Mama’s Love
One foot in front of the other. Stand up straight, no slouching. Long strides, high knees. Chin slightly down, look straight ahead.
Cameras flashing, cacophony of voices melting into an indiscernible hum.
“Mama, look at me. I did it.”
“Put the chips away. Your ass is too fat,” bellowed s a raspy voice from a porcine body encased in a grease stained house dress.
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
Strong beat pulsing through the air, reverberating off my bones. Focus, lean and strike a pose.
“Badass, that’s it.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? Your shit smells the same as mine.”
“Leave me the hell alone!”
I lead with my gaunt hips back up the walk, cutting the air with my sharp angles. My attitude screams I’m a force to be reckoned with.
Whiskey wafts towards me, suddenly spiraling me to a seedy living room birthing an overstuffed couch patched with sweat stains and unrecognizable clumps of food. My mother, slumped down as if lacking a back bone, tracks me with her rheumy eyes.
“Put some damn clothes on. No one wants to see that. You waddle as bad as me.”
Before leaving the stage, with my back to the crowd, I turn my head. I break focus and look at the concourse. I’m hit by an explosion of applause. My head is also exploding, expletives and insanity crowding out the reality of my success.
“Great job. Sexy work. You were hot tonight,” met my easy gait.
No one knows. No one suspects I’m a phony.
With trembling legs, I barely make it to the bathroom. I push open a stall door, drop to my knees and vomit out what little was left in my body. Heaves forcing me to hold the bowl, eyes clamped shut.
“Shut the hell up! You don’t own me anymore!” My words reflecting the wretched posture of my body.
The evening’s silent discourse proved to be too weak for an exorcism tonight. Maybe tomorrow; maybe tomorrow mama will finally stay in her damn grave.
Homo Sapiens
Do we have dogs in our schools? Do we have chickens? Do we have butterflies? No. We have humans. Maybe, in some cases, many kinds of humans. But we just have humans. So how is this diversity? We are all the same species, why divide us by gender and race and religion and sexuality? Diversity is racism disguised as tolerance. We are all the same. We are all the same species. Why divide us into cultures when diversity is a lie? Diversity is just another way to divide us, to separate us into factions. Homo fucking sapiens. Don’t divide us any more than we already are. Politically, parentally, racially. How many ways are there to cut a person into ribbons? This ribbon is race, this one religion, this one sexuality.... by the time it gets down to who you are as a person, there’s nothing left.
Diversity erases who you are by judging you, for good or bad, by your divisions.
Division will kill us. Diversity will cock and load the gun.
Silence
He couldn't remember the last time he had mustered enough energy to utter a word. He had been trapped, bannished?, in the cave for years and had learned a long time ago that screaming was only a waste of energy. In the cave, silence was the only thing that ensured survival. If your prey did not hear you, you received the privilege of food, if your predator did not hear you, you got to live for another hour. Darkness, danger, and silence were his only companions in the cave.
His head jerked to the right as he heard a soft grunt in the darkness. It wasn’t deep enough to be a predator, which meant that a prey had fallen off the walls of the cave and was in his domain. He quickly but silently made his way towards the sound over the memorized route he had walked for years.
When he reached where he believed the sound originated from he could hear it, quick breathing that betrayed his prey’s fear. They could see in the dark, they could see the silent hunter marching towards them. Without a sound, the man’s hands darted forward and grabbed the small hairy beast. It violently trashed in his hands but it was no use, in a few short minutes the prey suffocated and the man swallowed it whole.
He held in a cough and glared futilely in the darkness. He hated the hairy prey, but the hairless ones were protected by the predators and had sharp teeth to defend themselves. He remembered those teeth in his darkest dreams, he remembered a time when he did nothing but make noise and attracted most of the predators in the cave.
He fingered a scar on his arm lightly before following his route back to an edge of the cave hidden away by jagged rocks. He had not walked far before something assaulted his eyes and he couldn’t hold back the shriek of pain that emitted from his throat.
“Whoa! What was that?!” he heard something say, loudly. He held in a growl and softly crept towards the loud creature. The attack that almost destroyed his eyes had left and darkness had once again returned to his realm.
“Shhh! We don’t know what’s in here. No-one has left here alive in a hundred years, there has to be a reason,” a deeper sounding creature whispered. That one sounded like a predator, but not one he had ever heard before. Something in the back of his mind was screaming at him to remember, to understand, but he ignored it. That part of his mind had led him into more dangerous situations than he cared to remember, he hadn’t listened to it in a long, long time.
When he finally reached the sound’s origin, a strange sight awaited him. His underused eyes attempted in vain to focus on the previous attack that was originating in a strange rock inbetween two mostly hairless creatures. Light, the back of his mind reminded him. He didn’t understand the longing that filled him, why would he want something so useless? He was sure that ever predator in the cave was closing in and every prey was running for cover.
They made more noise than he had ever heard just by opening their mouths and the man knew that they were dangerous to him. Only predators made that much noise, and only when they killed their prey. They were vicious creatures with nothing to fear, the beasts in front of him did not fear anything by the looks of things, when they should fear everything. They were prey, and the man was a predator.
He would show them exactly why silence should be a creature’s best friend...
Vanilla
What ever happened to all the great haters; the masters of the misanthropic masterpiece, the devil-directors of debauched Dirty Realism?
Where are the Bukowskis and Burroughs and Fantes?
Where is the appetite for angst, desire for destruction, discord and disquietude, the punk’s perturbation, the rebel’s rage, the grit and grime of grotesquely great-works, outlaw’s outlandishness, the unartist’s manifesto.
When did we lose the great anti-intellectual intellectuals of our time and devolve into a society of self-indulgent, amorphous, moping masses. A homogenized system of declaration for platitudes, cliches and “good-vibes.”
At what time did we decide to trade in the boots of the working-class-hero in exchange for the loafer’s loafers?
In what fucking world has, “fuck,” become passe and Brooklyn, a haven for the affluent, overly-financed organic gardeneers?
Where is the appreciation for those who tear down hotel walls; the toilet-bombers, guitar-smashers, the up-fuckers of the shit and tearers-down of the world?
Maybe we’re still around. Maybe we’ve fallen within outselves. Maybe the world doesn’t want us, until such a point as our East Coast Existentialism comes into vogue once more.
The paragons of prophetic paradox wander itinerant and look towards the next upcoming recession, when an intellectually idle, hungry populous can once more consume our work with trendful voracity.
New horizons, beyond CBGB. Drifting on to new shores, which might create us, reborn anew, like the phoenix.
Shores which will render us once more, the flavor of the week.
Are we?
Everything has a value. It must have. Otherwise why do we bother making them? But sometimes, we lose interest in things. Lost to time as we move on. New ideas catch our eye. A VHS player is a good example. Hell, even a dvd player is useless now a days. But there never really is useless. It is an arrogant view of deeming somthing as unworthy, just because it has no significant value to us at the moment. Because we have computers to type we don’t need to write with our hands. Because we have the internet we do not need textbooks or dictionaries. Before we know it we will deem our legs as useless, seeing as machines have already started doing the walking for us. With all these things we put value to and in the same breath lose interest in, I look back to see the littered pile of uselessness in our wake. And I question myself, who is all this useful to if not for us? If we were to evaporate into thin air tomorrow, what creature would benefit from any of this? So I ask, do the things we create ultimately end up useless? Or are we?
