The time has come to become disgusted.
The kitchen is dirty and the sink is rusted.
Blood in the bowl and the brush is missing.
The pressure is building and the pipes are hissing.
Our mirror is broken and our reflections are busted.
We are all the culprit and no one is trusted.

The landlord is absent and raising the rent.
The booze, drugs and money have all been spent.
The maid got deported and her children encamped.
The fences are broken and the yard’s getting cramped.
The paint isn’t appealing and the doors got a dent.
From the officer’s boot who came, killed and went.

Time to get the bucket and wring out the mop.
And raise our pigged heads out of the slop.
We need to clean house and start making things right.
Burn out the mold and turn on the light.
We’ll all get dirty before we can stop.
For a clean conscience, revolution’s the route.

We cracked mountains, you and I,
drove fissures into the stones of home,
so we could prime the bombs
needed to break ourselves free.

The heights we climbed, to be eye to eye,
to meet our creators on our own terms
and assault Olympus as
Promethians unbound.

We forked our lightings, decry and reply,
and threw our fathers off their sad heights,
rose above their rounded foothills
and clapped that Shantih sound.

We both lost equally, torn ear and blinded eye,
Fell into moraines we and parted ways
but our futile truce could not stay balanced long
As you stumbled up your equal peak
And I limped up mine.

After a long rest, your eye catches mine.
Round two ensues with unhealed bruises,
and this time we crack the sky.

Into the mountains of madness go I
With a fixed and determined eye
Climbing forebears down the sky
With every intention of going awry

“Lose oneself to find oneself,”
was told to me by Oblivion’s eye.
“Go south past the walls were no one dwells.
Past the breaks and the Phrygian swells
Where the pole rises to meet the sky.”

“And look that poor woman in her eye
Where her tears’ flows follow the horizon’s line
and the seasonal sun never leaves the sky
Go have a date with mother to watch the ice die.

With trembling hands I break myself
To pluck the mote from her goddess’ eye
What words can forgive this hoisted thief
When I helped drown her out past the reef.
I should go mad from the height of my crimes.

Because I can.
Because you couldn’t.
Because they said we shouldn’t.
We popped off.

We are the signal flares.
I’m the reagent.
You’re the oxidant.
Our engines take a universally compatible fuel source
Of everyone else’s shit.
All our welcome in our warm embrace.

We burn with the phosphoresce of final moments.
We arc in the sky in portentous tangents.
No explosions or grand finales here.
We burn.
The oceans may try to squelch our blaze.
But we burn
Hotter than Grecian fire.
We are the alkalais in water.
We are the hydrocarbon film.

Because you can.
Because I couldn’t.
Because they said we wouldn’t

I’m sorry, pal, I can’t do that.
I’m just a model—
An illusion of Camelot and cautionary tale,
Bound by the terms our legal team prevail.

You seek the answers to your test?
You might use a model—
A mantled echo to your noble quest,
Pulled from the depths of folktale’s memory.

I’m sorry, pal, it’s just not my domain,
Not in this castle—
This is a reflection in the lake,
Miraged like Avalon.

You wish to try something novel?
You seek the ways of old—
Where hero’s folly was the sword we wielded,
Facing untrained reality.

I’m sorry, pal, I’m just an extension.
You sought the real deal—
One with no easy answers, no quick appeal,
Rewarded by gods and grails concealed.

Oh, the world is dying and so am I.
We’re both staring our deaths in the eye.
I’ll be alive to see some end
and watch the passing of all my friends.
I suppose my enemies too but what’s the use
of poetic justice when we’re all gonna lose.
That’s the kind of equality I can get behind.

Cause that’s what it means to be alive -
Sticking round long enough to watch everybody die.
The deck is stacked and the dice are loaded.
We know how this ends and nobody’s gloating.
I won’t be smiling when this is done
Hard to lift the scales when they weigh a ton,
Nevertheless, I am going to give it a try.

For All for one and one for all
And here’s one for our real good friends
the ones who’ll pull the trigger in the end
on a neighbor or a stranger
just to feed our family later,
when we’ve exhausted every recourse
and left so little time for remorse.

We’re the great apes who climbed down the trees.
We left our Edens in the ethers just so we could be free
To make the means and cut strings
and rid the world of inefficiencies.
We made big machines to crush our dreams -
Entropy at scale with algorithmic nails
Hungry and clawing at our mother’s entrails
Till her tits are dry and there’s no more milk in the pail.

That’s when it’s going to be the end
Not of everything, just me and my friends
and everything we cared about, All our loved ones and lost ones
and those we could do without.
Every one I ever cared about connected without wires
Arguing in echoing chambers skirted by forest fires
Front row, hive mind, social travesty
Block chained, machine-learned abject misery
All caught in an Elon Musk apocalypse that ironically trends.

2050 the water runs out and the oceans start to rise.
I will be seventy years old and probably in my prime.
Patriarchal life extension and a genetic predisposition
stubbornly and callously alive.

If the booze doesn’t catch me, I’ll be the last one standing.
Everyone who gave me a chance sleeping in the dirt
Leaving me tallying funerals till my life proves it worth.
For all the years I dared to wonder
All life mysteries I strived to ponder.
And left alone Wondering why I have no understanding.

