“When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly bodies. Instinctively he consults them when he awakes, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks” (Swann’s Way 5).
The dreamcatcher jolts and bobs with the force of speed bumps, catching moonlight in brief flickers. Joe sees you staring at it. He snorts a half-laugh.
“That there’s a real-life Ojibwe—handmade by a shaman,” he says.
You watch the merge line rush and vanish like a flow of ghosts in asphalt.
“That one existed before all this cult’ral propr’ation bullshit, ya know? That there’s legit.”
You search for words. Spirits swipe the underbelly of the truck. The Doors play on the radio. Lyrics you know. Lyrics that have always left you cold.
Words come to you eventually: “does it keep the nightmares away?”
Joe laughs harshly. “The nightmares! Hell, the nightmares were real before I got this thing. Now they’re just nightmares, ya know?”
You remember Joe’s stories. Apparitions. Aliens. Dark mythology as an insolent force. “Real? I thought that was just the writing,” you say.
Joe doesn’t laugh this time. His face hardens. “It’s all the writin. There’s nothin else.”
Jim Morrison screaming. Headlights casting judgment on the dead.
“Tell me about a nightmare that’s true,” you say.
Joe asks if you really want to hear this shit. Yes, you say, you really want to hear this shit.
Joe pushes an Export A into the cigarette lighter receptacle. He sucks white smoke. The tip lights the blackness with a bead of orange. “One time I’m drivin. I see this broad on the side of the road, ya know, with her thumb stickin up. But it wasn’t her thumb I was lookin at, ya know what I’m sayin? She was firin on every cylinder, this broad. I dunno how she could even see over those titsa hers.” He cackles silver puffs. “This was a high-class whore. She wanted a ride and she wanted to pay for it. Only she wasn’t no millionaire, ya get me?”
You look at him. Smoke jets from his nostrils and clouds his rocky jaw.
“She was a prostitute?” you ask.
You’re surprised he doesn’t laugh. He nods again. “Yeah. A real-life prost’tute. So shortly after she gets in, my jeans are bunched roun my ankles, ya know? My feet are wedged together and I’m strugglin to keep control of the gas n brakes. And this broad has no brakes, ya know? So she’s got her face all over my cock, ya know. Not jus suckin the thing, but teachin it new languages, ya get me? I can say without a shreda doubt, this was the finest blowjob any man has ever had in any parta the world at any time. Ever. It gets so my eyes are tilted up, jus watchin this dreamcatcher. Jus like you were watchin it. Swingin. Kinda dancin. But then, I feel this thump, ya know? Huge thump. I stop the truck and kinda jerk up in my seat. My cock pokes er in the eyeball and she starts slappin me but I’m too scared ta notice. I jump outta the truck. I run back to the spot where the thump happened. What do ya think I see?”
You speculate. You imagine squirming demon fetuses and spectral forms. “I don’t know,” you say.
“I see me. That’s what I see. Pulv’rized in the road, sectioned up like parts in a butcher shop. It was me, ya get it? Not someone who looked like me. It was me, smashed in the road. So much blood, wet n black in the nighttime. The hooker’s runnin up behind me, screamin at me that I coulda killed her and what kind of a sonofabitch could do that to a dame while she’s suckin im off. Then she walks off and I just stare, ya know. I don’t know how long I looked at myself, dead there in the road.”
His story ends with abrupt silence. He tosses the half-smoked Export from the window in a mild flurry of sparks.
“But… you’re still here,” you say. “Still here behind the wheel. Still driving.”
“That’s right. I’m still drivin. And that dreamcatcher isn’t goin anywhere.”
Read more of Mike’s work here.
Topaz Rags: Come to the Now
Zizek on being in language: Lacan’s definition of the signifier as that which ‘represents the subject for another signifier’ amounts to the assertion of an irreducible duality: if a subject is to be represented by a signifier, there must be a minimal chain of two signifiers, one of which represents the subject for the other.(art by jenny morgan)
yukio mishima photographed by yato tamotsu demonstrating his passion for seppuku, 1960
a decade later he committed seppuku after a failed coup d’etat
Correction: a decade later he failed to commit seppuku and had to be aided in suicide by the General whom he attempted to overhrown in a failed coup d-etat.
