Category Archives: Politics

Monday Morning’s Meeting With Steve

It’d be nice if you could at least say hello

Hey!
You!

Frenzied dizzel-brain!
Dog-crapping-up-my-yard-while-out-for-a-late-morning-walk neighbor!
What the f?
I mean like
What the actual f?
“Neighbor!”

Yes, that’s right, I am addressing you
Yes, you
The one now clamoring how you “forgot the poop bags, ah ho ho ho, ha ha ha, oh well, ha ha, short term memory loss I guess and at least it’s organic fertilizer, right?”

All tittered nervously in short gulps of air and high pitched giggles
Eyes darting about the sidewalk for somewhere safe to rest your desperate gaze
But never in my field of vision, never in my eyes
I’ve got eyes you know, I’ve got eyes

Yeah
And these eyes?
They see you every day at this same time, in this same pattern, this same rut you’ve created, this habitual groove I’ve succumbed to too, finding these few minutes to pull errant weeds every weekday at these very same moments on these very same clocks we share in common

You know man I thought we were neighbors
I thought we shared this accidental bond
C’mon
Friends? No, we’re not friends
Obviously
Obviously
But we live on the same pre-planned block and we see each other every day
And we know our routines and so we must have a
A relationship right?
You do not think so?
Ok

Wait
Wait!

How will you act,
I mean it, listen to this:
How will you act when the reckoning is on the doorstep of our horizon?

The reckoning, you feckless fool, you know – Jesus.
The foreign hordes at our shores
The great climate calamity a’comin’ and a’trottin’ our way
(Only one of those is true I know but I’m never sure which one.
Don’t TELL me…)
When the minutes remaining mean the difference between life and death and that difference is partnership and camaraderie and eye contact goddamnit!
Real life begins at the conception of emergency
And that shit
That development of paranoia and fear materializing in the actual world, touching us and abrading our actual skin,
That shit is organic too, dear neighbor, you subject of my budding disdain, you dog obsessed spineless sidewalk meanderer,
That shit is organic too

And now you’re walking away
And now you’re walking away

I was just trying to connect
That’s all
Forge some
Community
In this accidental community

Ah, well
Well

Time now I suppose to return indoors
To fret anew
O’er my bitcoin account
O’er my NFT sales
O’er my dark web deliveries

FlyingJohn

‘20 to ‘21 (note to self)

All year long all year all year!
We were all unable to leave all
Unable to breathe all
Unable to grieve all
All year!
And we’ve been holding
Off holding off
All year!
The floods heavy
The fathoms blue
The ballooning fear
The agony and sorrow we’ve lived through
It is a dark time and it is.  It is
Past far past!
Time to acknowledge the hurt time
To let in the pain time
To exhale
The lost rhyme.
The lost rhyme.

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Letter to the neighborhood conspiracist following an unsurprisingly heated and useless yammer session.

Dear Steve,

To summarize the thoughts I shared with you this morning over our heaping trash and virtue-signalling recycle bins (as you so cynically dubbed them):

The conspiracy theorist is problematic not because rational people believe conspiracies don’t actually exist, he’s problematic because he cannot offer rational people any persuasive evidence that confirms his often extravagant fever-dreams. He is no detective, but simply a self-indulgent and self-imposed outcast in love with his own fantasies and blind to basic reality and reason.

Everyone knows the truth, except you, Steve. It’s too bad you missed that day at school.

Cordially yours,

Bon

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Betsy? Dolly. Mmm Hmm. We Need To Talk.

And still you allow the wild to awake, take fire, and break free
You still listen for the chatter of the ancient trees gossiping secrets of freedoms dreamed
You still believe the hope of these towering hills and blinding plains, the lie of infinite rains
You still swim the chaos of rapid waters forsaking the eddies, the ease, the still pools of disease

And still

And still
You’ve become this bloated butterball baking
Basted brightly in cortisol tattoos
And Schadenfreude shampoos
Laboring place to place
A slower and slower pace
Agony in your face
Cowering against connections
Ignoring local elections
Seeking advantage and protection
To mock and tweak
The others you seek
To re-tweak, re-Tweet,
Fellow-travelers naive as thee, judging them, my phrasing, and me

I worry for your heart
Your literal and figurative heart
America

And still
Here I sit
You remind me
This armchair pundit opining
This internet poet resigning
To soft wrinkles, a stiff spine
A graceless and sad decline
Still overwriting every goddmamn line

True
True, I admit
That’s it, that’s it
I too
I too am
Complicit

And still
I do
I do still worry
I still worry for you
My fattened flailing friend
My family
My blood
My soul
My soil
Coiled to bite
Too spoiled to fight
Happy Birthday goodnight
Happy Birthday goodnight

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Capitalism

Saw me a further flown flower
All the way from Ee-jup
Imagine that
Smelled sweet and acrid
Acid wells and candy cane
Glowed soft white
Speckled yellow freckles and freckled yellow speckles
Pancake
Pancake just burned in momma’s overripe oven
This flower
This weed

A thing of beauty
And I let it slip away
Saw me the man abscond with his purchase
No doubt mine eyes did burn
No doubt
But the burn ain’t have time to blink
For this fire to ignite again
Elsewhere inseminated
Another flower flown
Flown further still

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