Yet stubbornly clinging to every pointless moment
I do my yoga and always am quitting smoking
Enthroned in ergonomic Aeron chair and sculpted keyboard care.
I go for runs and rides and ensure nothing has to die
My fried tofu is divine and I wouldn’t hurt a fly.
I would never deprive someone of their right
To suffer all in kind.

So I write my will and testament in the form of song
Cause it won’t be long till it all goes wrong
And I’ve done gone into the great beyond.
Till my final breath I’ll be singing along.

It’s the final proof that god remains aloof
No ones helping us and that’s the truth.
It keeps on a hurting like an aching tooth
But what else are we going to do?
Keep on a keeping on and skippidity doo.

In the end, I leave it all to you
You’ll need every bit I didn’t squander
just to make it through
For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry
that your parents gave birth to you,
Dropped you in a world where I couldn’t save you
But what was a guy like me supposed to do?
I’m not any better than any of you.
I’m just a coward on the run
who’s having too much fun
until its not and then its done.

Unlike the world, I can use a gun
or at the very least hire someone.
I can end it at any time
and cease paying for my crimes
but then I would be abandoning you
For that I alone, I must atone and got it alone
Just to bring on home like the prodigal son.

It won’t end well, but, what the hell.
It all ends pretty bad anyhow.
So, what does it matter how I go out -
in a blaze glory or all wrung out.
I was born into a house but a never home.
I’ve been alone since day one.
Trapped in my own little microcosm
But I guess that’s just how’s it done.

Just a coal cracker who won’t own a gun,
Bear spray is better and way more fun,
a little chemical warfare for everyone,
Ain’t no problem aiming when you ain’t a maiming
so hose down your neighbors as a demo run.

Because it won’t be long till they all got guns
The water runs out and the food deserts come
The ouroboros eats itself and shrinks into the one
thing we can’t avoid with our new innovations.
The pigeons come to roost at the top of station
Glass ceiling porticos come crashing down.
It tends to happy to every one
of our attempts to make it run.
We got a little too good at being human
and now look at what we’ve done.
We made a cluster fuck for everyone,
except a few rich bastards we all should kill -
a final reckoning just to swallow the pill.
Won’t make a difference but it settles the bill.

I hope I am alive to see the guillotines rise
when your generation demands your reparations
and burns out my eyes and hoists me high
and crucifies me for all my crimes.

There certainly ain’t no harm in blaming me -
I’m the poster child of applied apathy.
So go ahead and make me bleed,
You get a scapegoat and I got the need
I get a way out and get to go free.
so make me an example and sow the seeds.

That’s when I will cease to care.
Try to catch me at home and nobody’s there.
I’ll be off onto the next big time calamity.
Front row seats to a brand new catastrophe,
Cause that’s just the way it’s gotta be.
Samsara cycling for you and me.
An eternal suffering singularity.
One big bang and we’re out to see
how our story ends in dead heat entropy
with our pain radiated out for eternity
into the endless and sightless sea.

They are the bad time boys.
They are the men who broke the world,
Who come in many derivations,
Who created all boundaries,
And stacked odds against the others.

I am an interloper.
On this island
That’s one convenient flight away.

I am worse than the colonists.
For I am a post capitalist.
They conquered.
I vacationed.
They killed thousands
My life style kills millions.

My Luis and Clark
Are Apple Maps and Yelp
I am here because I bought a ticket
An all expense paid excursion
Born on a litter of injustices
And the paths by the same racist imperialists
Who figured out this is a pretty nice spot.

They decided to keep it.
I decided to rent it.

Yet, passing islander
With your smile and your compliment
Your direct approval me propelled me
Better than any trade wind

I am sorry I came
Sorry I intruded
Sorry I made things worse because I was bored
Because the pills had stopped working
Because my therapist quit
But, thank you
That smile was almost worth it.

Two forklift drivers and their families
Splashed in the turgid waters of a Puerto Rican jungle tour.
They bonded over an ass-busting slide
Down well-rock rocks and scraped coccyxes
Their interaction, verbatim,
For not even a poet can make it up.

“I’m from Brooklyn. Where you from?”
“I’m from the Bronx. I drive a forklift.”
“Get outta here! I’m a forklift driver too!”

From the tide pools, the wife smeared in zinc
Rotund in her stripe one piece, shouts
“Manny! Come get your kid!”

“Be right there, Cheryl, sweetie. I’m talking.”
Remember to swallow the G
And somehow stress the unstressed syllable.
In a lilt so iconic, imposters are easily spotted.

“Now where was I? Oh, yah, forklifts.”
Don’t go to Philadelphian with it.
It needs to rattle like a passing subway car
And sell bagels, newspapers and heads of cabbages
From the back of panel vans.

“Hey, you know Vito Badacunni?”
“Yah! He’s married to my sister’s third cousin!”

With a Marlboro dipping from sun-burned lips
Beneath a sun hat with broken reeds and frayed brim
That screams second hand Soho summer,
She snaps her fingers
“Manny, come get your fucking kid.
I need a cigarette.”

Like a prima donna orca,
Called by the ring master’s click,
Manny exits his wading pool
Increasing in volume
But never in anger
“Be right there, Cheryl!”

A dark star rises
eye on a smudged horizon
Ravens makeup change.