment,
and that there is a distinct chance
that my ideas and suggestions are boring,
commonplace,
or tedious,
maybe even deadly
to the great breadth
of your legendary happiness.
but i know
your tragedy is that you
can't easily locate a single ounce of joy
in the universe,
because of the bitter squabbling
war against peace that is waged
every day
in your angry mind,
a place where
everything bad has been bronzed
and put up on a mantle.

so quit it with the fun.
let it be understood
all throughout this land of neurotics
and depressives
and citizen-jackals
locked in jealous competition,
that
fun is a thing that should be had
and not mentioned.

Sus scrofa democratica:

The 3-Year Deafening Silence of The Electorate's Complacency in the Interim Between Executive Branch Hustle Seasons, or, How to Have a Sound Moral Opinion on Voting for a US President

"I live 6 flights up..
Oooh how that man loves to climb."
~~from, The Blues

"I voted."
~~ Imbecilic bumper sticker proudly held aloft before face of self-congratulating peasant in their New Facebook Profile Pic, probably because they are newly hot with the heat of feeling the Bern.

It may be that voting in the current American system is complete fatuity and swinish arrogance. We call it fatuous because it's the perfect word for the act, one committed very often without question or understanding. And we say "swinish" because we go to the booths like pigs, to the trough of our own fattening conceits, all massed up and comforted by nearness to so many other needy, self-devouring ungulates. It's a multi-layered anthropomorphic metaphor, see. (So keep in mind that pigs, though clever, are herd beasts mostly found with husbands of a stronger species. The subject here is not the actually free, lean-bellied ancestral pig who still roams the forests, with tusks, frightening more dominant species, no.)

But also we say "swinish" because it is understood and accepted, when wanting to denigrate human behavior, to compare it to that of pigs, because pigs are filthy animals, and live in their own shit, and like it, whereas human beings prize themselves clean and virtuous animals, advanced long past the era of monkeying around in poop and darkness. This means, in part, that we have become masters of deception in all its forms, and are content to lie about the fact that we are wallowing in shit, blood, and collective infamy, and indeed are getting better at all of it.

The voting species of swine is rightly called arrogant because they perform their election ritual with such an airy sense of accomplishment, solemnity and ceremony. It might be an accomplishment if something was affected, or effected, that were not odious and inimical to our well-being. As a herd, we are not clever enough to see the full, grandiose scam of the voting scheme, though we are clever enough to have produced a Goldman or a Twain who then said, "if voting changed the system it wouldn't be legal." (The provenance of this quote is unclear perhaps because we have all had the same thought.) As opposed to more local forms of government, this is decidedly more true of the larger, federal-sized governments, which happen to wield tremendous power and in securing their interests often slaughter millions of citizens of every sort of country by military force and remote aerial bombing, and other unmentionable methods that even better define the true nature of Power.

Now right here I am compelled to attempt a clean diagnosis of the electing disorder, morally speaking. I'll try to phrase the problem, as I see it, in as crystallized and clinically abstracted, philosophical a way as I can. For years, dimly, and eventually, clearly, I perceived the essential moral problem with voting in its average practice as being the following: When one votes, they are typically voting from the place we call the "ego" or the vanity cortex. All other communal or nuanced or philosophically unselfish considerations are murdered when you willingly lurch forward from your poll position at the elementary school or courthouse and ally your own moral stance and nature with that of a single other human being. Let alone these horrifying motherfuckers before us in 2015-16, or 2016-17, or 2017-18, until the end. What I mean is that these creatures are in some sense nothing more than a reflection of your own positive and favorable self-image. In micro-moments of honesty, anyone will tell you that they vote for this or that figure because they imagine that figure to be in agreement with their own private value system and political philosophy, and this is a simple, academic relationship. It's very basic psychological self-identification, which in theory wouldn't appear to be able to produce, on the whole, a sound democracy. You may even be voting for that simpering oval-faced cracker simply because he, like you, feels that Count Chocula breakfast cereal is the very best, above all other cereals, snacks, and pacifiers. Maybe that female would-be senator from Crackerton shares with you the only political position worth having: that evil niggers like Willie Horton oughtn't be raping white women. Maybe taxation is your most fiery obsession and about all other social issues you are satisfied not giving fucks or fondles. In so many cases of voting I sense that the primary issue is a kind of barely concealed, self-adoring self-reflexivity, an elevating of one's fetishes, hang-ups, and morbid and over-particular myopias to an imagined, grander visionary scale. Indeed, I sense something so dirty and seamy in the theoretical act of voting in modern systems, that I struggle even privately to articulate it, or describe its smell. But I know certainly that the stink comes from inveterate, almost biochemical pettiness in the hearts and minds of human beings. Tradition, jealousy, materialism, various psychic and sexual insecurities, and the interior narrative of power relations writ every size, etc. And perhaps far deep down, the pathetic and craven simian need for leaders, for chieftains, for physical bad-asses to protect the village and the water source and the imaginary harem of genetic right-of-way. How about a monsterful breakfast for the rest of your days. I am the candy-date that will give it to you and keep immigration and race-mixing to a reasonable limit.

