Consider the Birds: They’re Assholes December 13, 2007

Sitting in leaves, I sniff fall. Warm, crisp hills dwell in coffee-stained orange plaid like a couch from the 1970’s, leaves so dull I smell the mildew of November.

And in the mist of all this November, I think about how my friend Dan points to pointillistic detail. He’ll stare into the distance talking tittie recalls and Internet Spam, and without skipping a beat, point out every squirrel streaking flapping down a tree, every sparrow that shits in his birdbath, every toad stinking up his swimming pool like some fat Mafia don.

I think about that level of detail as I sit and watch the thrift-store couch of fall, and I begin to notice the crevices in the lint crumbs. A spider walks a dead leaf like he wearing Waylon Jenning’s cowboy boots. A bluebird dives through sky likes he’s taking a drink, dipping down so close I could be just another tree. His fleece is the bright blue neon of 1990’s Spandex, a dream in my brain. I feel like nature, like God doesn’t even notice I’m here.

The bluebird swings into a tree like a sax man on a jazz groove, slipping down the blues into the bottom of his soul. He’s happy, free and sad because he can smell November, but it’s still warm, like bread. He’s the only color not stained with brown. The blue bird is beautiful and divine.

A browner bird pecks the ground for a Gummy Worm imitation. Minding his own business, he’s reading the paper about Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan blowing each other to bits, chopping each other to pieces. The browner bird sips his coffee and looks out at the browner sky. Perhaps he even wonders why.

And then swinging down a tree, the bright bluebird bitch-smacks him on the head.

For no reason whatsoever.

The bluebird does not kill or eat the browner bird. He does not fuck or give him a kiss, just punches him in the head and flies away.

Why?

Because then it hits me: the birds are assholes. Backbiting, egotistical assholes.

I always thought only humans acted like assholes. People do the cruelest things over religion, gender, sexuality, brownness. Human beings have been assholes to each other throughout the crevices of Time.

But birds. I thought at least birds were nice. Birds always lead the sing-alongs in the Disney movies. Birds taught us all about sex with the bees. I thought that at least birds knew what love was.

But they don’t. Birds can be just as cruel as us, only the bluebirds haven’t invented the aircraft artillery to kill the browner birds yet.

Give them time. They’ll learn. The birds are fucking assholes.

I’ve always believed that the evolution of the universe was the evolution of the consciousness of God. When dinosaurs died, their pea brains were replaced with mammals who learned how to think. This was God’s mind growing. Mammal thoughts led to great and terrible things. Thinking bred jazz, poetry to woe women, but it also invented bombs and thundersticks that kill people. But that’s just God learning, trying to get it right.

Yes, even birds punch each other in the back of the head. But maybe somewhere in the echoes of their bird brains, they are learning too.

Because the next thing God (i.e. the consciousness of the universe) will learn is love. If the mammals and our fine feathered friends don’t, the next being to breathe and breed and blow sax will. The universe will learn to love itself. It will have to. It will learn not to pounce on its browner brother God for the sheer thrill of it. Because all the Gods, the browns and the blues, the purple and the polka dotted, will learn to play jazz together.

Because Love is a jazz jam. Every soul has a rift.

Get a groove on. Be God.

2008: a Space Odd Decadence November 28, 2007

The biggest disappointment of the 21st century is there are still no dolphins in my swimming pool.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” and its sequel “2010” promised my inner eight year old that one foot into the 21st century, we’d have spinning space stations where we walk the planks like M.C. Escher on Mars. We’d have talking computers that can outthink God at a crossword, dolphins for pets swimming happily in our backyards.

And yet as Time keeps ticking into the Great Beyond, our computers can’t think beyond whom to bomb next, and the only frontier left is the next interstate highway connection. When that wart-nosed bitch witch stares point blank into our crystal ball, all she will say is “My God, it’s full of cars.”

Because the future is an Internet scam from Nigeria, and all we have to do is fill out our children’s social security and click “Send.” Talking robots that do our laundry while we wage laser wars on the moon certainly won’t happen within my lifetime, but by all science fiction accounts of the future, we should be there by now.

