What a glorious day to be alive

When the drugs wear off
and the dopamine’s low
That’s when the angels swoop in
With their swords of vengeance
And arrows of self-doubt.
On another crusade to make you feel bad
About yourself.

As if they represented the good in life
For they are the murderous zealots
armed with a history of judgmental patriarchy
They represent the holy atrocity
Responsible for some many deaths
And so much derision
And they come in the guise of self-recrimination

But when the sun shines
while the birds sing their hopeful song.
You are reminded that life is still lived.
There is a sublime satisfaction in self actuation
Where you tell the angels to fuck right off
For they hold no dominion over you.

You see them for what they are.
Fables. Lies. Stories used to explain hallucinations.
The drugs have allowed you to see them for what they really are.

When you can wake up on those days
And realize you lived by your own moral code
When you did right by everyone
And harmed no one
Or at least minimized
your impact to unintentional antipathies

When you kicked off the safety
And turned the gun of temporary madness
Back upon yourself.
You reveal your truest self.

That’s when you can stand toe to toe
Wing to wing
With Gabriel and his kind.

Hey, Fuck Up

I am talking to you, reader, author, everyone alike.
And I don’t mean that in the drunken uncle sort of way.
It’s not that same Budweiser tone
Shouted from a vinyl arm chair
Submerged in a leaky kiddie pool

I mean the collect we. The special fuckup.
Ever notice that? “Species”, “Special”
We the people who evidently fuck up.
Why are we like this?

Why do we act the way we do?
Why do we practice anonymous violence?
Cling to outdated and exclusionary ideologies
Try so hard to make everyone else different

It’s not the homeless woman
Trying to score whatever necessity makes this life bearable.
It’s not the trans boy or girl or non-binary
or whatever combination of forces and factors they are
It’s not the downtrodden, the lame, the destitute,
The unwell, the insane, the malfunctioning or the
dysfunctional.

It’s the rich people.
It’s the ones with the money and the power and the say and the platform
And the means and the privilege and the education and the connection
And the alma mater and the 401k and the trust fund
And the summer house.

It’s them.
They’re the fuck-ups.
But so are we.
We let them do it.
Hey, fuck up.
I’m talking to you.

Stop

“Stop fucking up,”
We say collectively
to ourselves.

It’s one part indictment
One part affirmation
and all a bit unconvincing.

Three wisteria bushes jut from a hunk of basalt
Marking the grave of someone so important
No one remembers how to spell their name.

Why do we even want to be remembered?
The age of Cadillacs has come and gone.
We’re always a step too late.

If everything is imitation,
why do I claw at the roots of my ancestors
Digging for deeper understanding?

Only two wisteria remain -
Lightning struck one and transformed it into charcoal
Suitable for a cave painting.

“Stop fucking up,”
We cry to the heavens
to no avail.

They are the good time gals.
They are the women who make the world,
Who come in many forms,
Who cross all boundaries,
And struggle against stacked odds.

They are mothers born and goddesses chosen:
Some warriors, some healers,
Some brutal, some savage,
Some kind, some rude

• All equal.

This is an ode to the feminine form
in all its guises,
To the women who made my world.
Not all of them birthed me
But all shaped me
All equally,

Equally beautiful
Equally monstrous
Equally stormy
Equally righteous

Some were a passing light
Flittering across smokey windows
Some were lingering lanterns
Guiding the way down twisting corridors
Some were pragmatic nurses
Closing the dead eyes of fathers.

They are the good time gals
The women who remake this world
Who propelled us as a species
And might help us tear it all down.

Forty Two Poems

No reason, no real rhyme
Just attempts to encapsulate
Little vignettes, bubbles of time.
Gaseous things.

Some quirky, some foul
Some droll, some stupid.
You know, poems about life.

They say right what you know
And I really know a good cosmic fart joke
And the pointlessness of worry

Forty two songs about things falling apart
Cosmic order that, the arrow of time
Ever to that great Entropic goddess
Singing that eternal knell

The music of the spheres
My cosmic ass to your celestial ear
The heavens sing
With forty two explosions of the gut.

