Cecilia

Life is like a pressure cooker.

 

            I should be in school right now.  Sucking down all their words through a funnel with the kind of smile they want growing on my face.  But I’ve got better things to do.  Like skip and sit on a curb downtown and laugh because it’s all mad clockwork.

            And I mean MAD clockwork.

 

            Side note:  Whoever invented the clock is a sick b*****d.  Who the ---- wants to measure time!?!?

 

            To value pretty colored flags, to stake out land and call it yours, to fight over shiny rocks and painted tree skin… petty, just petty… but who am I anyway? Foolish me, talking out of turn, put that damn funnel back in your mouth, shut up, and take it.

            (Pervert.  I know what you’re thinking.)

            Anyway, I feel like an alien in my own world.  Nothing they love excites me.  Football, for example.  Let’s all toss pigskin around and run back and forth and get paid millions to entertain the dull. 

            Maybe I’m bias.  Maybe I just don’t like football. 

            Or maybe that was a terrible example of my alienation…

            I just don’t want anything they want.  That suburban safe haven, the beautiful wife who bakes real American apple pie, the four kids with their ruddy cheeks, the annual vacation to Florida, the 9-5 sit me in a little box in front a glowing fake brain all day so I can help churn the fabricated gears of the world.  I want none of it.

            It’s routine, mechanical.  The American dream.  Chain your soul to commercial endeavor, taxes, and a twisted bit of little over two century old culture.  Then pollute the ground with your corpse.

            I think the worst thing that’s ever happened to me was growing up.  I could be a child forever.  Everything is simple and easy and beautiful.  You know there’s a god because you colored his son’s face yellow in Sunday School. 

            Now I’m grown and the world is sad and I’ve come to learn that everything anybody ever told me was a lie.

            America is not good.  They destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in Japan.  They murdered the Indians.  They sterilized handicap people in the 1970s. 

            There is no Santa Claus.  There is no Easter Bunny.  There is no Tooth Fairy.

            Noah couldn’t have fit half the animals in the Dunghoe Zoo on the ark.  Snakes don’t talk.  Nobody can survive in the belly of a whale for three days.

Then they tell me I’ve got to work and shave and this and that. 

            I just want a cabin in the woods, some place far, far away, so I can sink into my mortality, curl up, and die a slow and lovely death.

            But if I had to choose a job… I could sit on the moon with a telescope and watch all the little humans in their ant colonies and take notes.  Or name streets.  I want to know who has that job.

            My phone rings. 

            Paul.

            Paul is like Max Brod.  A kind of best worst friend.  Depending on what side of the bridge you’re standing on.  I used to be on the fan side. 

            But Paul’s grown yellow.  He stopped asking questions and now he’s a brick.  I told him we were animals and he grinned.

            “We’re not animals… look what animals fight over.”

            “What?”

            “Territory, mates, and food.”

            He caught himself and turned a kind of fever red.

            What do we fight over- Helen of Troy, the Holy Land, and oil.

            We just can’t stand using our natural weapons so we build bombs.

            Maybe that’s the justification I used to not like him. His ignorance.  Because I think the real reason is that I watched him and my other best friend become more interested in one another and less interested in me.

            What does it matter.     

            I don’t answer the phone and slip it back into my jean pocket. 

            The homeless man across the street is watching me.  His eyes are dripping. Like paint.  I laugh because it’s funny.

            How much do we spend annually on video games and ice cream and music and booze and underwear and McDonald’s?  It could probably feed him and all of Kenya. 

            But people love their comfort so much more.  And their pets eat better then must humans. 

            Well, comfort has a tendency to swallow itself.  And the employed.  All in one sick long gulp.  Like lemonade. But stale and Roman. 

            My mother never gives homeless people money.  She swears they’re all coke heads.  She might be right.  A lot of people love their coke.  The government confiscates 245 million dollars worth of that coke every year.

            What do you think the government does with 245 million dollars worth of cocaine? Destroy it? ---- no.  They resell it.  That’s why it’s illegal.

            My mother is also a Republican.  With an A Type Personality.  And she’s part Swedish.  She’s probably got about 128 labels. 

            Everybody has a label. Conservative. Jew. Hippie. F****t.

            I think everybody should wear their labels on their sleeves.

            That way I can disagree with you before we get into an argument.

But it doesn’t matter. Everything is nonsense.    

Are you still doing what you haven’t done or have you done what you did?  What were you doing when you were doing what you wouldn’t do but you did?  (I wouldn’t want to do anything else other then what I’ve been doing.)  See, even proper laws can be applied correctly to nonsense.  Laws order nonsense.  Everything is nonsense.

            Except mathematics.

            My grandfather was there when Leopold Kronecker said this: “God made the integers; all the rest is the work of man.”

            God is on my hit list.  I hate him because it feels like I’m trying to pry open cement skin just to hear his heart beat. 

            I mean I never would have created a world like this.  Not if I knew what it would be like.  I’d rather be selfless and alone.

            But I’m impressed with what he or whoever has done.  Look how tuned we are to time.  What we see are actual precise stills of motion and being, like frames in a film.  I just wish we weren’t so obsessed with it.

Side note: In the pursuit of trimming down time to the second, to instant reception, to optimal production, we have degraded the meaning of being and diluted the moment.

            The clock and written language have destroyed us.  If we didn’t know when to be and no one could write down what was done or what should be done, we could live in the now.

            But what does it matter.  I’m just an overgrown baby sitting on a curb in the middle of a rock garden on a giant ball in the corner pocket of a universe that never stops growing.

            I heard someone say life isn’t that bad.

            I agree.  It’s more like a pressure cooker.          

 

Reviews

[Coyote Poetry]

I'm Ojibwa and I heard people say. Those people who don't belong here. Should go back to their country. I smile and ask them are they Ojibwa? They ask me why? I tell them Michigan is Ojibwa land. They tell me not them but those damn Mexicans. I tell them were the the Mexican Mayas and Natives of western America?. They walk away. Your story is true. No innocence in this world. Religion and racism caused enough death. I like words. A lot of wisdom if you want to see them. You need to pass your wisdom to more people. Better to roam with the wolves then walk into the slaughter house with the cattle.
Coyote

[HighBrowCulture]

Better to roam with the wolves then walk into the slaughter house with the cattle.

Phenomenal.