(via fisherfolks)
For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition…
Lacanian element to this.
I’m awash in harmony and subtle yellow fusion of human expressions.
Faces crane backward to form a path of illusive snapshots,
printing memories of false events.
Baroque pop symphonies build cadences along gold grin walkway
like illusions of joyful childhood.
I conduct bike horns and hazy basement laughter down this luminous path,
puffing afterglow fog in the rain.
Shamanic euphoria hoists me from consciousness
into the gridlocked insanity of otherworld imprisonment.
I know there is an eternity of pinwheels and zippers and warped funhouse terror.
I know I’ll see every detail before I make it back.
I know this tranquilized, cruel cyclone and
I know what it means.
I know it will make me sick before I can stand again.
I’m paranoid and lost in the wet baseball diamond.
I remember you tilting like a madman, fogged face and wild hair, mumbling crazy in the rain.
You were just a kid again—lost in the woods.
Read more of Mike’s work here.
I got a tattoo of God. You can’t see it
but it’s everywhere. If I seem out of it,
do the math. I was put on earth.
And then you were, making up your feet
as you went along. New thinspo clanks the spank
bank. New emoticon makes a Holocene.
If you want to get in shape you have to jog
your memory of Euclid. Jesus built
a ship in a ship shape and said
there’s plenty of loaves in the sea.
Some Idaho you turned out to be.
Some money bin I, a rich duck, swim in!
The coins of you in my feathers like water
off my back. I count each red cent of you.
Now the rain with its funny money din.
The rain beats a tattoo of God any day.
Apparently this is what contemporary poetry should look like. It’s better than Poncho’s work—but that isn’t saying much. If you want to read more of Robbin’s work you can buy his book at any Chapters.
Your vantage point is safe but you’re sick with regret. The guys are silent. A beer bottle hisses open and you hear the glug-glug of a first drink. / “This is going to be huge.”/ You feign indifference as the skyline erupts, cutting the illusion of peace with a mournful boom. / “Shit. We did it.” / You know what’s happening. You know that somewhere across the expanse of blackness a family is caught unguarded in the street, screaming a horribly dreamlike symphony as it feeds those crimson tongues. You can almost hear the implosion of automotive steel under the grip of flaming claws. You can almost smell your kitchen of childhood solace—dried herbs torched in a tumult of instant destruction. / “Goddamn. I told you it would be quick.”/ Distant inferno crackles in your pupils as you share a drink with the boys. A drink becomes three drinks, then five drinks, then you lose count. You’re drunk off your ass and the fire keeps burning. / “Goddamn. It was so quick.” / Someone turns to see your expression but you’re not going to look away. It’s your responsibility to keep watch.
You can read more of Mike’s work here.
All that remains is the wrapping.
The best used up, and the rest,
left to get stuck, in a chain-link fence.
.
The wanting eyes and open hands,
holding out for something,
that none of us have to give.
.
There are no crickets or frogs here.
A stomach growls.
The click of lighters.
The clink of glasses.
The sniff of powder
being pulled up a straw.
.
The siren scream
of undomesticated violence
and unadulterated drugs.
.
The searchlight searching
for something,
that we won’t find here.
You can find Rusty’s other work here.
I run my own publishing house called Ssemblage Publishing. I’ve published the first book (Sleep and Ecstasy by Tomas Boudreau and Mike Thorn) and it’s selling successfully. Follow the blog if you’re interested in collaborating or if you just want to check out the collection.
ABANDON EVERYTHING, AGAIN
“It is four light-hours to the end of the solar system; to the nearest star, four light-years. A disproportionate ocean of void. But are we really sure that it is only a void? We only know that in this space there are no bright stars; if they existed, would they be visible? And if there existed bodies neither bright nor dark? Could it not happen on the celestial maps, just as on those of the earth, that the star-cities are indicated and the star-villages omitted?”
