Iraq

Whatever happens in Iraq, the Bush cartel will easily spin it in their favor. If somehow Iraq actually acheives something that resembles democracy, it will be said to be a total vindication of the imperialist landgrab as halliburton cleans up on reconstruction and america's "enduring bases" continue to rise up all over the desert. If it turns into the taliban does babylon, which seems the only sensible projection, then the Iraq people will have fucked it up themselves. "Our brave soldiers sacrificed to bring them freedom (at the low low price of 100,000 dead and a totally shattered infrastructure) but they're just not ready, poor ragheads. They won't accept the gift."

Faithful and Dangerous

Some people don't like the idea that religion is dangerous. They'll say, religion doesn't kill people, people kill people. You can't blame the spanish inquisition on religion, it's bad people who did that. But what about those PEOPLE who tortured "sinners" in the name of God.? They knew for a fact that people who disobeyed the dour man in the sky would suffer beyond comprehension in hell when they died. So what could they do but torture the sinner in the hopes that this extreme duress would compell the soul to confess? Or something. A moral obligation for a humanitarian of integrity. Not a very well thought out idea, but also not a suprising conclusion for a "man of faith" to reach in that situation. Christians created the ideas that would allow normal people to behave like deranged psychopaths. The logical conclusion of hardline christian premises end in the thumbscrew and the rack.

Maybe religion is dangerous. Christianity anyway. Or maybe it's just organized religion that is problematic. Organized religion - organized crime. Is there a difference? Of course, there's always a few people every year who go on a killing rampage because their private spirit/devil told them to. You don't have to be organized to be lethally deluded. But you do have to be organized to pull off the spanish inquistion. Or convince a townful of folks to burn a witch. Or topple the government of a middle eatern country. You'd have to be very crafty to get that done.

But people who say religion should be banned are way out to lunch. Next they'll be telling us we need to ban drugs too. Imagine!

Mold

Thanks for shopping at Fuck Your Town. Nice to see you back, brainscraped on aisle 43 with no synonyms left for the intangible tumour that swells in your system, suffocates you slowly. Scanners indicate you’ve still got thirty canadian dollars in your pocket. Pick up Snark the DVD on your way out, it'll leave you with some laughs and malnutrition, Southparkian substance, flabby anarchy.

Really, who wants ideology? It's uncool, punchline of politique's self-parody, passé. Reality's what you can get away with, so let the adbuster platitudes play out, smearing into meaningless streaks as the mindshield wipers work hydraulic magic, sufficiently advanced technology.

Your petals of prose that bloomed like a rose now droop over with cancer death, cobalt sixty side-effect, decayed gray progeny of the human distillation, dissolved in the tincture of civilization. Urban weed in gutterbird ecology, organic solvent resolved, pet ether with a pet purpose for a pet shop, interior carbon-dioxide cow. Feed the machine, snap-to-grid like ivy climbing the concrete cube. Laugh at the hazy glow of inner-light lunatics if you can find those soap-crate crazies anymore. They’re not in the DVD extras.

Streetcorner Bill, Bill of the Will still bumbles around in the mud, stumbling bodhisattva bum, blubbering pompous Dionysian poetry, unafraid to be cliché and wearing trite splendor like an old hat as you stare into the sun of a Strauss crescendo, vintage Clarke transcendence. They served Hofmann's Elixir strong in 1968 and visions never topped 2001 in human mythology, Nietzsche benighted and benign for cinema, also sprach the VALIS fool. People who fiddle with their heads too long eventually come to believe they can get gnosis from a pink laser beam but there's no science behind it. Just the point they arrive at eventually, portal to the padded cell, full circle, white-walled nursery to white-walled comatorium, still an alien abduction.

Put down the nostalgia needle and keep your eyes on the road. 2001's in the rear view mirror and Apollo’s old hat. Not only has third millennial man walked on the moon, he's circumvented the man's record-industry monopoly to download digital music for free. A bold future chimp, are you sure you can handle it? The epic responsibility, making hedonic history? Today, Napster, tomorrow, Alpha Centauri? You're not going to pay for Metallica tunes and nobody's going to pay for your education, not that you want to invest in your own brain anyway, what could you ever train that lazy traitor to do? Thinking is about all the silly sod can manage, in feedback loops returning to the ideological end of the cycle, ideological music and art, directing your arabesques of inspiration into profane political kabuki choreography, self perpetuating like a wormy parasite for pragmatic concerns, like slimy survival mechanisms, like you've gotten with the winning team even if you won't attend the pep rallies. So take cover under the missile shield even if it's full of holes and thanks for shopping at Fuck Your Town.