It’s 2008, so why can’t I beam myself up to a Jupiter disco bar where the Martians are easy? Technology is bunk, black junk in an alley cooked shivering in the sun, twiddling thumbs like some 20th Century bum.

Roy Scheider did his taxes on an Apple II C on the beach catching a tan in “2010.” At least we’ve gotten that far. Laptops go anywhere, and I can download naked pictures of the “Who’s the Boss?” girl in a forest full of blueberries. Knowing the future held that at the age of twelve would have made all those pimply, puberty de-pantsings much more bearable.

Nowadays, most Apple II C’s are recycled hippie house foundations, but at least we can download porn anywhere we roam with a decent connection. Wireless Internet is the only promise Star Trek geeks have made good on so far. We can masturbate in a train, in the rain, with a goat or on a boat, all thanks to Bill Gates and the Larry Flint Foundation.

Because of good Wi-Fi digitally distilled, celebrity titties titillate at the touch of a button. Britney’s nipples are the real reason Al Gore invented the Internet, and we should send the man a check before Alaska melts into the oceans.

Pornography contributes to Global Warming as fat, fifty-year-old orgasmic baldy gas sears the ozone layer. Spam blam smells, but it’s the only thing close to science fiction we’ve got so far.

Web porn can get ugly, but I know that somewhere in the galaxy, Leonard Nimoy looks down at us with a far away smile, knowing we are safely under the protection of computer geeks cradled in the command of his alien stunt double narrating Nova for a day job when he’s not out cruising Star Trek conventions for a cheap date off-line.

Martians Need Some Bush November 28, 2007

Like a JFK hard-on stoned on Viagra’s vagina, W’s wet pipe dream launching a trillion dollars to Mars bares careful consideration with an unbuttoned fly. Are these diamond studded Superman Underoos or NASA’s Skywalker destiny? Though Bush may be Bozo the Clown of world history, his idea to send a man to Mars should be reviewed in hindsight 20/20. Bush dreamed movie stars, and we’ve got a nine trillion dollar credit card bill to prove it.

Consider this: Speaking in Hollywood, outer space would never go to bed with your wife. E.T. is Spielberg’s retarded kangaroo, two left feet who just can’t dance. Earthling wrinkling alien fantasies comfort the jealous sex lives of boring NASA scientists who no longer get it up for their wives.

But reality is the Cosmos is sexy, and just outside of Hollywood, the real-life E.T. might be an admonished Adonis. Earthling women love a man who’s been somewhere, and if the Martians happen to have slick abs, pot-bellied earthling males may never have sex again, vanquishing all hope for the procreation of the species. Any minute of the day, the Hubble could beam down the pectorals of some great alien lover, buffed and gruffed and looking for a God damned good time.

But luckily for the fat ass masculine sex drive, the Hubble is running out of juice like an Energizer bunny nodding tunes, hopping Quaaludes, passing out in his soup. Thanks to the chimp in the cowboy hat, we can’t afford to fix it, so we’ll never know how stacked the Cosmos really gets, saving our entire species from sexual procrastination and ultimate annihilation.

So God bless the Bush and his legends of legacy. Earthling humdrum needs excitement, and fortunately, NASA’s can’t afford to upgrade the Commodore 64 monitoring the earth’s climate, so we’ll never know when the next Global Warming Ecstasy Rave discos down in strobe lights.

Strobe-light typhoons make life sexy, ripped and glistening. A huff and a puff, and Atlantis and the City of Angels may suddenly share the same stretch of reef, bobbing in the water like New Orleans’ grief. Thanks to W’s dysfunctional deficit, Bruce Willis might have to save our sorry asses in a true-to-life Hollywood blockbuster brought to you by the foxiest news.

No news is good snooze. Thankfully for the Bible-college educated, NASA lacks the cash to study the nature of the Cosmos, and we may never know what went BANG!, why anti-matter really matters or why black holes dress Gothic. For the Bible tells us so is all we really need to know.