-Soviet science fiction writers scratched their faces at midnight.
-The infrasuns (Drummond would say the happy proletarian boys).
-Peguero and Boris alone in a lower class room predicting the miracle behind the door.
-Free Money
*
Who has traversed the city and for music has only had the whistles of his fellows, his own words of amazement and rage?
The handsome type who didn’t know
that a girl’s orgasm is clitoral
(Look, it’s not only in the museums that there’s shit) (A process of individual museification) (Certainly all that has been mentioned, revealed) (Fear of discovering) (Fear of the imbalances not foreseen).
*
Our next of kin:
the snipers, the lone plainsmen who devastate the Chinese cafes of Latin America, the butchers in supermarkets, in their tremendous individual-collective dilemma; the impotence of action and investigation (on the individual level or clouded in aesthetic contradictions) of the poetic act.
*
Tiny bright stars eternally winking at us from a place in the universe called The labyrinths.
-Dancing-Club of misery.
-Pepito Tequila sobbing his love for Lisa Underground.
-He sucks it, you suck it, we suck it. [In Spanish as in English, the verb can be used literally or informally in a derogatory sense.]
-And Horror
*
Curtains of water, cement, or tin separate a cultural mechanism, which itself serves as both conscience and as the ass of the ruling class, from a living cultural event, scrubbed clean, in constant death and birth, ignorant of most of history and the fine arts (quotidian creator of its own insane istory and its amazing fyne artz), body that suddenly tests new sensations on itself, product of an epoch in which we approach at 200 kmph the toilet or the revolution.
“New forms, rare forms”, as old Bertolt said, half curious and half smiling.
*
Sensations don’t arise out of nothing (obviousness of obviousnesses), but from a conditioned reality, in a thousand ways, as a constant flow.
-Complex reality makes us seasick!
So, it is possible that in part this is a birth and in part we are in the front row for the death throes. Forms of life and forms of death pass by the retina daily. Their collision constantly gives rise to infrarealist forms: THE EYE OF TRANSITION
*
Put the whole city in the insane asylum. Sweet sister, howling tanks, hermaphrodite songs, diamond deserts, we only live once and every day the visions are bulkier and more slippery. Sweet sister, lifts to Monte Albán. Tighten your belts because the corpses have been watered. A scene of subtraction.
*
And the good bourgeois culture? And academia and the incendiaries? And the vanguards and the rearguards? And certain conceptions of love, good scenery, the precise and multinational Colt?
Like I told Saint-Just in a dream I had once: Even the heads of aristocrats can’t use us as weapons.
*
-A good part of the world is being born and another good part dying, and we all know that we all have to live or we all have to die: in this there is no middle road.
Chirico says: thought must move away from all that which is called logic and good sense, must move away from all human problems, in such a way that things appear under a new aspect, as if illuminated by a constellation appearing for the first time. The infrarealists say: We are going to fill our heads with all human problems, such that things begin to move inside themselves, an extraordinary vision of man.
-The Constellation of the Beautiful Bird.
-The infrarealists propose indigenousness to the world: a crazy and timid Indian.
-A new lyricism, which is starting to rise Latin America, supports itself in ways that never fail to amaze us. The way in to matter is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes. Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breathing and heat. The shotgun experience, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions.
If the poet is mixed up, the reader will have to mix himself up.
“erotic books without spelling”
*
The THOUSAND DISMEMBERED VANGUARDS OF THE SIXTIES precede us
The 99 open flowers like a smashed-open head
The massacre, the new concentration camps
The White underground rivers, the violet winds
These are hard times for poetry, some say, drinking tea, listening to music in their apartments, talking (listening) to the old masters. These are difficult times for man, we say, turning to the barricades after a full day’s work of shit and tear gas, discovering / creating music even in our apartments, largely overlooking cemeteries-that-spread, where they [sic] despairingly drink a cup of tea or get drunk on pure rage or the inertia of old masters.
