various camper trailers 

scattered across five acres, 

along with goats and chickens

ancient white trash quartz and wild 

harvested railroad spikes glazed 

with spray paint speckles as spell

freestyle sonnet #044: THE REASON TRUMP MIGHT BE NEXT PRESIDENT

Shineface pundits analyze Trump cards royal flush
of ordained oligarchy, but make no mistake -
corrupt billionaire ain't saving grace which will crush
corrupt billionaires. Real people recognize fake;

but people been down so long got no fucks to give.
My pops was lifelong chainsaw mechanic, died young
(by conventional average), so didn't live
to see this day, but that lifelong frustration sprung

from him before self-medication took its toll;
he would've been down for Trump, I know, not with pride
but with almost nihilist no fucks left lost soul
abandoned by exceptionalism, denied

the audacity of hope. So what's left? Voting
against pre-fab talking points pundits are quoting.

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign Policy Guru from New York Times machine
I often look at streams of readers at *cutting edge* and *progressive* reading series, and the steady parade of unphotoshopped but pure shinefaces freaks me out. How is a scuffed fucker supposed to become pyramid success when already so obviously flawed? Every little known site avatar full of perfect white face with perfect MFA, and it's freaky. So to read about one of these *cutting edge* and *progressive* new world not-traditionalists being, well, just a deeply embedded part of the establishment, I don't know, it's already weird enough this collection of facts.
But what's weird as fuck is the mentions of Holden Caulfield in this piece. Holden fucking Caulfield. Now the internet machine has been great for clouding and fogging all things into conspiracies, to where everything is stupid and means nothing, and that way we can elect Donald Trumps and have robot planes bomb Pakistani weddings. But did you know that there are weird Catcher in the Rye conspiracies? That Sirhan Sirhan was carrying the fucking book when he shot that Kennedy bro. That the John Lennon murdered also was carrying the fucking book. That even Winona Ryder, when she got all weird and spaced out and was arrested for shoplifting, was fucking carrying that book. Now whatever, I can see somebody loving a book a lot. I love a couple of books a whole lot, so much so I buy used copies whenever I find them to give to other people. But if I was gonna go murdering somebody, I'd probably leave the book at home to be honest. And yet here are multiple instances of people carrying that same book when they do weird shit.
Well, even weirder is the secret yet allegedly based in truth notions that Salinger was on CIA payroll. But deeper than that is the connections (all of this is whispered, and obviously there's no proof to any of this, especially now that we have the internet fog and all proof is just a joke meant to obfuscate all shit into oblivion philosophies) the CIA is supposed to have to highly credentialed MFA programs, specifically (as I have heard) the Iowa Writer's Workshop. There was some article a while back I read about some novelist talking about becoming a spy, and I was like, "Holy shit, he's saying the conspiracy, but making it some 'hahaha, check out how strange my life journey has been' crap."
Now of course this is all nonsense, just gibberish by dumb ol' Raven Mack at his dumb ol' blogsite in the dusty ass corner of the internet on his 2004 ass looking website. But damn yo, read this article. This shit is reality. And we're supposed to be impressed by it. I don't get this fucking world, at least not the one put forth by those who are writing the history.

"You Want a Description of Hell?" Oxycontin's 12-Hour Problem from Los Angeles Times machine
So Oxycontin and it's parent pharma company have been taking heat lately in media for having a pretty strong hand in helping the latest heroin epidemic as much as any Mexican drug cartel. The sad thing is this only became newsworthy now that suburban kids are starting to OD. Oxycontin has been a huge issue in rural American parts of Greater Appalachia for a long ass minute. I know people who have been in that rabbithole (thankfully, so far as I am aware, none of them have ended up down the heroin route, at least not long enough for it to be obvious), some of them people I love. The issue is not, however, just a corrupt pharmaceutical company alone. They were able to game the FDA system because the system is designed for gaming. That is by design. This article is painting Oxycontin as an aberration, that the family who profited off of this - passing other dynastic families like the Rockefellers and Carnegies in the process - somehow is lesser than those other mentioned dynastic families, that rigging the system in the 1920s was somehow more pure and acceptable than rigging the system in 2000s.
I don't know, I don't really have anything specific I can say. I mean you have the earlier article about OBAMA'S QUIRKY NOVELIST SPEECHWRITER FOREIGN GURU guy, and Obama's health insurance plan is still touted, for some reason, by many, as a step in the right direction for our nation's broken health care system, as if having wolves circling the henhouse but then demanding all the hens pay into the wolves to trust the wolves to not eat them (for profit) is somehow fixing a fucked up situation. I don't get it. There were fucking opioid-related constipation drug commercials at the Super Bowl this past year - the most expensive commercial time on earth, a drug for a side effect symptom of opioid abuse saw it a worthwhile investment to buy that commercial time. You realize in terms of dollars and cents how fucking crazy that is?
People are getting eat up by this system. We are living in fogged times unlike anything we've seen before, and a large part of that is due to the progress of technology - both our social media as well as our pharmaceutical inputs (including through our *non-drug* diet). Fuck man, today's INTERNET READING LIST OF LATE is sounding like crazy man Alex Jones shit, but I don't know, the fog is fucking thick right now. I feel overwhelmed by it some days.