Adam and Eve wore dinosaurs like bloody mink coats, petted lions for pleasure, didn’t believe in Neanderthals nor Lucy in the sky of a caveman. Adam and Eve went to church every week and loved Jesus with all their hearts. With less astronomical research and plenty of pipe organs, science class need no longer be the soulless soul sucker of Satan’s apathy.

Six pack alien abs abolished for good, cliffhanger weather raves on the edge of our seats, Bible-essential science to put any classroom to sleep- such are the unforeseen benefits of Bush’s trillion dollar dream. But inspired by America’s greatest generation now broke as a fuck in the back of a pick-up truck, we want a bang for our buck, a buck head for our mantle, a world of peace though it all went to pieces.

Let’s make that trillion dollars worth every cent. Send George to Mars wrapped in a flight suit and disco leopard go-go boots. A million monkeys on a million typewriters will write him another speech. As Bush smiles for the Martians on their bright red soil, it will be one small step for a man, one giant leap as Bruce Willis drop-kicks him in the ass, power-locks all the doors and floors it back to Hollywood. Coming to a theater near you, NASA’s biggest bang since the invention of Tang.

Blue Music and a Tip Jar (I’ve Got the G-string Blues) November 28, 2007

A day is a job to pay the piper’s pimp. Every Cheerio in the kitchen is a piece of white bone. The weight of a Pontiac sighs in my bloodstream, and the air I breathe in the house I live is paid an hourly wage. Every drop of perspiration rations more numbers to drop on the gas bill. Everything we own, everything we need is made and paid in sweat. Even the alarm clock is made for the blood of the workers, paid by Jesus Christ delivering pizzas for shitty tips and drug money.

But when the sun goes down, jazz swings aqua blues in an art aquarium, rippling jellyfish down the sea breeze of a nightclub. Poetry art intoxicates, wobbles the rabble of the workweek blues. Factory boys kick loose, hipped in the hop of beer blues juice. Rock and Roll post Warhol is a bump on a thumb, while Neruda lies naked on the page. We all get juice from art music blues, satiating proverbial poetry verbs on a dial, riding lightning down the meter of a stereo receiver.

Musicians play, while the rest work, bleed, piss, and die. Writing is work, as carpel tunnel burns fingers to the bone to meet end’s make. Every word is a blood vessel, a marrow of bone’s soul aching sound: every poem is a pint of blood.

While words can conveniently pay bills­ buried in the New York Times, poems convalesce veins of sex sun gold like a bowl of mind. Poetry lays, but never pays unless you’re a pop star Jewel, a teenage-legged gimmick and the best selling poet in the English language. Bone Poets starve in bars, freeze on the train tracks, stick their heads in the oven when the rent comes due. Bone Poets die lonely and Grammy-less.

But I stick my head in the stars until poetry sizzle-bleeds all over my good sneakers. I want to write words that drip, purr, lure lucid insanity. A sniff of art intakes the toxins that it takes, imbibing the babbling baby at the base of the spine, for I want to get the whole world high on dandelion word wine.

Scraped like resin off a Candy Land board game, my dream is to go to work every day in nothing but a G-string, handcuffed to a coffee cup and the keys to a keyboard, pouring art music blues onto a blank white night of a computer screen, oblivious to all but oblivion.

And into these blues I pour in everyone. Soaked with raw whiskey and lit on fire, words spread dancing like strippers. I want to melt muse all damn day in my underwear for a living. Tell your friends; write my name on the bathroom stall. Spread me like a Jehovah’s Witness.

Geo Porn Turns Global Warning (Where Have All the Titties Gone?) November 28, 2007

The drill of the drone drains my sanity as the walls of the dentist office shine through time. I kill time waiting for my time, for like a blindfold and a lit cigarette, like a shaved bald spot, my moment waits behind the curtain under the drill of high noon high on Novocain. And like a last meal of pepperoni pizza reeking anchovies, dentist office literature offers an array of gardening tips and fishing guides, baby mags and muscle cars, housewife reads and ABC anthologies. I loiter through gun nut tribute issues and onto a recent copy of National Geographic, a favorite titty mag of my childhood.

