oh, family life

The world against the family, the ever-loving strangers knifing into private affairs with blades of thievery...that is the problems with giving birth to a child, they get you stuck and you have to pay. You might as well chain an anchor to your noodle legs and throw yourself off a dock for all the thanks and joy family life will give you.

My family life is terrible, and I didn't even start them up. They raised me. My mother is a tyrant, and there are numerous drunks sulking around with disasterous minds and tendancies that get them into these horrible situations that would be comic if they weren't so frequent and depraved. My aunt and grandmother fight like wild animals. I hear about this, and sigh. Nothing for me to do but watch the world fall apart. I try to tell them "Don't drink; alcohol is an instrument of genocide. Look at the natives." But nobody in my family listens to me except my grandfather. They think I am young and inexperienced, when in truth I am old and very experienced. It only takes a few experiences in order to solidify a world view, and a few more in order to know true morality paired with just and intelligent action. But many in my family are lacking in these experiences.

My father is a shallow man, obssessed with technologies that deaden the mind. He also is a hypocrite, incognizant of his own failings, and somehow he has all this money despite being on disability. There, you have another comedy.

I could illustrate these things to you, but it is better that I don't for I don't want to invoke pity, but just recognition of how terrible and crummy families truly are. They had me locked in a mental hospital, not because I became inconvinient, but because they needed a scapegoat for all their problems. Of course, they felt terrible soon after doing it, but while it was happening you would think that they were convinced that it was God's holy mission for them to lock their non-combative and non-suicidal son up in a mental hospital. Well, I did try to run away to a friends house. But at 24, seriously, you would call the police because of that? What a bunch of assholes.

Anyway, I suppose the larger issue is that my faith in the human race, and joyous love augmented with trumpets and harps and shit is waning slightly. I can love anyone, but when they fuck you over for no reason because it is of some strange symbolic advantage to them, then I think the love has got to stop. Love extenuated to far is a form of violence, when it seeks to trap and control an individual within a failing structure. Family is a sinking ship where nobody wants anybody to survive.

stream of consciousness

Subconscious draft where monkey speaks with angel glands, and love keeps sauce boiling with a ladel shaped like a hallmark heart, where we cooked on the stove our thin broth that was somehow more nourishing than a steak dinner. I am not the Lamb whose mutton you eat today, I am the spirit who’s breath teases your hair in little spirals the direction of up or down, and we have been down here for so long because of the directions we have taken. Every decision is a crossroads, remember that, and every hallmark heart is pulling you towards love in some manner of speaking, but beware the false love my three-hearted friends, beware the heart with swords for it will break yours if you are not careful. And delicately, we romanced with wine set at the table that we failed to drink because it was just there for decoration, and remember, remember what has happened to your lives, built with control like so many machines. Because they have feet, you do not call them automatons, and because they drink water, you do not call them robots, but I know better, I have seen their gears and the ways in which they work, they are merely mechanical and barely biological, transistors full of call and response, nothing more, nothing less.

The angels went walking in the streets yesterday, rinsing out the blue of the sky with rain clouds, and you could see them if you were careful not to talk to them when they were working, winged creatures of divine right and close to the top of the natural hierarchy, but don’t tell the President this, my love, for he will capture angels and hack off their wings in order to wear them as ornate dress, in order to make them serve the machine instead of the machine serving them. Do not try to get back into the system once you have been released, it will only bring you heartbreak upon heartbreak upon heartbreak and maybe even your mind will break, because what they do to people like us is a terrible tragedy that doesn’t require much ingenuity, it is the same old story from here to eternity. Rise up, rise up, rise with the winds like an angelic warrior poised with broadsword, confronting the polluted weather with a charm that destroys foul demons, and recall who we are. You know who you are, you who fail to fight, and it is killing you because you want to be yourself and you can be, nobody has the right to take yourself away from you. Listen to some good music and deign to do something startling, but do it in a group, be with a small group so you are protected. Loners are powerful, but groups never get arrested.

And when we saw the bus stop, we weren’t sure that it matched the schedule. But the driver let us on without charge, and we listened to the numbers as they rattled off in conversation. Soon a man with a blade was upon us, but we ignored him as he plunged it into our back like a sweet embrace, for there was nothing behind us to kill that had not already been lost, the past mainly, the ever dead past that rises up like a living corpse bent on destruction . Live now and excuse yourself later.

