Poetry: Dick pills

ceaseless ads for dick pills

spill out of this plastic box

every moment of every day

telling me that my performance is weak

like I'm a fucking sports car or something

always hard

always happy

that's the american dream

isn't it?

forcing the cholesterol wash down hard paths

through a heart that stopped beating

years ago

into the tip of a phallus that doesn't know when to stop

we are an erection that's running out of things to fuck

but we can't stop jamming these pills down our throats

swallowing anything to keep our dicks hard

washing it all down with buckets of chemicals

splashdown in the liquor sea

bubbling up antacid clouds

through the antibiotic antidepressant antianxiety bitches brew

strung out eyes follow the hookers of the world

working girls won't even look us in the eye any more

they've seen the raw and bleeding sunrise

at the end of the oil and cocaine fueled nights

and they know we're not paying nearly enough

to make them put up with our shit

and our promises

and our lies

lazy and soaked in gasoline

barely seeing the outline of the street

we stumble still looking for a cheap hotel

and getting turned out of the doors

doesn't stop us

laughing when our friends tell us

you're gonna die young

forcing each breath through a cloud of tobacco

and exhaust fumes

fuck you man

I'm gonna die hard

and I'm gonna die happy

Poetry: City Life

the fumes this city exhales into my face
every morning
are starting to eat at my mask

and the trash of 200 years piled up around me
is a constant reminder that we can never throw anything
far enough away

it's a thin film over every romance
every half-assed attempt at significance
we pass our fingers over every summer

sometimes i think we're not even fooling ourselves
rotting as we are along with the detritus of our ancestors
sitting here next to the mountain of pbr cans
in the foggy reminders of late night laughter

i know i can smell it between your breasts
the city life is there
beating between the wings of two bluebirds
as fierce as your mouth on mine
fighting to reach the sky through the clouds of exhaust

are we any different?
fighting through the street traffic
tweeting viciously at the gray dawn light
and fighting each other
for crumbs
in front of another corporate coffee hole

the ghosts with their skim lattes
don't see me any differently any how
i'm just part of the scenery

another bird on another breast
digging through the trash heap
of civilizations past

wearing each treasure
like a discarded mask

Poetry: I am not your lover

I bet you thought you had a lover then

the two of us snuggled up against the teat of military spending

sucking down the milk of suffering and death

Until I took off all my clothes

and my teeth started coming out of the walls

Until my skin started wearing too thin

and the wool over my eyes evaporated

in a burst of flames

I almost let it slide this time

I almost believed in it all

that the shiny new toys of the 21st century could make me happy

that a cage so gilded, so covered with flashing lights

could ever contain a wolf

that any man would ever be happy in his golden shackles

that the tiny rebellion

of an iPod full of punk rock

will sing my soul to sleep

or make me shut my fucking mouth

I have been bleeding my soul onto Interstate 95 too long

I send these white blood cells up the concrete

riding on waves of cancerous clouds

the irony of this does not escape me

that this system needs it's repairs so bad that it will sacrifice anything

to keep it moving

I am wired into this sleepless monolith

of recorded conversations and cost-benefit analyses

that never looks at the costs in anything other than dollars

information never takes a break to watch the sunset

24 hour caffeine buzz burns mindless droning sounds

across the wires that replace the trees

I can almost fall asleep

I can sometimes ignore the pain

of this wire jammed up my ass

but as ashamed as I'm told to be

about my anger

that no evolved man is angry

That we talk about our feelings

and we work it out

I can't let it go

There are words burned a thousand feet tall in my heart

YOUR ANGER IS A GIFT

YOUR ANGER IS A GIFT

YOUR ANGER IS A GIFT

And I am not your fucking lover.

Rant: Private speech

We spend a lot of time in shopping malls. That's where this whole thing began for me. Working at the Tower at Willow Lawn I'd interact with hundreds of other Richmonders and area residents every day and at the same time was going through a huge political and social awakening. What does any other moon eyed 20 year old with his first Noam Chomsky book want? An audience. The more I looked into the legalities of distributing literature and engaging public discourse the more disillusioned I became. You can't. This is private property and we determine what goes on here. Private property laws backed up with police paid extra to spend there time off enforcing mall rules. It's a wonderful system full of controls and carefully worded things. The real problem here is that our public areas have been almost completely privatized. All that's left is for our park systems to be sold off to the highest bidder and the mind-fuck is complete. Looks like all we have left is the Intertubes.

But the tubes are threatened at every turn. They are a series of interconnected privately held networks mind you. People treat Myspace like it's theirs, like they own what's going on there. Legitimate right? Owned by News Corp, the fine folks who control Fox News and a big ass chunk of global newspapers. Our ISPs, our blog posts, our digitized thoughts, our entire fictional identities are owned by hedge funds, investment groups and shareholders. So where is the impetus to allow free discourse? Why should any individual fight for the right of someone else to hold a belief they don't agree with? Especially when it's their money on the line. Who's talking about the loss of something just as precious? Our right to talk to one another.

The free exchange of ideas and information have a few safe places. Some colleges provide such a place for discussion and for that I am intensely grateful. What happens when you don't have the money for college? Where do you go then to learn what there is to be learned, to hear out your fellow citizens? Well damn, is that even a value in this society? I don't really run in to too many people who'd like to actually have public discourse so maybe the shape of the world just fits what people really want. But there are safe havens, bookstores and coffee shops mostly. We rely entirely on the effort of brave individuals who dedicate their lives to providing such places, both here on the web and in real life. It just makes me sad to think that the vast majority of our culture will never walk through the door of a local coffee shop, get a cup, sit down and find out how someone else lives.

So what can we do about it? Should we really do anything? When it comes down to it, it's up to the people who make up a society to determine the rules by which they live. I think Americans tend to forget that. Laws that have been around long enough start to seem like truth, like they are a permanent part of our world and they've always been there. The fear of authority runs deep, and we're taught it quite well. It's up to each of us to fight for our rights in every moment. The freedom of speech is not granted to us, we take it, we keep it alive. It is eroded every day we do not speak out against it's slow legislative demise, every time we tolerate the silencing of dissenting opinion, every time we allow a journalist to be beaten and imprisoned and every time we brow beat another person for not agreeing with us.

The walls between us get thicker every day, there is always one more reason to not engage a stranger in conversation. There are enough ists and isms out there to keep every ones nose in the air and their opinions to themselves, enough fear floating through our collective unconscious to keep us huddled in our comforting illusions and reruns. I say be brave, talk to strangers. Find out how someone else gets down. But remember, don't talk down to people, never think you are superior and leave people alone if they start getting agitated. Most of all, don't be a dick.