The sewers are veins with shit for blood,
and the city only ever inhales.
Trucks fly on fourlane superarteries
delivering loads of Doritos to gaping mouths.
rotting concrete, glass cages with cash registers.
Welcome to the Kingdom of Us,
where we could have made anything,
could have been humans on earth
but were too cheap.
Decided we were content with cheap plastic,
metaphysics,
and gutters.
summon the charcoal and chimneys,
summon the gas stoves and microwaves.
we will eat tonight, don’t worry about that,
keep shopping.
keep shooting.
And someday, we'll move out to the suburbs, dear.

.....
my fluid seeks sewers to feed myself, my city, but these foundational beams of rotting streets destroyed my undercarriage,

the highways pulse with commodities

my house rests between skyscrapers

I can look through my windows to my attorney.

his aggression opposes what in a domestic animal, cold open space, large enough to work with isolation?

city is the possession, the men in it middlemanaging, cubicles.

You have to consume real estate to be human, distance, square footed, in which a beloved kitchenette is heaven, for example.
....

My sewers, my blood, I felt my city around upon me rumbling down upon the long high superways,
I felt my mouths crying for Doritos,
And we exhaled into overbrimming cash registers
that can now buy anything,
can only buy us, reaming our foodstamps over again
Welcome to my house, gridded and grey,
where we could have had a future, we could have been here before,
but we were too cheap.
Give me your kitsch! your scams! your hungry!
Don't worry, inhale, your fiery riots will wait for tomorrow.
we are an island of torment in a sea of white picket topped waved American Dream.
....
The city was there as I was there
flowing inside the shreds of newsprint
soaked in the sludge
of all our industrial and self secretions.
there, my bottom half rubberized, my shirt covered in shit
that steeped down from fifty stories of city.

Some shitleak under 16th street
years of someone’s acid vomit
corroding the pipes.
Leaking into drinking water
obese consumers blindly
wallowing in themselves.
...
our sewers wrap us together
in dreamy abstraction
our faucets rip our outer skin off
every morning,
and pure waterfall flesh
cannot hide behind dirt reality.
Plumbers tie cities together
so that we may roam streets
avoiding the eyes of passersby.
our cities enable solipsistic
self images
masterbatory subcultures
conversation murdered by
perfectly accessorized
pictured people.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 2:52 PM ] [ ]

Here's an account of a hard trip I had at Bonarroo, it seemed crazier at the time than when I wrote it up:

