Scarcity and Economics

do you dream of substance by day, and pay for numbness by night? You dream of a world where you'd sell them down the river for a handful of pills that melt into your hands and turns your veins black to match the liquids running from every orifice, until the digital age turns your loved ones into resizable pictures and cropped out photos, and voice becomes a stretched moan from speakers the finest money can buy, five and a fraction times the voices moaning around you, lost in the aura of feigned sexual pleasure and gap-toothed smiles painted over by a firebrand whitewashing, and its your only revolution, the cycles of sleep and wake, where you trade your friends for cards and bubblegum and burn the sun by day, where you step into the rain and think you're home again, but the mad honks of headlit horns send you running like a fox, diving behind cars and catching a sickly cold, dying alone in a room that smells of the stink of rotting food lost behind packaged memories that tore through the generations, when your family was in chains but chained themselves so they said, and lived without mediated experience until they found the camera, so we live, we die, we own, we dispose, and throw away the cigarettes on wet pavement we are sure will turn the fire down, for though in the back of our heads we know the flooded gasoline from innocuous cars is traveling like the black blood you brought home for your veins, and any minute now the chemical mixture and the planets aligning will turn science into legend and this whole joint goes boom, sending you into a fit of real pain you wished you could live over and over again, instead of crowding space with pictures of famous movie stars heads pasted onto your friends bodies, feeble reminders of the crazed way you'd want to remember them. Yet nothing happens, the gasoline forks on either side of the cigarette, still burning into ozone and drowning leaves stained like sin, and it just goes smoking until the rubber tires screech over it to give an automated 'fuck you' from someone's beautiful Honda Element.

Script

the camera clicks // now i possess you // but the photo itself // it possesses who?

...

colonial children play in the sun, a pedantic kind of dance on merry ash where the blacktops burn and dry away the tears, where a grimaced cry looks like a joyful smile, and the heat it gets so bad not because of the burns the burns are only physical but the children cry oh they cry, but it dries their tears and they aimlessly chase each other in high noon blindness, they throw stones and sticks like primitive weapons, playing a game they don't yet know the name of, but if you could recall your childhood games there was never really a winner was there, just a loser, the first one to bleed and fall and cry and end the game, not in this land though, no everyone's a winner because the sun dries your tears with mercurial fetish, a cold mother for a band of bastard orphans who don't know left from right, why if you saw them you'd ask why they're running in circles. 

But they're smarter than the rest, they've started their pathways on quickly, the parents only run bigger and bigger circles, and they stay inside where the sun still blasts through the shallow glue that binds the cracks that breaks the backs that tightens the slack like the whip they felt a hundred times before a brain shaped like a brand its a far better score than the iron some say when you raise your hands they run away, youre God we're Not, look at how bullets stop, before they hit you a divinity if there ever was one, now I believe in miracles, and Christ and I'll pray and pray til they take my sons and daughters away and my kingdom turns to ash on which the children will play, so small it becomes that they create a new game, where they run around it in circles, sometimes tripping over it because of the high noon blindness, and the first one to bleed is always the loser.

General Grant

Come with smiles, come with gold,
they stow their guns in darknened fold,
delighting children with tales untold,
like men of God, like the Gods of old

'I will not harm I come for peace',
the flesh is human and gripped at ease,
to sleep, to sleep, the guarded trees,
but before you lie, they dig your knees

night by night the shadows run,
grow long by night, short by sun,
a tusk, a tail, a useless one,
dig the earth, until it turns to crumbs

and sing this song for piety of favor,
'no food greater than the fruits of labor'

no food greater than the fruits of labor.

one fell dead.

sing again.

no food greater than the fruits of labor.

two crosses for Christ.

no food greater than the fruits of labor.

and again, like you mean it this time.

and with an eye bent at so slight an angle,
the straight-lined sticks begin to mangle,
the flags of Kings begin to dance,
to crack through air, to plummet and lance,

down on your back, splitting your spine,
collapsing your lungs, coughing the mine
you reach for words to grab to scream
to kill to bleed to wake to dream
one by one, brothers hung low,
one less soul in the choir show
no food greater than the fruits of labor
no food greater than the fruits of labor.

split the Earth with protest, show them for sinners,
they feed open mouths with muskets for dinner,
yet they said, oh they said, with smiles with grins!
for love, for Jove! for Christ! for King!

keep working, oh vigilant one, till one day you fall,
on the ground with leaves like lives winter stalls.


for the best fruit indeed it comes from the soul.

so dig, so dig, this time for heart,
but its gone, its gone, twas a hole from the start
with lies they bought it, with smiles they sold,
for they came with nothing, but left with gold.

Afternoon

they bang together like blues, the black-rimmed glasses they brought back from the 50s, the way they sit red and gray when it was just black and white, leave it to beaver white families stuck in perfection while the world around them went to hell and good boys and girls died in color, it was color that was red and gray, not much different from these blues bangers, hipsters with their cigarettes hanging off their lips like Godard's ghost, lisping away from every puff they waste, the smoke calling all the addicts in the city, their lungs rasping across graffiti-streaked walls, walls of poverty, and you just want to throw the fucking coffee pot against in slow-motion, because you run in circles every day, oh they told you you could be something great, but somewhere between your last button on the red and gray button-up and the fitting of black-rimmed glasses in a color world from the 60s, you realize that you're stuck in the gap of two generations, maybe even three, climbing back up on mid-week alcohol binges and amphetamine uses, but no you're no Kerouac, because your life is dull dull dull, brought from the suburbs and its all the same old story, just a satellite image, maybe they drop they bomb maybe they don't, but if they do you'd better hide under a desk like good little schoolchildren.  And the bomb will destroy every black-and-white but actually white family with the pearl necklaces and state of the art vacuum cleaners and cats that rip the perfect white carpets with the furor of their tiger brethren, and the world will be left in a globe of smoke, just smoke that chokes your vision like it does your lungs, and then they take that suck in, forget to inhale, and toss the damn thing on the streets of New York.

Fuckin' waste of a cigarette if you ask me.

Terra Firma

Real revolutionaries plant their flags upside down and their guns right side up

***

rebel,

take a swim in the barren sands

with just your feet bandaged against sun and solace

facing winds like these that turn nations into dust,

rebel,

your flag planted long ago,

it grew trees in the desert,

and you suddenly feel weightless,

because below the dunes lie the graves of warriors before,

kings and peasants, gold and rubble,

stick and stones that turned into whips and bullets

rebel,

should you ever lose your way,

remember that you are always in the desert,

and the horizon will match your every turn,

then it will ask why you fire in the sky,

when you stand againstwinds like these that turn nations into dust

Home in the Sky, House in the Dirt

this is the poetry of war,
steeped in blood, hidden in the cracks of bones,
the bombs will drop,
and i will put my winter coat on and look to the sky,
wait for eclipse, my guns planted beneath my body,
the bombs they will drop,
in perfect unison they cover the sun,
and the night will love me blind,
so i cannot see, black nor white,
only speak,
the poetry of war