But in the Clemens tradition, I won't allow myself to be more than briefly side-tracked with precision philosophy or nuance: we are talking about a very influential, space-age monkey species and we wish to be bound to the territory of generalities and broad historical conjecture, which is larded with proofs of how systems of Homo Sapiens governance are an elegant sham that have worked brilliantly to trick the governed into being shit-caked animals with a fat and bloated opinion of their so-called civilization, and their tinkering little role in its upkeep. This is certainly the specific case with the form of government in the United States of America, which is at the tip of the world hegemonic spear and reportedly the top of the heap of something. Now, it is reasonably well-proven that throughout its existence our species has enjoyed periods of actual, free self-rule and harmony among and between various herds and clans. People speak well of old Athens and the principles of some pre-colonial peoples the globe over, and the principles of political egalitarianism that have led to some of the modern republics with their highly mulled over and credentialed constitutions, and their generously recorded histories. Violent outbreaks of popular revolt against oppressive systems occur still and all through time in small, out-of-the-way pockets of empire, and some youths of the offending ruling class even support these struggles, in theory, from within their class rooms, and dance festivals, their drug-inflamed sex orgies, and term papers. Then there are the assorted smaller cadres of Europeans and aesthetic radicals who attempted to realize different utopian and socialist visions. But we are not in times of real "democracy" and active, utopian self-determination right now, when it comes down to It, which is just where we're at, and which state has caused the stench that disturbed you and caused you to recoil in your dreams and vague moments, if not when you were wide awake.

We have one very fresh and steamy example of the larcenous futility of the American political system and voting in it. We can be frank here, and hairy, and state it plainly: The younger Bush did not win the important presidential election of 2000, and perhaps even more clearly, lost his second assault on the Republic in 2004. These contests were manifest frauds, almost too wicked and insulting to consider without laughter or a deep, crippling disgust. Depending on one's views of the authenticity of the official Non-11 narrative, these election frauds may take on an even more troubling and ominous color. But every credible measure that has ever been made of these castor oil referendums ("You'll take it and not like it!") proves very simply that Bush was installed, or selected.

Put another way, the whole game was rigged, and we the participants were simply pulling levers that were attached to nothing, for proponents and opponents that are little fake front men for the more authentic and powerful players that have always lurked in the backdrop of it all. In spite of the sounds from the onanist echo chamber of media and mainstream punditry, "W" was not even a credible contestant, or intended to be. No amount of make-up or historical revision will clean up that imp's stinking low character or erase the stain of his blotched, madness-stricken face from the national lineage of Important Guys. A murderer of frogs and a crasher of bicycles, the blank-minded puppet priest chosen to preside haplessly over the satanic/dark masonic mega-ritual of Nein-11 he was, and nothing more. He is, for all time in his archetypal way, The Cipher and puppet executive, and unworthy of further remark here, where we are serious, except to say that his outright vileness and ineptitude was a cute additional insult above the weird piratical farce of those long-winded millennium rituals. The game was rigged. A cackling elf may as well have been perched inside the shambolic voting apparata and behind the corrupted touchscreen computers in your local demo-cracy zone, eating or wiping his ass with your ballots and digital selections. We all lined up to be summarily shot with silliness and trumpery, and were impatient when the line moved too slowly. We snorted and stamped and enjoyed our harsh divisions, but everyone knows how astonished we really were when the offensive idiot from the somewhat provenu CIA and banking dynasty scampered away for a second time with the presidency, and a victory over an obvious, fraternal patsy who now heads the state department and looks barely human because of ghastly plastic surgeries. If any of us recalls, the 2000 matter was ultimately settled by the Supremest Court in the Land. Their decision is infamous and it tells only a small part of the story. The dark alliance of Bribery and Coercion probably tells the rest. Indeed, some competent, informed researchers say money from the bottomless coffers of the Coca Cola Empire (a corporation well-known to be connected to the Central Intelligence Agency in the same way that Air America and The National Endowment for Democracy and USAID are) went towards this barrister-buying. The one dissenting opinion whispers volumes, if one were to read it, in a safe place.