The Sacred Grain of the Northwoods from Roads & Kingdoms
The final of these 3 links for this morning is about wild rice. I was at the Trader Joe's yesterday getting myself some more European style yogurt containers for my cayenne yogurt drinks (just like Karoun's! but I did it myself!) and I laughed at the "cultivated wild rice" label on the cultivated wild rice. We recently had some bona fide self-harvested wild rice gifted to us from some people connected to that realm, and no shit, it has felt important to eat it right, like don't just whip it up with some black beans on a Tuesday afternoon.
I will be honest, I feel too fogged to write clearly about all these things today. But I live down the road from former dairy farmland now leased out to giant agri-business entities who plant slave corn or slave soy depending on the year. You can actually feel the slavery in the plants. I walk up there sometimes and vibe to them. (Perhaps you will find this crazy but) Plants have feelings. They do not want to be enslaved any more than pig farms are full of happy pigs dancing in happy circles as someone makes barbecue from them (as the label often suggests). But what do we do? We can wild harvest enough food to support all these people, can we?
(That leads to philosophical jump to tech industry shit like soylent, which itself is heavily invested in the philosophy of MAN HAS DOMINION OVER THE EARTH even if they took mystery god out of the equation. I'm not down with that. None of it.)
But the simple fact that wild rice exists less, for what seems to be fairly obvious scientific reasons, yet that is overruled by bigger interests, leaving original cultures at a loss for something that has far more than economic importance to them but spiritual significance, I don't know. We very obviously went wrong somewhere. We think economic significance enables a progressive replacement for spiritual significance. It doesn't though. This is why we might end up with a fucking President Trump, because people know the emperor has no clothes on, and they don't really care that the guy pointing it out is an idiot liar with a bad hairpiece. They're just going, "hahaha, no shit! Fuck the emperor!"
There is no way to tie all this together, but if you read the articles, it will tie together for you I hope. Those two words are important, too - "I hope". No empire is bigger than earth; this has been shown time and time again. And though many humans may die due to our greedy incompetence at living with the rest of the biosphere, some humans will survive, and adapt, and regenerate, and stack stones into cities and write words into prophecy. I maintain hope that all will work out, or at least continue, and all one can do is have hope and do their best to survive. But goddamn, the fog is so fucking thick...

shower before work if white 

collar; shower after work 

if blue collar; fuck showers

"lucha libre" means "freestyle"; 

"dirtgod" means "god of dirt birth, 

worthless in pyramid eyes”

where nature and men struggle 

for survival side-by-side, 

blossoming where allowed to

in the end, whirlwind blizzard 

of barely memories fade 

into last breath transition

back behind rundown strip mall 

used tire and rim shop, by the 

dumpster, that’s where I stashed it

"it should have been Lars" it 

was often said while we smoked 

dirtweed through empty beercans

never underestimate 

the ability of white 

paint to correct defects

simple lime green posterboard 

from the dollar tree rolled up, 

made into photo filter

chemtrail X marks the sunspot; 

tree (old ways) and power line 

(new) jostle for position

digital tonton macoutes 

shoot electromagnetic 

toxoplasmosis at me

solar shadow dwellers from 

al-Khwarizmi's crater send 

survival tricks for future

elder wizards fish for lost 

souls using fractal hooks made 

of sharpened rainbow fragments

freestyle sonnet #043: UPON READING THE PHRASE "METH MAKERSPACES"

Amphetamine makerspaces - hacking pieces
of commercial chemical make-ups together
in artisanal lab'ratory releases -
brand new high, spiking real life's dead end grey weather

with crystal visions, wide eyes see all so clearly,
although goodwill couches pushed against front (side) door
perhaps suggest paranoia; I've sincerely
appreciated meth-triggered adrenal war

against "reality" at times in life, but my
psychology is fractured at best - fragmented shards
of cracked windows, wild highs, depressing lows, pigsty
existence wasting away in secondhand yards.

