Cosmic Joke

I was put here by the forces that 

put people there...wherever they

find themselves.  I "have" a 

beautiful house with gardens,

and plenty of places to get high,

and abide alone.  I write because

that's all that's left to do. I cry

because the poor bastards have

no idea....

Still, the universe caresses me

with the sight of bougainvillae.

 

Oops...

I was living dead till I dug myself up, dig?

It took forty years, but now I'm fine...

Only trouble is, now that I'm awake,

I look around and wish I was dead.

Ode to Terry Southern

You had immense fun and joy

poking holes of laughter into

Eisenhower deadly sleepwalk. 

Blindsided by backlash of no

alternative besides Nillson nihilism,

you fell by the roadside like

so many good intentions.

What you wrote as a joke is now

absurdly commonplace.

You can't out parody self parody

taken as the truth.

Your end was an end of a road.

Turn of Season

A season for every man...frantic burst of creativity in the Twentieth Century,

heralding the end of smarty pants...no matter to him if the answer is emblazoned

in the minds of great monks...he was in for the killing, the taste of bloody success...

the frenzy of pleasure that comes from victory...and in the last 100 years or so

there was plenty of success to go around...a feeding orgy of triumph as the earth

was put into harness and ridden into the ground.

Try to sound hopeful.

It's a dream...the dream continues despite life and death, this world or that...

do you know how big the universe is? Just be careful what you dream...

monsters from the Id...time is another dimension we move through...life

after life...only temporarily attached to a human body...the film we store in

the vault of mind memory is shaped into the next movie...cast into the next body.

The universe has plenty of bodies to go around.

A turning of the season as homosap "Doh!"s  himself into temporary non-existence...

...just hope the dope doesn't find another planet to inhabit in time.

"Can't let this cat out of the bag, no siree! Ruin the whole Milky Way he will...

why, he ain't even house broken....can't let something like that soil the rugs...

he get's out of the yard and we'll have to put him down...no use upsetting

the neighbors.

"Shouldn't have tried evolving higher beings out of primates...the Three Stooges

were funny, but not worth the investment....should have gone with the dolphins 

like usual....we'll harvest the art while there's still time and write off the rest of it.

I wonder what a Picasso will go for on Alpha Centauri? Don't bother sending any 

more mushrooms....too much for these apes." 

Diminishing Returns

"I think most American publishers' tastes are on the level of the comic strip...they don't

have time to read; they're too busy hustling....they're the first automatons trained quite simply

to spot imitations of previous imitations."  Terry Southern, circa 1958

"It is precisely in unconscious involuntary manifestations that all evil lies. You do not yet 

understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you

do understand."  G.I Gurdjieff, 1916

"Rage, rage, against the dying of the light."   Dylan Thomas

What happened to the poets, the writers, the painters?

What happened to the people that loved them?

Belittled, shot, thrown into a ditch like Lowrey's Counsel...

poems wrapping fish like yesterday's newspaper...

the rise of the "airport novel"....

What happened to Paris, Greenwich Village,  Morocco.... 

seething gardens of human rainbow? 

The magic lantern hypnotized us all...

patterns on a screen that stripped us bare

of sweat, love and joy so all that's left is fear...

and a numbness that freezes bone.

Even the magazines are getting thinner...

starved because of inattention...

There is a fierce song in the hearts of

men and women  that will not be suppressed.

Poets die so that others may read them and live.

I drink to that....I will not be led to my slaughter

without a handshake to my executioner,

and the chance to call him "brother".

The world is going insane in sameness..

which is why it is my duty to be crazy

and loud with laughter...chaos is the

compassionate response to an order

imposed by madmen.

There is no end to this poem,

nor am I a poet...

I'm just a human that likes to sing.