We were wandering through a suddenly savage tent city, walking in circles and talking in spirals, descending into exasperated incomprehension, tyler and I suddenly strangers. “How long have I known you? do you know where you’re going?” Chronic disorientation in space and time plagued us—neither of us could hold a moment for long enough to understand it. He questioned me, and I had no answers, and by the time I told him so, the question was gone. All I could get from him was “this is really intense, really weird, are you tripping? I think I’m tripping, I’m not sure.” And, the ever present, “let’s just go back to the van, man. It’ll be a place to ground.”
He had an acryllic face on his belly, nipples for eyes. My chest said “I Love You” in green acrylic paint. I liked mine, he needed his off—paint burning into my skin, he said.
It started raining, and suddenly we were on the right street, I spun around a tent and there in the distance was the van, tent, and just in time, downpour. We flung ourselves into the tent, unstable. Thankful for a destination. He began questioning, and I couldn’t keep up. His mind sent question after question burning out of his mouth into a monologue that needed little encouragement from me. But I didn’t know that, I tried to keep up with him, I got frustrated, I needed to call adam, I needed to piss. I just walked out of the tent, feeling like I was abandoning him, relief flowing out of my bladder in the rain. There’s adam! holyjesus, man, I’m glad he’s walking in, does he have any idea what he’s coming into? What is he coming in from? need a hug. Tyler opens the tent looks at adam, glad. Then he looks at me, standing in the rain. “What’s happening right now? Are we going crazy?” “Yes. we’re going crazy.” “It’s not just me?” “No, I’m going insane with you, we’re going insane together,” and in my heart and maybe maybe-not my mouth “I’m sorry for walking out just now.”
Adam flung himself into the tent after me, and we all three sat in a trinity, legs crossed, listening to ourselves. Tyler questioned endlessly, and adam and I chased his mind through time and through destiny and truth, which circled back on themselves in the great cycle of questions burning through his mind. In the presence of adam, I was no longer frightened and overwhelmed by the questions, and I began to understand the tremendous artistry with which tyler lead himself through a universe suddenly deprived of time and meaning. I wish I could remember all of it, I wish it had all been recorded, but it wasn’t. He asked over again “Is it OK that I’m talking now? Is it OK?” and a series of time questions “How is this happening now? When did this happen? did I already say that, or was I going to?”
Somewhere along the line, we made the momentous decision to go into the van. Adam and I lay in the back, tyler got up front, still talking. His questions slowly became more manegable. Adam began to scat with his voice, singing answers to tyler’s questions, and music became our safety. adam sang “beautiful women, can you hear us calling you, we have song, we have soul?” and suddenly we were singing to the rivers of beautiful earthy girls outside the van. I saw a girl out the windshield, flashed a peace sign and she did too, and my trip morphed to thinking entirely about what kind of energy we were sending out of the van to her—as if our powerful tripping vibes were a beacon for everyone to fall in love with us and us with them, and I began waving things out the window to show that we were good, desirable, come into the van. I waved my hat, then tyler’s knife, a paintbrush, my arm. At some point, Adam took over the talking, began ranting about the right of expression, that expression is all we have and we have it and it’ll never be taken away. I felt the best vibes emanating from him—I felt that he respected me and respected tyler so much he wanted to burst. he began telling us that we are all saints, and then that we were all gods, that we were the trinity, that we were Buddha, and there is Buddha looking at us from outside our windshield! We are surrounded by saints. and I began feeling like god. from then on, my trip was very egotistical—I built myself up to a legend, a god among men. The objects around me became holy icons of pieces of my personality—the hat, the paintbrush, the knife—it didn’t matter to me that only the hat was actually my own. I lined up these things on my chest, and became them. I began to feel strangely masculine in a stereotypical way that when I am not tripping I distain—the Marlboro man machismo that kills. I took the knife and began stabbing it into the table in front of me—stab….stab…then cut, saw, hack. Stop.
Sex, love, my body egresses and entrances, I became a worm eating the soil of human flesh and leaving behind me a trail of the same. I became eros, and in that moment understood that I was desirable. I felt this so strongly that I assumed that it was emanating from the van, summoning humans. “And you’re perverse, so you like women in wheelchairs and who can’t walk!” Adam said to me “Yes” I said, although the thought had never occurred to me before. I guess I’ve just never seen a really attractive girl in a wheelchair, but I unhesitatingly affirmed the fact that I love cripples sexually with my entire being. “How amazingly fucked up it is that people who can’t walk are seen as undesirable” he said.
Adam took up his notebook and began to scribble. I felt sure he was recording me, he wrote, and I was glad of it. I left the van, came across a guy selling didgeridoos. I was instantly enamored of that object, I felt it was transcendent and perfect, and well worth the money—a poor tripping decision. I walked away with it. I walked to the next tent and asked the girl working there for a hug, which she gave me. Then I walked back to the van, victorious with a didgeridoo I couldn’t play. It struck me later that the only reason that object came into my life was that it was phallic and I was tripping.
Coming down was foggy. My brain was completely grey. Tyler sat silent, I don’t know how long he had been silent for. He stared straight ahead. The only thing he would say was “are you guys still tripping?” a question for which there was no reasonable answer. Herbie Hancock played outside the van, one of my favorite musicians, but I felt no urge to go see him play. Adam’s mind was still bouncing around the van—clear, now. Trying to understand what the trip meant. He struggled desperately to make us participate in his energy, but all I could manage was monosyllables. I could see that he needed to rap on about life and expression and love, and I wanted him to. I wished I could’ve rapped back, given him some feedback energy, but I couldn’t. Sometimes I managed a tangled sentence, but my mind was completely absorbed in purging the toxins.
Alex returned to the van to three half naked men sitting in silence with savage distracted looks in their eyes.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 4:01 PM ] [ ]