And so we touch on the minds and most importantly the frail memories of our species. If we had memories to serve us, and not just televisions and pharmacologists, we would sense the repetitious Wrong of these patterns in the systems we consider so important. It's very clear that we are terminally forgetful, as a species; we have senile or child-like memories and deference to our superiors, which relation can replace the need for memories, learning, and knowledge. Servitude is always a form of helplessness, of complete dependence. But it is also swinishness and pathological egomania, in our case. We are now told that a new day has dawned and America swiftly redeemed itself from the Bush-League years by electing an Afro-American president. An actual negro in the white house, however diluted and brahminized the blackness might have been. So many good people leaped headlong into a blubbering fit of "liberal" optimism in 2008. And those who were dumb and bad, or at least dumb, howled bitterly and they cringed at the prospect of the ostensible tanned goodness of what appeared to be Obama, the near-complete reversal of Bush.

Altogether, the land was seduced and prodded into a kind of skin-deep and monochrome monomania, content to make the whole contest a tussle of shallow identity values, without bothering to judge the charade at large. We don't have memories or we would recall that this kind of evil outrage of being tricked on a titanic scale is nothing new. Historically, we are a nation whose role seems to be that of a garrison state, under remote control. Our principal purpose seems to be to make war for various forms of profit on behalf of a more elite grade of human being that does not recognize similac notions like sovereignty, human rights, nationalism or justice. This arrangement requires massive trickery and scientific brainwashing. It requires in a pendular fashion the exigent need to pull a brownish nigger from a silk top hat at the perfectest and most cynical time, following a nightmare of rule-by-Bush-and Company, or even to produce a Clinton after a Bush, but only in a time before the internet and the basic forms of competent research that thing affords. We must all join hands and admit that this wiser age of the internet could only be seduced and trickified by a State-baked Brownie like Obama, if we had first been professionally brainwashed by the eternal flickering horror-show of Non-11, which, to gild the obvious, was a show produced by the same hollywood-type outfit that then debuted Obama after his short life of finishing and painting up and being yanked fully formed from the head of the devil, somewhere between Hawaii and Indonesia and Columbia University. And I will race-mix and confuse all the metaphors I please right here, because for a little while, you see, I am in actual control. Telling you as it is, and not as it appears to be. I won that basically competent moron's right by publishing newspaper columns which refute the child's fiction known as the Non-11 Tragic Events. And by then pointing out in the same space that Paul Wellstone was probably murdered, thereby assassinating my own career in journalism.

Yea, we should remember, like good little sanctimonious lever-yankers who might retain some fondness for the truth and objective history-keeping, that our democracy has lately suffered murderous pangs of self-betrayal again and again, and resembles a failure totally hollowed out by greed and evil. There are state-assassinated presidents, congressmen, and moral leaders littering our recent past. There is the constant sacrilegious warfare by every means against other countries. All along the way, lies, jingoism, distortion, corrupted news media. We don't comprehend that 100 years is absolutely meaningless as an historic period of time, but significant in our case for its strange, homicidal, even cultural viciousness. So much evil, and sanctimony to cover it, in so little time. In our case, it seems our memories are so bad that we have no sense of time at all, or vice versa. Fifty years ago is 5 centuries, at least. We have Kennedy brains still spattered all over us and rotten material from the bodies of Lincoln and Wellstone stuck in our guts but we don't notice, or maybe we don't care. We are only good pigs and only wish to be fed routinely. For routine food distribution systems and a solid infrastructure, we will even sit down or suit up and submit to sadistic brainwashing, and go to endless, psychotic war. We're slyly trained with sports and video games and always, formally, by the military and by our secret husbands, and we hardly notice any of it. Games and Wars never stop, and they never have purpose, the funny things. But they both become more global and Greater, and more shiny with imagined virtues. They must be related somehow. They always have asses for the seats, meat for the kill, and grist for the mill. What right does meat on a hook have to vote for anything.

