Diatribe of the Godless

Disconnect me forever
from a Heaven I've never seen;
whose empty opiate lullabies
never reached me.
Leave me here in the dust
to rot with the rest in time.

Hide my eyes from the face
of all your stillborn gods
that I may drink in the gaze
of the wheeling stars,
that the clockwork of creation
may wash over me unimpeded.

These are not my things
piled up around me,
this detritus of desperation
that threatens to bury me,
choke my breathe,
leave me crippled.

Mine are not the empty mandates
of the ineffective past.
Mine are not the laws of the mad.
Mine are the songs of life, the agony of birth.
Mine is the silence of death
and the glory of the dawn.

Ours is the soul of stone, the soul of fire.
Ours is the soul of the tide and the wind,
ours the soul of the tempest.
Ours is the soul of creation
that consumes and engenders,
devours itself that it may remain.

Ours is the memory of the longest past,
ours the promise of the untold future.
Ours is the kingdom of nothingness,
ours is the kingdom of everything.
Ours is the kingdom of Heaven.
Ours is the kingdom of Earth.

The Going Rate

Are you happy yet?
I've lost myself
in your corporate modifications
and marketing manipulations.
I'm writing these lines
between spurts of paperwork,
and just last week the Marlboro Man
rode up on a starved and beaten mare
to repossess my last lung.
I can't make my Escalade payment either,
'cause no one wants these greenbacks anymore,
and all the gold's long gone.
Everyone wants you to pay in slugs:
two .06's for a bottle of water,
a .32 for a pound of flesh.
.22's are the easiest to come by,
and you can still get a blowjob
and a cup of coffee
from and aging transvestite
for two .9's and a .45.
You get your change
in buckshot around here,
right before the store clerks
mug you, rape you,
and remove your fillings
with a good pair of pliers.
We all drink blood and oil now,
and the price of gas is up
to 12 scalps per gallon,
unless you happen
to have a full clip,
then everything's free, baby.
No one wants you to spend
your cash too quick.
They want it to sit for a while,
fester and weigh down on your soul
before you fling it in someone
else's direction, aiming
for that soft spot in their wallet,
in their brain.
It gives the Wallstreet Warchiefs a chance
to skim a few more rounds off the top,
to be sent off to Cuba, or Iraq, or Israel,
to finance the next waritme
profit margin.