Creator of Worlds

You make art.
You summon emotion from a featureless plane.
Your slender hands guide indelible ichor.
through unforgiving curves
Where perspective means everything
And assumptions nothing.

A picture is worth a thousand poems
Regardless of the brevity of the imagery
I can describe a hand with allusions and allegory
But you start with a base of originality
You can sketch a hand that people can see
The same way we all see hands.
You can stipple in textures
Showing the callousness of over worked fingers.

We needed to focus.
We had been divided
but, you showed us the way.
You showed us
what it really means
to be a senator.

You gave us a bad guy.
Showed us the heart of darkness.
Gave us a villain worthy of Hollywood.

After all, we love our action movies.
We like nice clean cut stories.
We needed someone really evil.
To really unite this country.

Lean into it, man.
Start wearing black,
practice your throaty voice
and your death grip.

You already got the backstory
You killed enough kids
Destroyed enough homes
Stood idly by
as the apocalypse kicked up

Redirect tax payer dollars
Fund you final opus.
It needs to stand with the greats.
You got to out pageant Nuremberg
You got to cross swords than Saddam.
You got to unhorse Putin.
We need a fitting backdrop
For a dramatic conclusion.

Make sure your statue
is taller than your ancestors.
Build it big and tall!
Make sure we need all of us
to pull it down into the dirt.

If you plot populations throughout history
Counting back from now to antiquity
You may notice a startling asymmetry
when charting our ironic morbidity

Graphs place you in the top percentile
When nations crumble as eyes turn docile
When we huddled massive must now reconcile
Maybe our ancestors went out in style

Would you rather be born in ages agrarian
Oppressed by noble contrarians
Or struggle with classes proletarian
Who have proved just as totalitarian

Be born in a time in famine and fable
And lucky enough to make it past the cradle
Or be destroyed by technologies most fatal
When

Odds are you were born in that moment
When populations had an exponent
As centigrade rose and coastlines floated
And when everything simply exploded.

It was a numbers game in the conclusion
Be you humanitarian or Malthusian
The rare peasant died young in delusion
But a majority went out in collusion.

So much depends on a used bowflex,
glazed with fresh tears,
besides the two people fucking.

I’m Out

Fuck it, I’m out.
It’s gotten to that point where the rat’s got to swim.
You all seem so intent on looking out for that prime number
The one that doesn’t divide very well.
The one that always equals itself when everything is square.
It’s time I took the goddamn hint.

This isn’t my country anymore.
If it ever was, it was because I was blind and deluded.
Suckered into a mass hysteria dream
Where we are all convinced we could do better.
When we stood firm on the ground with reason.

No, that’s just a trick.
We’ve never evolved much past our tree swinging days
Take that both ways
One’s a religion and the other’s a state.
Weren’t the pillar and the rock supposed to be
Dare I say it -
Separate but equal?

What for?
I paid my dues, said my pledges and did my time.
All it got was me was high enough
To see just how it operates.
I served, learned, lived,
breathed, marched, swore,
defended, amended, rear-ended,
contrited,
delighted,
ignited.

That’s bit is supposed to look like a torn flag
Clever?
Cleverer than a constitution.
Cleverer than a highly cherished societal rule.
A hummurabi’s code of our generational search for justice.
Where laws are just bad memories.
Callous exclusion of little details.
The poor, the disdvantaged, the infirm, the broken
the callous, the jaded, the hated, US.

That part looks like nothing.
It’s pure slight of hand.
An optical trick to simulate depth.

Can we call ourselves civilized?
When so much goes wrong
When so many really fucking suffer.
It seems kinda broken.
All around us jagged and burnt out doll houses.
Each of us coming to terms
with awakeing from that same mass hysteria dream.
A collective consciousness,
deigned and designed
to enforce its enrollment.
A controlling custom of cutscene contraptions.

What if we got it all wrong, folks?
What if we actually invented the devil.
We built a machine and system so broken
That it tailors our own personal unhappily ever after.
Full of everything wrong with the world.

We fight for our happiness.
We look for a deeper meaning in the words and the songs.
But it might be time to forget all that.
To put away childish things
And to remember
what’s important.

And to remember
That the only alternative is.
A collective and chorused,
“fuck it, I’m out.”