HORA ZERO precedes us
((Raise baboons and the hags will bite you)) [Sp: Cría zambos y te picarán los callos]
Still we are in the quaternary era. Are we still in the quaternary era?
Pepito Tequila kisses Lisa Underground’s phosphorescent nipples and watches her leave for a beach on which black pyramids sprout.
*
I repeat:
the poet is a hero revealing heroes, like the fallen red tree that announces the start of the forest.
-The attempts at a consistent ethic-aesthetic are paved with betrayals or pathetic survivals.
-And it is the individual who will be able to walk a thousand kilometers but eventually the road will eat him.
-Our ethic is Revolution, our aesthetic is Life: one-single-thing.
*
For the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie life is a party. Every weekend they have one. The proletariat doesn’t have parties. Only rhythmic funerals. That is going to change. The exploited will have a grand party. Memory and guillotines. Sensing it, acting it certain nights, inventing edges and humid corners, is like caressing the acidic eyes of the new spirit.
*
Journey of the poem through the seasons of rioting: poetry producing poets producing poems producing poetry. Not an electric alley / the poet with arms separate from the body / the poem slowly displacing his Vision of his Revolution. The alley is a complex point. “We are going to invent in order to discover its contradiction, its invisible forms of refusing, until it is explained”. Journey of the act of writing through zones not at all favorable to the act of writing.
Rimbaud, come home!
Subverting the everyday reality of modern poetry. The confinements that lead a circular reality to the poem. A good reference: the madman Kurt Schwitters. Lanke trr gll, o, upa kupa arggg, runs the official line, phonetic investigators codifying the howl. The bridges of Noba Express are anti-codification: let him shout, let him shout (please don’t take out pencil or paper, don’t record him, shout with him if you want to participate), so let him shout, in order to see what face he makes when he finishes, what other incredible things we experience.
Our bridges to ignored stations. The poem interrelating reality and unreality.
*
Convulsively
*
What can I demand of current Latin American painting? What can I demand of the theatre?
More revealing and expressive is stopping in a demolished park because of the smog and seeing people crossing the avenues in groups (which contract and expand), when so many motorists, like the pedestrians, urgently approach their hovels, and it’s the hour when the murderers come out and the victims follow them.
What stories do the painters really tell me?
Interesting void, fixed form and color, at best the parody of movement. Canvases that will only serve as bright posters in the rooms of engineers and doctors who collect.
The painter is made comfortable in a society that is every day more “painter” than he is himself, and that is where he is found unarmed and registered as a clown.
If a painting by X is encountered in some street by Mara, this painting acquires the standing of an amusing and informative thing; [in] a sitting room it’s as decorative as the iron armchairs of the bourgeois / a question of the retina? / yes and no / but it would be better to find ( and unfortunately to systematize for a time) the explosive factor, class-conscious, one hundred percent concerned with work, in juxtaposition to the value of “work” that precedes it and conditions it.
-The painter abandons the studio and ANY status quo and fills his head with wonders / or sets out to play chess like Duchamp / A painting that shows how to paint it again / And a painting of poverty, free or cheap enough, unfinished, of participation, of questioning the participation, of unlimited physical and spiritual extension.
Latin America’s best painting is the one that has even unconscious levels, the game, the party, the experiment that gives us a real vision of what we are and reveals to us what we can do will be Latin America’s best painting is the one that we paint with greens and reds and blues on our faces, to recognize ourselves in the incessant creation of the tribe.
*
Try to abandon everything every day.
Architects, abandon the construction of stages inside and extend your hands (or clench them, depending on the place) toward this space outside. A wall and a ceiling become useful when they are not only used for sleeping or avoiding rain but when they establish, starting, for example, at the everyday act of sleep, conscious bridges between man and his creations, or the momentary impossibility of them.