Memories ease in the breeze. Too short to grow facial hair, we used to sneak behind the liquor cabinet where my best friend’s dad kept his prized collection of National Geographic, a virtual history of tribal titty stretching back into the 1950s. National Geographic shined pure porn to my eight-year-old eyes as we sulked under a shelf stocked with the finest waters that ever ran through Kentucky.

Swinging Pygmy flabby glory was my introduction to the female form at the tender age of first grade. Those centerfolds of hunter and gatherer society titty deserved the Tipper Sticker of Explicity. In an age of suicidal heavy metal porno, somehow anthropological pin-up beauties slipped beneath the radar of the United States Congress and Al Gore’s sex muffin.

The fly girls of Niger have long been my Viagra of dentist office arousal, stiffer than Dr. Seuss meets Richard Sccary with a cough to the left. In an elementary school mind, sex makes love to anthropology without apology, and even now as an adult, my inner seven-year-old salivates down my bearded chin as I tickle the spine of spanking fresh National Geographic and step inside…

…and am greeted by African women wearing T-shirts made of Idaho, annual sock-hops at the Y, DARE to resist drug relays for cancer back in 1985. Some sport Hawaiian flowers thrift-stored floored from that late ‘80’s craze. Bart Simpson smiles down African cleavage toiling her way to the well. A faded mullet MacGyver wife-beater is the only thing one little girl has on.

Their shining nipple moons are covered by our left-over thrift-store. All the crap too crappy for America’s poverty stricken now worn by people who once ran around with a stitch of nothing on.

I remember a cocktail conversation with a doctor fresh from Africa digging wells and culturing throats. She said the naked Africans went Christian, covering their bodies in our thrift store rejects because now they have something to hide. Three million years of fashion tradition turned “Girls Gone Wild,” thanks to missionaries making the most of their position.

And in the breeze where all the flowers have gone, the globe calls out a warning. Amidst pictures of African thrift store safari, National Geographic is now filled with articles crusading against Global Warming polar bears melting into arctic puddles.

Words thaw Alaskan ice-cubes in millionaire microwaves; oceans runneth over. The earth is a blister on a smoker’s lung thanks to  all the cowboys hooked on dinosaur bile so their Hummers may hum. National Geographic is still fighting the good fight bringing the world to America’s living rooms. But now it’s a world bubbling in the oil of America.

One would think more bare titty’d be free streaking through February as the heat wave kicks on, but everyone has something to hide, especially America. Our shame is contagious Iran Contra as the CIA conspires in thrift store aisles, and diamond miners, sweating in the belly of the earth for $1.75 a day, dress like Disney tourists stranded in the 1980s. Culture is exported like our greenhouse gases, smoldering all the oxygen until even a hit of fresh air burns like Everclear.

So National Geographic’s nuptial nipples have been nipped in the thrift-store as their editorial board struggles to take in all our carbon monoxide. And dentist office waiting rooms will forever be sinister as future generations of seven-year-olds have no more to gawk at than the oceans boiling over.

Yet we were all born naked, even Christ who had nothing to hide, even cowboys conscientiously objecting to the Kyoto Treaty’s piety. And one day we will stand nude before God, and like Christ, our arms will open wide in a bear titty hug, bare shockingly beautiful.

Glide in glory; ask for grace. Nothing will clothe, nothing will hide, as nothing is everything we shall become.

Rosetta’s Stoned Roach November 28, 2007

Caught in the teeth of Mr. T’s feathering signature roach clip, the cockroach smiles beads for eyes hiding inside the dream of his kingdom. I stare to know the secrets of his language. I want to understand the phonetics when cockroaches phone lunatics howling Armageddon dreams in the middle of the night; I want to learn their lullabies singing the drunks asleep off in newspaper piles.  And through the teeth of the roach clip, I look the cockroach in the eye as the bulbs secrete the secrets of its alphabet dialect. We understand one another.