Artisanal In-Real-Lifes: manufacturing
momentary whole highs while world keeps fracturing.

full moon tends to bring out my 

lizard people syndrome a 

bit heavier than normal

freestyle sonnet #042: YOUR FREE VERSE POTENTIALLY IS WACK AF

Oh hai! Another free verse masturbation by
MFA candidate thinking themselves offbeat
despite being stereotype of white girl/guy
liberal-raised, liberal born-and-bred to complete

self-serving progressive cycle of "creative",
cultured within sheltered confines, using same tricks
workshopped into poetic mix, imitative
bullshit masquerading as innovative fix.

Oh hai! Another pdf publication
"curated" (edited) by best friend as advance
forward against backwards lit world, elevation
of the truly great (people they know), with finance

from further up family tree's rich tradition.
Oh hai! Same free verse crap but from *fresh!* position.

two hot dogs with sauerkraut 

for a dollar - the saddest 

road-goes-on-forever meal

internet reading list of late

(triplicates of links that occupied my mind at *work* recently)

The Digital Afterlife of Lost Family Photos by Teju Cole
Buying up old photographs at junk stores has long been a part of art school projects, or zine making, or an activity part of the brain of anybody wired up in that old-fashioned post-modern (lolol) mindframe of "everything is art" when you derive new meanings from old shit. Internet, however, has complicated that because you end up having pictures as part of "your art" that are actual human beings who have actual human meaning to others, who then end up seeing it. That doesn't necessarily bother me, but I think there's a respect that should be used. This article by well-known internet thunkpiecer Teju Cole, touches on that, but maybe not as deep as could've been touched upon. Still though, in an age where everybody simultaneously believes that: A) they can re-appropriate everything they find, and B) they own intellectual property over whatever derivative they appropriate from it.
I take a lot of pictures, but have mostly refrained from taking pictures of people, mostly because I am uncomfortable with the notion I in some way have any ownership over pictures of somebody else. I've got a couple new projects in mind which will force me out of that comfort zone though, and I've been contemplating how I would apply concepts of verbal consent to taking pictures of people, and how I'd want to share what I end up getting from taking pictures of them. (Understand off the jump, I make no money off art to speak of, so there's no Richard Prince factor here... just some dumbass taking photographs who doesn't appreciate the othering of others in most photography, especially since I could've easily fell under othering categories during large swaths of my own life.)
There's a whole gentrification/cultural appropriation factor to art projects involving old pictures once they become digital entities, because generally it's people with access to art/photography world benefitting off *their art* while the people pictured, who make up more than a small amount of the significance of the project, often get nothing. A photographer I've followed in recent years, Chris Arnade, caught a lot of flack for having bought people he took pics of drugs or giving them money, because it broke the photographic rules of documentary, that you were supposed to somehow be removed from the person, simply documenting their existence. But how the fuck do you do that when you are sitting in a drug hotel room with two other people, having talked to them enough to know them well enough for them to be comfortable even letting you into that world?
In our house, on the refrigerator, we keep a copy of that famous Dorothea Lange photo of the Dust Bowl mother looking all stressed the fuck out. My ol' lady put it up, to remember that shit could be worse. I found out in some other article a year or two back that the lady in that pic wasn't even at her bottom rung. They had a flat tire and she was sitting on the side of the road with her two kids. Dorothea Lange apparently promised to give them copies of the photographs or something and never did. And then became famous off the image.
None of us live in a vacuum, and that's even more true in digital era where all our old bullshit might resurface if the clouds shake right. That mostly seems to be applied negatively to some, othering them as counter to digital conventions, but it should also apply upwardly as well. You can't own every stupid fucking tweak and filter you put on other people's lives. But this is America - we don't respect people, we respect property, so Digital Artists creating new *genius* *content* from old shit (that is actually other people's real lives) will always get the props. But intellectual property remains an oxymoron to me.