For architecture and sculpture the infrarealists start from two points: the barricade and the bed.
*
The true imagination is the one that dynamites, elucidates, injects emerald microbes into other imaginations. In poetry and in what is, the way in to matter still has to be the way in to adventure. Creating the tools for everyday subversion. The subjective seasons of being human, with their beautiful trees, giant and obscene, like laboratories of experimentation. Establishing, seeing signs of parallel situations and as harrowing as a great scratch on the chest, on the face. Unending analogy of the face. There are so many of them that when newcomers appear we don’t even count, although we are creating them / looking into a mirror. Nights of torment. Perception is opened up by means of an ethic-aesthetic taken to the extreme.
*
Galaxies of love appear in the palms of our hands.
-Poets, let down your hair (if you have any)
-Burn your garbage and start to love until you get down to the priceless poems
-We don’t want synthetic paintings, but enormous synthetic sunsets
-Horses running 500 kilometers per hour
-Squirrles of fire jumping through trees of fire
-A bet to see who blinks first, between the nerve and the sleeping pill
*
The risk is always somewhere else. The true poet is the one who is always letting go of himself. Never too much time in the same place, like guerrillas, like UFOs, like the white eyes of prisoners in perpetual chains.
*
Fusion and explosion of two shores: creation like audacious graffiti and opened by a crazy kid.
Nothing mechanical. The scales of of amazement. Someone, maybe Hieronymus Bosch, breaks the aquarium of love. Free money. Sweet sister. Libidinous visions like corpses. Little boys cutting the meat of kisses until December.
*
At two in the morning, after having been at Mara’s house, we listen (Mario Santiago and some of us) to laughter that came out of the penthouse of a 9 story building. They didn’t stop, they laughed and laughed while we slept below propped up in various phone booths. It was enough for the moment in that only Mario went on paying attention to to the laughter (the penthouse is a gay bar or something similar and Darío Galicia had told us that the police are always vigilant). We made telephone calls but the coins were made of water. The laughter continued. After we left that district Mario told me that really no one had been laughing, it was recorded laughter and upstairs there, in the penthouse, a small group, or perhaps a single homosexual, had been listening in silence to his records and had made us listen.
-The death of the swan, the last song of the swan, the last song of the black swan, ARE NOT in the Bolshoi but in the pain and the unbearable beauty of the streets.
-A rainbow that begins in a cinema of bad death and that ends in a factory on strike.
-That amnesia never kisses us on the mouth. That it never kisses us.
-We dreamt of utopia and we wake up screaming.
-A poor lonely cowherd who goes back home, that is the wonder.
*
Making new sensations appear –Subverting the everyday
O.K.
Roberto Bolaño, México, 1976
November 22
I woke up at Catalina O’Hara’s house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (María wasn’t there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a few of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.
Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs and philenes. But the two main currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.
“In our language, of course,” he clarified. “In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.”
Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén, Aleixandre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer respectively. As a general rule, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to López Velarde and Efraín Huerta. There were a lot of queers, on the other hand, from the mauler (although for a second I heard mobster) Días Mirón to the illustrious Homero Aridjis. It was necessary to go all the way back to Amado Nervo (whistles) to find a real poet, a faggot poet, this is, and not a philene like the resurrected and now renowned Manuel José Othón from San Luis Potosí, a bore if ever there was one. And speaking of bores: Manuel Acuña was a fairy and José Joaquín Pesado was a Grecian wood nymph, both longtime pimps of a certain kind of Mexican lyrical verse.
“And Efrén Rebolledo?” I asked.
“An extremely minor queer. His only virtue is that he was the first, if not the only, Mexican poet to publish a book in Tokyo: Japanese Poems, 1909. He was a diplomat, of course.”
Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggots and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, according to San Epifanio, were faggot poets by birth, who out of weakness or for comfort’s sake lived within the accepted—most of the time—the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France, and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.