How blessed are the meek eating fossilized pizza bones. They shall inherit our crap. Thanks to humans, oceans donate needles upon the sands of cockroach sunrises. Long after we’re mushroom cloud dust, human landfills will flow a bountiful buffet for the cockroach gourmet. Our trash will become a food source for a new cockroach generation. Roaches will be reborn Buddhas never desiring hunger or thirst, sucking the liposuction from our lips in a delicious good night kiss.

Smacking their lips, they’ll taste our world to wonder the secrets of our lost astrology. What did we talking apes dream about when we discovered Kool-Aid and the atom bomb? Who did we laugh at; what made us dance? We may leave behind a kingdom of trash to eat, but I want these cockroaches to understand that we also had John Belushi’s sushi, Frank Zappa’s zap gun guitar strings, Ledbetter’s belly full of lead, e.e. cummin’s lower-cased sex drive.

We had soul; we had essence. When all we needed, we loved the Beatles, and Gandhi and Martin Luther King stopped bullets for truth. Our babies began knowing everything, and our old people forgot their minds in the pocket lint of time. Humans fucked and loved and wrote a million great songs about it.

What if cockroaches watch Teletubbie reruns centuries from now and never have a clue? When the cockroach archeologists unearth basements of Ninja Turtle comics, how will they get the jokes? Without some medium between cockroach idiom and what we leave behind, humanity will forever be a clusterfuck of mystery.

Maybe it’s the roach clip talking, but the cockroaches need their own Rosetta Stone, something to translate between our two languages so the puzzle makes sense. Egyptians had one made in Greek, and now we understand the graffiti on the walls of Ramses’s toilet stall.

And so I penned the cockroaches this decree, a shared message between our two civilizations:

“Our high priests and artists, those who clothed the nakedness of God, who flew across Hendrix’s guitar neck on golden Hawk wings, oozed the poetry portal of lyrical ejaculation. Our art inspired Gods. And while we did invent the A-bomb, at least we did so drenched in jazz, at least we knew how to dance. Maybe if we had made more music and less malicious math, if our poetry only transcended our self-destruction, we wouldn’t be the atomic dust bunnies you find us today. We tried our best, and we leave you what’s left. Learn from our perpetual suicide. Don’t be so murderously industrious. Play more. Take the day off. Smell the flowers. May you live a little, and your cockroach sovereignty continue long after the landfills run dry and humanity is nothing but a fossilized belch.”

But how to tell the cockroaches in a language they understand? Hence, I stare the roach in the eye to know the secrets of his dialect. Slowly, the cockroach tells me his desires, his dreams and pipe schemes, his lust for dust.

To understand a roach, realize they are the only ones left who still read newspapers. While the rest of us Google eye tunes and porno implants, cockroaches digest the New York Times like a lusty paperback, biding their time, waiting their turn. Cockroaches are geeks, and far down the evolutionary line, they will develop an alphabet based on the secret tongue of Bill Gates, spelled out in whatever punctuation sleeps on top of my keyboard.

Hence the translated decree, in cockroach:

“!$$%^ ^&&** ^&*(*, ( !#$%5 ^^(*(&( %W%%$ ^**(%%45, %#$%^ @#$@#$ @#$@#$@#$ $%^%$^7, %^**((*()^*&^*($%^#$% 45^457. $% #$%@#$ ~!!@$ $&%. ^*^( ^*^(&*. (0 #$%#$%$# @#$@$, @#$@% $%&^*&*( ^*^*&^* $%^$%^ #$%$&57, %^&*568 %^$^$^ @$@$E%^ . &&*^*(9 &%&%^&%&^ @#$@$@#$@#$ $^$^$%, ^$ &%^&%& 5&%^&^%7, %&%^7 %^&^. $%^%$654. /#$%&^ %^&^%& $%^$%. ^$% %&^%^&^%& $%@$@#$ $%#$%$&. #$%#$% #$%$%#% %$%^ %^&&*/. $^%$^$%^$%&%^&. @!@$ 3$% $%^$%^ $%^& $%#$%. #%$%& **&^%$@@ *()_++(& %#@!@$%^& (&*&^%&()_+)*&% &%#@#$%&^. *(&* (*(&*& ()*)*(&%#@ @$%^^$^* *&^%$##$% &*^&*((()*^%$^*()_)(*&^#$#@$$.”