Pork Life by Todd Kliman
This is such a weird article. Like, it's a fine read, and entertaining I guess, but a deep dive into gluttonous and privileged consumption of pork. Now for full clarification, I used to raise pigs, and in the process got to know the intelligence level of pigs. This combined with a job in medical research which allowed me access to tons of scientific articles led me to learn the genetic proximity of pigs and people. (That's why they be putting pig hearts in humans.) Those two factors (along with reading A LOT of old Sufi Islamic philosophy) combined into me swearing off pork forever. So reading this thing is like insight into what seems to me to be strange human devilry.
The highpoint of this is "III. Bacon Cheeseburger" because with my first two pigs, I actually made bacon. You know what I learned making bacon? It is the longest, most time intensive, and wasteful activity both in terms of man-hours and animal life just to result in a few slivers of salty ass flesh. After making my own bacon I came to the conclusion bacon should actually cost like $150 a pound if it was made in any way conscientiously (if killing distant kin animals is okay, which might be questionable on the morality scale too, but I ain't a vegetarian so I won't make that argument), so all this artisanal bacon and bacon topped cupcakes and hipster bullshit bacon boxes that are supposed to be "okay" forms of bacon somehow not tied to Big Pig have got to be bullshit. They've got to be. There's no way they're not.
People love bacon though, and honestly that shit freaks me out. Like I try to go through my days glossing over everything with this underlying mantra of hope that we're all just humans caught up in our little bullshit, but ultimately we're all trying to survive life and want everybody to at least be okay but hopefully even happy. But then I see some motherfuckers being happy as shit about bacon. About fucking bacon. And that loose thread gets pulled by my brain and the reality of predator drones and tribal nationalism and tribal politics even within concept of American nationalism and just general mean, hateful nature of humanity just comes out.
So yeah, this essay is like bacon - a long process, salty as fuck, but perhaps tasty, and yet ultimately unnecessary and pure devilry. So enjoy.

What Happened to Worcester? at New York Times
At first when Trump looked unstoppable, there were a slew of "Who the Fuck Are All These Dumbasses Voting for Trump?" articles. We have lately moved into the second wave, where people analyze the broken American Dream, how shit used to be compared to how it is now, and how that probably feeds the Trump movement. And I'm sure it does. My neighbors are a couple and their young adult son. Both son and father work labor, for the father that means side jobs both weekend days driving livestock or working at a farm. They raise cattle for selling as livestock, as much as their three acres will allow. And they are always broke. And they fly confederate flags. They're not bad people, not at all, but they were fermented in a different world. Democrats abandoned these people decades ago, because they didn't need them. Republicans whispered sweet subliminal racisms in their ears for decades, encouraged and enabled their worst habits, but have now suddenly - on the heels of the first black President - decided that the best business move for the Republican party is to not be so subliminally racist (kind of). As a business move, to maintain support, Republicans have now abandoned these people that they basically helped make so monstrous, because they no longer need them either (or so they think).
I don't say any of this to excuse people being narrow-minded or prejudiced. I say this to point out if you made a giant Venn diagram of our American system, no matter how much you broke down the circles demographically, a whole fucking lot of us would intersect in the FUCKED part smack in the middle of the diagram. These people are definitely in that same part. I will always be of the mind people who are fucked, so long as they are divided, will be conquered.
I think it goes without saying the America known by the grandparents in this article is no longer there. I know my maternal grandfather's parents were straight from Poland, went through Ellis Island, and raised their family in New Jersey. My grandfather wandered nomadically after naval duties, and still somehow managed to build a good life - owning a home, then building a new one to move into, then buying a farmhouse to retire in, having to sell one to finalize the other, but he died with cash in the mattress and enough left to take care of my grandmother for the most part until her death.
I'm not gonna have that, not even close. And the weird thing is I'm way better off than I should've been. Like I've climbed the fucking pyramid scam good as fuck, to where my children are at least not nearly as fucked as I was starting out. But the environment that allowed my grandfather to have money left at death, or even retire, is not the same one I live in. If I retire, that shit ain't gonna be grand at all - it's gonna basically mean I can stop driving to work and stay home, and if I tighten my belt and don't live too long, there'll still be groceries in the cupboard when I die.
Applying the racial aspect to it, or more appropriately xenophobia because often it's about immigrants when the monsters that were created start thinking about how they don't have jobs, they think of immigrants. But this country always had immigrants. That's not any different than it ever was. There just ain't shit happening to keep everybody occupied. If all of us benefitted off the technological advances, and got to kick back and enjoy the early retirement, with at least groceries in the cupboard, that'd be one thing. But we ain't getting that. We're getting told we should've gotten more education, been more marketable, been more skilled. It's our fault our lives suck.
I don't know man, it's a giant fucking mess, and this Presidential election is only going to make it worse, regardless of which evil gets anointed the more acceptable evil branch of evil bullshit. But whatever. Hopefully more and more of the FUCKED will realize our shared spaces on the grand Venn diagram of nowadays America, and we can start trying to keep each other okay. On the large scale, I don't have much hope for that, because the bureaucracy is immense, and corrupt, and benefits by maintaining FUCKED, but in the little pockets, where people actually talk to each other beyond the fog of manufactured divisions, I hope it will get better.

cameras can't capture wild 

dirtgods scrabbling in moonlight, 

teaching chivos poetry

mushroom technologies lurk 

beneath the early spring base 

of death, decay, and rebirth

"writing you can stab people 

with" goes the old saying my 

self used to make jokes about