We were served madness
on a plate of gold.
Our heads were served
to our masters on platters.
A smorgasbord of drugs,
liquors, beers, bongs,
pornography,
and broken condoms.
Emptiness screamed within,
filled with crystalline trinkets,
powders up the nose,
and sucked in through pipes.
Who could fill our dark desire?
Our masters served it.
Even as they condemned it,
they served it to us.
Perpetual Eden under
crooked stars that twinkled
in the moonlight of our demise.
Were we to blame victims
who were miseducated?
Cops and criminals shook hands
and agreed on various things.
Powders flowed from street corners,
tabs of acid snaked their way
through a society gorged
on insanity.
Mushrooms grew from neurons,
cocaine filled our sinuses.
Vicodin came and went,
and the occasional grave was filled.
Hospitals admitted patients
with the patience of investors
looking to make a profit
off of the deadened prophets
of a former age.
Feathered boa-constrictors
hung from our neck like nooses,
our egos were decapitated like gooses
eaten by the gluttonous harvesters.
It’s so easy to control someone
when they’re completely insane
and you know all the tricks
to pull their strings like marionettes.
Madness was the cure,
the chaos to bring us down
into the dirt
that filled our mouths so nastily.
Can you believe
that the man on TV
doesn’t always have
your best interests in mind?
Can you perceive
that the friends you see
will be cut in half
and divided by kind?
Manipulators are annoying;
you condemn them with rants and raves
and are arrested by the police,
carted away in handcuffs.
What was your crime?
To speak your mind
to a world that is scared
and learning to use
its own shadow.
Empty bottles,
40s of malt liquor
thrown at trains
with some kind of rage.
We hate, we seethe
we feel the flame within,
but they have made a net
to haul us away to the morgue.
The Indra-net,
it sparkles with jewels
we see ourselves
trapped within its grasp.
There’s paths and spheres,
drugs, strippers, queers,
our own flaming desire
to set the world ablaze.
But someone is holding
this strange, strange net
that keeps us within itself
and brings us to our knees.
We toss and turn,
scream and burn,
freeze and yearn
to get beyond ourselves.
But this net,
we cannot escape
we speak of voids and abysses,
stolen dark kisses.
Becoming angry,
we lash out and scream,
but the walls answer not,
these cinderblock walls
that adorn our most ugly
schools, prisons, hospitals.
They have pills for us
and we take them to feel better
from drug dealers
who have better knowledge
of brain chemistry
than the thug on the street.
But both keep us quiet,
both still the rage,
both are part of the cage
in this net,
this Indra-net.
Why are we here?
They tell us they don’t know,
or they give us reasons
meant to please
our screaming brains.
We’re a stone’s throw from death,
a stone’s throw from life,
a stone’s throw from getting stoned
and sinking into quicksand.
Our thinkers are perverse,
our poets are mad like me,
our artists are crying tears,
that dive into others’ eyes.
Socially inept we fell
into the world of being cool,
into the world of victims
who wanted to think they knew.
Knowledge is false?
Maybe your knowledge is;
maybe you’ve abandoned what you knew
to give into reckless abandon.
Brains injected with poison,
broken bones and bloody skies.
Trembling lips and sunken eyes,
angry ears hear comforting lies.
Do we really need an adversary?
I don’t think we have a choice,
the con surrounds us,
just as this poem surrounds
a deep,
dark,
bleeding
wound within.