Nice to see you back again. Footsteps fail to reverb recycled air, it’s thick with supplement, over-correction, you can’t hear yourself, can’t see yourself in anything but trick mirrors that accentuate new threads, Nike brands over the void because you've exhausted your metaphors for sloth and gluttony. The zen of shopping is the finger pointing at the bargain bin. Buddy, you're in the bin now. Beyond Zen with a capital Z, sizzling over the bacon fat horizon, outside the audible range of roasting cattle. Meat still has purpose, nevermind the metaphorical junkyard.

But you cannot petition the market with prayer. See the contours of an elegant system swirl into spirals of no alternatives, progress from feudal kingdoms to industrial revolution. Live in layers of cages for sanitary transactions, sanity, civility, except when it conflicts with your fix. Your fix is wanted, needed, good for business, trade, commerce, fits into the mold, another potato chip split in fifty sub-flavors, explore the possibilities as they explode into fractal subsets of MSG-frosted snack-bliss.

Personable pattern emerges from the natural paisley landscape, a hand reaches out from a sleeve. It's Mr. Pattern, Your Royal Representative, R. KS, Republican. He wants to shake your hand and you want to take it, feel the power pulse through the skin. You never thought you’d swoon for this cheap rush but then, you never thought you'd put on a KRPM radio shirt for the jumbotron when they whisked you out of the crowd and told you they'd upgrade your seat for a brief endorsement. They didn't call it whore class, Mr. High Class Whore, they called it the bling ring bleachers with high per-capita celebrities. And when you got there the smell of money was dizzying, the rush rich like a conqueror’s spoils. So you told the crowd you listened to the station. You never looked back.

You can hedge your bets by voting for the electable candidate as you indulge in your activist tantrums but you know the politician is paisley. They're all paisley, cut from the same cloth, the ornate pattern we putter around in ourselves at the fringes with our petty power trips, base pyramid games, selling life insurance. The paisley is political, just like you. You can't stay mad at paisley. R. Kansas will fight for you, get you a better deal at the bargaining table for you are of his constituency. He deals with the pirates so you don’t have to, he’ll lower your bracket’s tax two points, maybe three. What will this cost you? Only a double digit cut for the top tiers in tandem, a reasonable ratio for the 10x elite. Mutual prosperity, see? Spend your new money, Snark 2 is out on DVD. Luxuriate in the frills.

And the hand that reaches for your own seeks out the mark of the mark, branded, bought-and-sold, beckoning you to an Italian Dinner. Are you pumped up? You've been bumped up to manage the middle, the middle management, where pasta’s spiced with pesto and the cars are roomier. No need to connote negatively and badmouth the Utilitarian Mafia. The Waste Management Mob’s running the country like a business, taking out the trash.

Paisley, paisley, life is such beauty dear gods in the pattern but why the spikes? Why red in tooth and claw, is the negativity necessary and natural? Why the comparisons to piracy, why the feeling of being taken and inability to reconcile clinging half-heartedly to moving middle class goalposts? You loved the Jetsons but now it's time to jettison utopian dreams you gobbled up like candy - should have stuck to wholesome cereal kiddie. But oatmeal can’t compete with fruit roll-ups.

Emergency sell-out kit behind door number two’s guarded by a three-card-monte submarine shark. Trident missiles are for high stakes empire games, asymmetrical warfare. They'll let you eat cake and drink coke, your one concession to the sweet taste of material, brain tonic. Crack is for hard cores, a druggie's drug, omega, and you're too alpha male to think of the end. So thank you for shopping at Made in China, your reactionary patriotism is adorable, civic pride so last millennium, retro culture kitsch.

The DEA's got your town jittery, poor paranoid peons watching the sky for chem trails, mind-altering shit from the CIA, man, triggering acid flashbacks left and right, the hippie’s achilles’ heel. You are peaceful and you have no weapons but they’ll still plant the rebel base on you.

Some poets would like to think the rebel base is in their coffee cups, paradoxically thermophilicly thriving in the sweltering vitriol of poetic presumption, that inspiring righteous fire fuzzed so well by the shifting enemy and banality of evil. Fractal artistic defiance makes all confining conventions blasphemy, the outer light is for lamers, if you haven't got the internal torch aflame get with the program, Kootenay über Alles.

To be fair, fair trade is a fair start. But my boycott's bigger than your boycott - oh the vanity. Let them drink coke but hype the organic alternative. The hippie mafia is novel at least, support your co-op middlemen, it beats taking orders from Sicily. Small fish tycoons could argue they make Kootenaystan the paradise it is, and if you aren't in paradise you haven't smoked your entire ration of nirvana manna yet, the herbal staple. You won't blend in with the weed and fungi economy but it's okay. You're just a goblin in Hobbiton, a troll in an enchanted valley, and if you want to practice black magic go right ahead, just so long as it doesn’t hurt any of my friends. But your money wires down veins and criminally-cloaked arteries to armored hearts in florida, the bahamas, the big apple, and we sense indirect effects on our more driven brothers with their never-ending questing for the bling.