“In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. Take the case of the poor Sanguinetti (I won’t start with Pavese, who was a sad freak, the only one of his kind, or Dino Campana, who dines at a separate table, the table of the hopeless freaks). Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, where one hundred faggot poets, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the Kingdom of Letters (see, if you must, the shameful and malicious reflections of the Tel Quel poets). And the less said the better about the faggotry of the Russian Revolution, which, if we’re to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one.”
“Who?” they asked him. “Mayakovsky?”
“No.”
“Esenin?”
“No.”
“Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?”
“Hardly.”
“Come on, Ernesto, tell us, the suspense is killing us.”
“There was only one,” said San Epifanio, “and now I’ll tell you who it was, but he was the real thing, a steppes-and-snow faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov.”
There was an opinion for every taste.
“And in Latin America, how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martín Adan. Period. New Paragraph. Macedonio Fernández, (although some of his poems are authentically faggotty), butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would’ve driven Lecan crazy), sissies like Lezama Lima, a guided reader of Góngora, and, along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban Revolution (Diego, Vitier, horrible Retamar, pathetic Guillén, inconsolable Fina Garcia) except for Rogelio Nogueras, who is a darling an a nymph with the spirit of a playful faggot. But moving on. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal. The Mexican Contemporaries are queers too…”
“No!” shouted Belano. “Not Gilberto Owen!”
“In fact,” San Epifanio continued unruffled, “Gorotiza’s Death Without End, along with the poetry of Paz, is the ‘Marseillaise’ of the highly nervous and sedentary Mexican Queer Poets. More names:Gelman, nymph; Bendetti, queer; Nacanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Wesphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; our beloved, untouchable Josemilio P., freak;. And back to Spain, back to the beginning”—whistles—“Gongora and Quevedo, queers; san Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences between queers and faggots. Even in their sleep, the former beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the pimps they love. Faggots, on the other hand, live as if a stake is permanently churning their insides and they look at themselves in the mirror (something they both love and hate to do with all their heart), they see the Pimp of Death in their own sunken eyes. For faggots and queers, pimp is the one word that can cross unscathed through the realms of nothingness (or silence or otherness). But then, too, nothing prevents queers and faggots from being good friends if they so desire, from neatly ripping one another off, criticizing or praising one another, publishing or burying one another in the frantic and moribund world of letters.”
“And what about Cesárea Tinajero? Is she a faggot or queer?” someone asked. I didn’t recognize the voice.
“Oh, Cesárea Tinajero is horror itself,” said San Epifanio.
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives.
Since Kelie asked for more Bolaño…
(via noapparatusexceptgutfear)
AUTHENTICALLY FAGGOTY
(via rhizombie)
(via rhizombie)
Now’s the chance to get em back. Almost ten goddamned years workin for these sonofabitches and I’ve got nothin to show for it. It’s a puppet show, ya know what I mean? They point their fat fingers and I walk the walk. I march these dismal goddamned streets. The doors I gotta knock on, I’m tellin ya—these aren’t the places where dreams were missed. These are the places where dreams are ignored. These are the places where soggy old bitches and bastards dig up every bitter feeling they’ve had since birth then throw em at the salesmen in crazy screaming fits. They croak about havin some decency and givin them their peace and quiet. They send the salesmen out to the goddamned sidewalk, throwin rainbows of cusswords in for good measure. They’re real civilized people, see? They’re the ones payin the taxes. They’re the ones pavin the roads. The roads. Well, the roads are like conveyor belts for Jehovah’s witnesses with cheap jewelry and kitchen knives. We’ve lost our status. We are the low men. That’s right, we’re the low men, and I’m bringin us back to the surface. These places. This job. These cheap, lousy, good-for-nothing … Well, they leave me no choice. They leave me here, now, in the office with $45,000 of administrative dough wedged into my bag. Sweatin like a sonofabitch. Reconsiderin, but knowin I’m gonna follow through because this is my chance. This is an opportunity for all of them. For all the low men. Tonight, the plot is set into motion.
You can find more of Mike’s writing here.
New Literature
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