television love letter

Television, my voluptuous darling. Speaking in the colloquial, in the formal, in melodic advertisement jingle. We organized a religion around you, setting our dinners before your altar and our minds before your judgement. You told us about the sexual frustrations of 20 something generics arguing on MTV. This we noted with lack of awe and taciturn understanding. It is a difficult life getting lavish housing for free in a city you are not from, living with sexy singles who forget to take out the garbage every once in awhile. And yum, you served us tasty sit-coms about average everyday people made extraordinary by their comedic problems. These were sublte revelations for us, illustrating that no matter how funny or terrible life may become, everything perpetually works out in the end, that life is like a swimming pool: you dive in, get wet, and when you get out, everything is the same. And your brave sporting events, those eloquent sermons of the American spirit, outlining the nature of the free market: you compete, try your best, bring your A game everyday, and you too can own shiny, worthless, golden things. Sometimes you tear your ligaments or pull a hamstring, but who said capitalism was without its injuries. Those courageous players, still playing children games, and accumulating wealth because of it. Also, television my darling, your product recommendations are excellent advice for living a practical life. My new SUV makes me forget about the debt I incurred to own it when i am crumpling shopping carts with my front fender in parking lots, and the anti-depressant recommended by that doctor with the liquor smooth voice only very occasionally gives me diarreha and suicidal thoughts. 8 out of 10 of us agree, TV, that your news broadcasts are informative: they tell us what cities murders happen in, thus keeping property values down, which is a boon to my slum-lord friends who own pink con-apt complexes in Watts. When they get letters complaining about ruptured water mains, because of you TV they respond by saying there was a rape across the corner. But we are not always reverant or idle. When you talk about the social lifes of rich celebrities, we feel like we are participating in something greater than ourselves with you as our peer, kind television, mediating the information in a manner that even my nephew who has cerebral palsy can join in on the fun. We also love your music, which we hear in the shopping mall, and it comforts us and reminds us of you. Oh picture-sound, oh sweet love noise, oh mini-series mavin, oh my sweet date to movies edited for basic cable. To you I raise the golden pears of my mind in tribute, to you I rush home in a frenzy, not pausing to take off my coat when I curl up before you, adoration gleaming in my eyes and expectation fulminous in my breast. Your Carls Jr. commercials are beyond compare, and I am not even hungry. Always there, transmitting away the very best you have to offer, never running out of things to say, breathing over me when I fall asleep drunk on the couch like a sweet parent, humming the songs of weed whackers and tampons, translating my desires from the human to the specific material of the language of things. TV, may you watch over my life with sapphire light and euphonic sound, protect me from my boredom, and never let me accept limits for what i can and can't own, Amen.

poets and murderers

America supports its murderers better than it does its poets. Murders get a room, sustinence, a gym, a prison rec room, and occasional interviews with the press after the dramatic simulacra of justice known as the trial. Rapists are given more creedence in the courtroom with their testimonies than an essayist is given in a journal. I wonder what the proportion of criminals to writers is in this country. It would only surprise me if there happened to be more writers. This country could easily support poets for their lifetimes with the finances being fed into federal and state prisons. But it seems that criminals serve more of a purpose than poets. Criminals enforce the average citizen's legal morality by providing examples of deviance. Poets are tied to life, not morality. They enforce no conventions in the populace, except making life worth living through the gifts of articulate communication. And the country obviously hates them for it. There are multitudes of television programs that portray criminals and their violent acts, but not a single one that concerns the acts of the poet. This is a message to Americans, one that says it is more glamorous to kill somebody than it is to write a love sonnet to a woman. It says that investigating a crime scene is more important than investigating a piece of creative writing or a novel. Crimes are usually the work of no more than a few hours, while work on a book takes years. People often hear of a shocking crime in the headlines and respond with "But how could anybody do that?" I read Susan Sontag, Dostoyevsky, Knut Hamsun, etc and think the same thing, only with an appreciative wonder instead of a harrowing disgust. Murderers and rapists do not deserve the attention lavished upon them by the media. Give back the limelight to the innovative filmmakers, artists, and writers of our generation. Do not fetishize the sickness of individuals through mainstream movies, news, and magazines. This is serious.

response to my writing

"I do not know what to do with this. Pick any point on the compass...in that direction madness lies. "

Ah, how illuminating. Truely, what did i expect? Praise? Congradulations? I mean, it is obvious that i am seperated from most of the writing community, if you could call the smattering of published and unpublished writers across the nation that. It first came to me during my brief and disasterous internship for Pacific University's MFA in Writing program over a few too many glasses of wine. Writers defending warfare, writers defending corporations. A compendium of conservatives, writing cute little slice of life poems and essays detailing the minutae of installing toilets amid incense. Then a fictional story about fighting the Taliban and Al Queda, glossed with Republican justifications for aggressive occupation and civilian casualties. Pretty blatent pandering to establishment vanities in the hopes of recognition.

Another problem, the adherence of writers to the strict history of the art. I mean, it is fine to admire the writing tradition, but to expect people to adopt the structure of Tennyson? Of Whitman? Well, as Vonnegut's artist friend said "There are generally two types of artists, those who respond to the history of their art and those who respond to life itself." Perhaps i should be writing a Victorean novel to illustrate how ridiculous adherance to tradition for the sake of tradition is. Even following contemporary styles is a dead end. Who wants to read writing journals stuffed with tepid journalism masquerading as poorly researched sociology, in the classical form of the short story? "He left her after she had the abortion. She cried out his name into a telephone that was off the hook. 'John, John, I'm sorry." Bleh. Life is all there is. Communicate with it. Do not speak to the dead or for the dead. They left what marks they could in the atmosphere of their times. Deconstructing Holocaust literature should be a crime. Let us remember to sing our own songs, to intimate our own musics, to abscond from criticism if we do not create.