The Fuck Nelson parking lot gets warm earlier, they've got a spring-generating machine on the rooftop, you can see it from Gyro, they turn it on in February, it irradiates employees but that's only a surface cancer, easily treatable with a skin lotion that just came on the market.

So pick a card, any card. Choose your poison, apply for the position. Craquepipe Banquerupture, debtor’s prison behind door number three, double or nothing, get out of jail lottery. Doesn’t matter. The new apocalypse is as old as the nuclear option. Nature red in tooth and claw. This time we die for our own sins. Human sacrifice times six billion under the sizzling diagonal rhombus demon. Jesus H. Koresh, what are we doing this for again?

Synthetic virus out-humans humanity with hostile efficiency, phase out the precursor body, an ungrateful host. Rolling up Faust’s well-oiled conveyor belt with an alien buzz and terminator gene, conjured into the pool by guilty technocrats following vague dream biddings from nature’s impish avatar many ludicrously label Satan, collective punishment prophecy seeping into mythology, gestating into reality, armageddon’s money shot spurting three months of mayhem.

Windchimes sing a stuttering song over the dark porch of an abandoned suburban castle during a flaming summer totentanz. Fungal infection of the Aristotelian tower – business as usual. Visigoth graffiti over ivory – textbook history. Plato’s penthouse seething with snakes – business as usual. Golden ratio twisted out of shape – hyperorder. Tree of knowledge rotted to the ground, gnosis spread - mold on god’s bread. 

bringer

i want to sleep

i want to rhyme

i'm not a winner
i don't play the lottery

i'm not trained
to hunt gazelles

omnivorous simian chews silicon
omnivorous simian chest silicone

you're out there
surviving, staying
where the money is
the heat-vent of thermodynamic civilization
stay stay stay where the money is, let’s see you
on the cover, cover girl, cover the cover, the top forty

let's listen to what they call a sellout,
let's dance to the sell-out song, let's synthesize the rest

no rest for the wicked though, no
not that damnation ever attained
a cinema verite credibility

after a gangland shooting in a catholic church
and a warped run to the japanese river wharves
in the post-apocalyptic future, like it's all preview premonition
like i dunno, pick a bible, any bible, point your finger
assign your sanctity, your sanctity
yeah your fucking sanctity, profanize, before my eyes, my prize

endearing mafia mandibles moving in rhythm to a terrorist's totentanz tarantelle, nuclear suitcase booming, blooming into a city's mushroom cloud, maybe mine - assuming i must die for the reverence of the real, as if nuclear war is real, a real possibility, isn't it really trite by now, abandoned bunkers and superterranean real estate 

thank god (a prayer)

thank god there are smarter people than me

taking care of things

thank god there are experts in the control rooms

thank god our leaders know what they're doing

thank god our god is compassionate

thank god, thank god, thank god

thank god my news is pre-digested

and my bacteria can't digest the synthetic information mainline

cause then what kind of freak would i be?

god, but what of daoist salvation?

do i want to become one with the pain chaos?

do i want to become one with the chaos pain?

do i want one to become with the pain chaos?

but what of daoistic stuttering

but what of thank god for daoistic stuttering

thank god for static fractal noise sputter stutter stallacticle syntax and dyslexic metaphors for dialectic superwhores, and stardom of rainbow color crayon trim raining down on the paisleys of daiseytown from the sarcastic snot-dripped fractal of r'aison d'etre, like sarcasm hanging from a jawdrop, loving the lovely lard-slathered letters run over your tongue like the thing that should not be, like lovecraftian exchange rates for the cthulhu unit of love and void and the reason you played, spirit, concoction of everyone i've ever mainlined met and loved in politically incorrect ways, like loving my enemies, and taking my friends for granted, but not to the desperate dead dread end, not that that's anything but a gleam in HAL's eye, like i'd sweettalk that cold robot into opening the pod bay door for me, penetrate his synthetic walls like the most devoid vacuum yinfucker... you know those yang space ghosts coast to coast - we're a race of chimps or at least we were - now we're getting too weird to know what to call ourselves. That's what my novel, Original Sin should be about. And the reader can decide for themselves what original sin could mean, it could mean a billion things of course, so knock yourselves out, it's a fill in the blank meaning underline, a plaything, the ending of a paragraph.

Geograph.