To get us constantly to forget requires some effort, you can imagine. I know you can. Because we are smart creatures and it is not simply a question of memory-loss here, but of trauma and coercion, too. In our case, the most effective expression of this effort, and maybe the only one worth talking about, besides football and Lady Gaga and all of televised or visual media, is the American public school system. I can't speak of private schools because I am from the lower classes. In those schools, they probably enjoy a different kind of scholarship, a different kind of education altogether, as they end up in very different neighborhoods, income brackets, and prisons. But in public schools I can tell you, we are ruthlessly taught to forget, and whipped if we remember. We are given harmless texts and a regimen that involves bells and a flag in every room except where we defecate. We are taught the obvious mysteries like Darwin and WWII, peace be upon it, and in these upsetting days we endure lots of testing that will determine our school's funding and the livelihood of our teachers. We are indeed very well-tested.

And we come out of these compulsory 13 years of training with a shabby and asinine view of the crucial subject of History, and apparently, also now, of the natural sciences, and math, and civics, and even basic, agreeable social training that for a time, about seven years, still held society together despite the advent of hand-held gadgets and compulsive internet masturbation. When I look back on the years of my primary and secondary education, the main impression I get is of the definite need for a tertiary one. We are not saying that the people there, my classmates and friends and fellows and instructors, were dumb or horrible, but that the specific school system itself, and its philosophy, were created by 19th-century Prussian Statists who worshiped centralized, fundamentally aristocratic power, and this system was selected and adopted by our Prussianic, freemasonic leaders for just this reason, because it regards us mainly as a form of chattel that can be brought into an ordered and reliable discipline. That is why we are lied to methodically and encouraged to feed or chant together in front of that mystery-school banner every morning, until the awful ritual isn't needed to help flatten our personal will, and we elect to refrain from standing and jabbering but still have the permanent tape-worm of obedience feeding in our stomachs. It is why we are force-fed such a fat catechism of lies. And obviously that's why our system has turned out this army of pitiless, vicious body and money-worshippers, these chemical-crazed sensualist hustlers who are stupid, vain and forgetful enough to call themselves "citizens." Usually even the finest and most honorable of us who graduate from high school to the voting booths are still just meat producers. We are tied to an economic system that is a murderous hoax and intended to crumble, and in our own political system we are meaningless and treated like babies with no understanding. Beyond our own private spiritual lives and our importance to our families and close communities, we are the lowest of pawns.

And then we have the universities, which we might hope would be that third and redeeming education, as we are hopeful and creative creatures, who anticipate the best as long as we get enough calories and the pump is thumping. The reality is far less wholesome. We make it to the end of another four to eight precious years of mandates and indoctrination and again receive square boards to put on our heads, and are granted our certificates, a ceremonial pronouncement of worth to society. Thus gripped by the ankle and smacked in the face, then flung to the unshackled bloodthirsty market, we can conclude that our universities have nothing to do with the universe and are in fact very much local, provincial institutions. They are so much more like your local cannery. The meat comes into the cannery and is put into tins, the tinned meat is then sent to market. As with caviar, there are different varieties and qualities of the canned matter, the best of which is produced and packaged in entirely different and mysterious buildings, and these wide varieties of flesh grant us all the illusions of choice and potential we desire. We have shining before us always the dreamlike possibility of advancement towards a higher grade of wastefully packaged slop. I don't know about you, patient word-reader, but fuck voting. It is the death cycle King of Insults to a dumb people who believe in Presidents and bin Ladens and possibly deserve them both. It's the modern Killing of the King ritual, expanded to the entire herd. Long live George W. Bush, Obama is King, Capital and material power are God.

Plea to the Lord, written in the eternal waiting room.