Future cockroach archeologists will translate a language bridge between our two civilizations. As roach anthropologists study vintage Laverne and Shirley for a clue of what we were really like, they will do so with a cockroach translation of everything Lennie and Squiggy had to say. Sitcom hoodlums will become the ancient pyramids of 20th century humanity, stretching into the horizon in a desperate plea for immortality.

Buddha Blues November 28, 2007

My blond burning armpit bush tells me essence is constant, for whenever I reach to heaven in the shower, I always count the damp hair concaving down its cave’s insides to remind me I am animal. But munching in the bush like a crapping zebra, a gray hair muses another daydream: I am dying. Graying, decaying instead of growing, one cell after another wakes up in the morning to find itself dead.

I examine the hair in the bathroom light: gray as the lint in an old grubber’s toes, gray as the souls of baby moles, gray as a Lawrence Welk lay on Sunday. How long before gray-haired zebras trample the pits of my arms, munching skin down to bone, and I roll in a grave as my great, great grandchildren listen to shitty music and dress like ridiculous snots?

A towel off, a dry down, and another gray hair, and I am a clown crumbling in Time. This one I already knew, spotted three months ago in my Viking red beard by my aging father. He touched it like his own death, and I could see him foresee his own impending doom. From old ladies to screaming babies, we are all born card tables for the peanuckle of earthworms.

Even the oldest statues fold. Today’s newspaper tells me they are picking up the pieces of Buddhas in Afghanistan. In 2001, right wing religious nuts blew the Buddhas of Bamyan to Kingdom Come, two of the tallest Buddha statues ever carved into a cliff for the sheer hell of it. Measuring 180 and 121 feet, the Buddhas stared from that rock for over 1,600 years, smiling in wombs.

But the Buddhas were idolatrous and un-Islamic, and the Taliban were un-Buddhas. As Time is an ocean, the Taliban took an entire month from their short lives to blast the Buddhas of Bamyan to the fires of hell with tanks and dynamite. Now young boys search through weeds for pieces of Buddha like smashed pottery.

If only Allah deserves worship, then only the Taliban, those toweled Carmen Miranda-men throwing bloody flowers on God’s feet, deserve to decree who is God. Maraca-mamboed bazookas give them Holy authority like the sexy sultans of samba they are, twirling exploding gowns, swaying hips, clacking gold teeth.

But like the lady with the bowl of fruit on her head, the Taliban will too die, in time too confused for fruit and underwear, just as the ghost of Carmen markets Fruit of the Loom, Chiquita bananas on a sunny spring day.

For even Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi is merely mortal. The Taliban governor, widely seen as responsible for the statues’ destruction, was gunned down one afternoon on his way to prayers. Perhaps little children will pick up pieces of him in the bushes like other worldly debris.

When I read of the Buddhas’ destruction years ago, I felt immensely sad at the engorged egos of men claiming to live their lives close to God. But then Tibetan Buddhists slept on my neighbor’s couch. They spent an entire week creating a majestic colored sand mandala that seemed as if it should last forever in a museum of Time.

But meditating and praying, the monks poured their sand dream into the river, where it splashed eternally resting in fishes and slime. As everyone knows, fish slime is light, and the sand became light, for everything that dies becomes immortal like sunshine.

Because when we die we speed like light.

Buddha is round, a circle ball, a slick ball of blues rolling in space through the essence of eternity. What’s more Buddha than sleeping fish slime? What’s more Buddha than smashed pottery admitting mortality? As my hair turns gray standing in the showers of Time, I am becoming a ball of light, like star light speeding through the universe, becoming poetry, becoming prophecy, reborn desire in the blue of the night.