In the Future, Heartbreaking News Spreads by Text (Spares the Awkwardness)

Dead twins

Her fault or his doesn’t matter

What kind of life anyway

Father in a methadone clinic

Who cares if he has a job now

Can’t help but think

They got lucky.

She thought this would save him

Keep him on la diritta via

Can’t help but blame herself

It was a stupid idea in the first place

But to be a mother—

Demiurge cursing the demiurge

That creates but

Does not maintain.

Funny that yesterday

I saw a bumpersticker

on a SUV that said

“Real men make twins”

Basta

Homogenizers
white as milk
dead as paper
spread a cultureless culture
on a land that had so much of its own.
Fully self-conscious of it,
guilt is built into their conception of themselves,
but for them it's a white man's burden:
they must save the savages' souls.

Invasive species,
any individual specimen may be acceptable
and nice enough
(the policeman, the pharmaceutical representative, the slavemaster, the capitalist, the nazi)
but taken together they are worthy of
a fight to the death.

Self-commodified talentless hacks
each a brand,
each anomalous,
each a rebel,
each cool,
vapid valueless archcapitalists
who sell their meretricious ware
to their contemporaries who
know what it's all about
and long to be the same thing.

Everything you touch dies.
You are why I don't recite poetry
or play slide guitar in public.
You justify NYC being nuked,
you almost make me hate Brooklyn.

Corny Cornus , Bro (or Future Ode to the Stupid Ages; or There Is No Alternative to Capitalism)

Charging Bull that reaches back
to before the urbanesque agglomerations
that became the hoyuks of Anatolia,
indeed, beyond our neolithic forebears
to that nethertime when H. Sapiens
had become artists but were not yet Kings
(but were probably already priests)

Auroch:
first for nothing,
then animated with animus,
and after apotheosis, a god.

Power:
Totemic, magical, nigh religious.

Markets true as Baal to Qart'hadast:
Ballerinas contort fine motions
on the back of the bronze beast,
flanked by the blue guard of Nea-Neapolis
who try to keep it from anarchonoclasts
who would destroy it with the fervor
of zealots against any idol.

Jubilee not forthcoming,
they have honed their craft
and no longer fear us,
our time is a line and
our latter-day kingship
needs not the nod of a god,
so the bull that once
gave holy sanction to
restoring the land
forgiving our debts,
and forever creating all anew,
instead tramples us,
leaving our broken bodies
strewn about the fields,
our own spilt blood
nourishing the soil,
preparing for another harvest
whose yield we will never taste.

We wait for the animal to die,
to exhaust itself and the world,
and look forward only to an end,
and never again a rebirth.

Apres Toi, Le Deluge

Literal wastes of life, talent, youth, and privilege.
Could've-beens, not ne'er-do-wells (well, some).
Addicts and depressives, all suicides.
White sons of Park Slope yuppies passing a crackpipe in 2013,
with bags of heroin and coke on the table.
The bar is set six feet under the cold clay:
"at least we're still here, bro" is supposed to be some kind of victory.
Every day the same as the last,
the only change being the ever-deepening lines in their foreheads.
Parting with prized possessions for paltry sums.
Stealing from employer, colleagues, friends, and family.
He killed one of his junkie confederates as a hookup:
“I warned him not to drink that night, it was four packets.”
But instead of setting himself on a course of
self-reflection and seizing the resolve to overcome,
in this wake death appeared to him as
hope of sweet release and better-than-this.
Survivor guilt: the living dead envy the dead.
PLVS VLTRA was the only way to honor his fallen comrades,
steaming ever farther to the part of the map labelled
HIC SVNT DRACONES, because, after all, that's the point.
Finally shipwrecked, his salvation was cold, retributive justice.
Addict once and now an addict for life,
his one solace is that his drug of choice wasn't alcohol
because you can at least avoid smackheads.
Some are bankers and architects,
some are addicts and thieves,
some are bucking capitalism seeking meaning and god,
and some are dead.
And I'm dead too, though,
just not my body.
Not yet.

[The subject is really time, not heroin; the ravages of aging, how everyone just settles into their own kind of sadness, accepts that all the promise of early life is gone and this is what you're left with, and how different settling into that sadness can be for people who grew up together: a banker, a junkie, etc.]