But what if i had wished great harm unto all the evil-doers i saw, and read about so often, and in my private time thought of their punishment and even a bit of their degradation? What if i never looked on politicians with anything but scorn and distrust? Or anything but confused admiration for those who were murdered right in front of our eyes over and over and called "assassinations" and "plane crashes?"

How will it turn out for me if my acts and works were chiefly of the idle and bread winning sort? If i muddled about and philosophized, and puttered along pursuing fleshy pleasures until i could no longer....will it matter that this was all supplemented by my deep feelings of remorse and sadness, and contempt for the predicted, prescribed, preordered and accepted state of things?

What if i did bad deeds, deeds known to be bad to me, and yet still prized the happiness and feelings of others as highly as my own, more than 98% of the time, probably? What if i was the rare bug calm enough and sweet to realize self and other were already in harmony---in harmony no matter what, despite the ignorance and shame and sorrow of our lives, despite the devilry and the strength of the lunatics and their dark masters whom you have let prevail over the earth since its beginnings, to test our mettle and weed out the faithless, in your high wisdom?

In Praise of godless Sorcerors

somebody must have hung out with
Charlie Parker on an off,
quiet night.
someone must have seen his beautiful,
bloated, wretched body
move about sloppily
with the magnetic grace of
drunken Hephaistus,
seen Bird when he felt
unwatched, and uncaged,
and wholly intoxicated.

they must have heard the beautiful words that came from his
keen alert mind.
He would have dazzled this person,
and they would have lapped up his company
like a draught of magic alcohol
they should never have
even approached drinking,
because that wine slept in the cellars
of the Gods,
waiting for a time when men could
handle it,
which still has not come.

i am listening to him now, on
the Strings records which
he reportedly said
were his best,
perhaps because they
enjoyed the possibility of big sales,
being on Verve records at his height,
especially with a little pushing
of his.
it is fine music, yes. but who the fuck
needs strings
when they are singing like God
through a bent and buttoncovered
piece of metal

No Need for titles or riches

oh god i need a starlet
with an angular jaw who
flares her eyes and nostrils
when i look at her and
puffs her swollen scarlet lips
poutingly and affectedly just so,
just for me.

make her the slinkiest that i've ever seen.
when she descends stairs i want to
see stars, and handsprings.
make sure she scorches the earth with her
stamping, privileged boots.
let's have a vital lass with vim brimming up over her stylish collars
and sexy footwear,
and a...primary erogenous zone that weeps
at the thought of me,
needing it as much as Man does.
we need her to be sentimental too,
and to have traveled to Europe,
and even studied there a bit.
bring her to me one night in a chance alleyway,
when the moon is pregnant
with hardcore mating potential,
when it's unlikely we could resist each other,
or bring her along by a crowded, swanky bar
with good lighting,
and have her proffer me a stiff drink of
it all,
and a lewd offer to leave with her immediately.
it's not essential that we rut on the first date
like dirty feral lovepigs
but it is fine.

i know that she may want something
like a star-caliber A-list celeb
with a car and free plane tickets
and a full head of hair...
but it only matters
that she fall for me
and my tender trickery.

chi hua hua Tartar

young Mr. Lakiavitis
thought he would end it all around noon
on January 2.
the first of the year had been too inauspicious,
and there was the important matter of
waiting to see whether he would be evicted or not,
and his lawyer, Mr. Small,
would have to be contacted
for this determination.

but otherwise his plan
was to fling himself
from his 9th-floor rent-controlled apartment
which his parents owned,
in the building
where he was known
as the withdrawn young man
never without headphones,
into the frigid Manhattan street below.

New York city had received
almost two feet of icy blizzard over the holidays,
and many of its services were
as paralyzed and incapable
as the despairing
mind of Mr. Lakiavitis.

so that when he screwed himself up
to the herculean task of self-defenestration,
his long liberating plunge to the frozen street below,
to escape all the
confusion and humiliation and disappointment
he had known
in his brief city-bound 26 years,
ended with what could have only been
an anticlimactic sound of busting rubbish
and air escaping from many stuffed trash-bags.
Refuse sacks piled high on snow drifts
all over the city
and neglected by the sanitation department for days,
prevented him from escaping
his life's bleak, sullen, dirty anguish.

but he was able to break his back
and develop further financial ruin.
Hello, cruel world,
he may have muttered,
as he waited for the ambulance.