Technoristocracy

Pace those prophets of the computer age, who frequently claim that the various wefts of the World Wide Web will ineluctably entangle us all in a global village whose economy is that of information exchange -- and thus one can only assume that with the establishment of this village will come increased understanding and a great info-commonwealth of humanity -- I find in the discourse of the internet elements of what can only be considered evidence of strange individualistic power fantasies. To wit, one purchases a domain over which to be webmaster, and which is contained on a server.

In Cyberia, we are all petty despots and tinpot dictators. Let us, then, in the words of Depeche Mode, "play 'Master and Servant.'"

In the Kingdom to Come, the Least Shall Be First

I ask: How many more smashplaster, smashglass nights ending in grief and swollen wrists? How many more nights will I wake to soaked sheets and REM-stage after-images of you and your cowardly lover waving me away dismissively as I am dragged away into a swirling scarlet fog of fury. How much longer must I chew this bolus of wormwood and gall?

Consummatum est. Nicht wahr? Yet what line of flight can I pursue when all lines lead to you?

Release me. Give me truth -- unvarnished, brutal truth. Then I shall be free. . .

Global Pillage

Do you want to know the true consequence of globalism? It's an American in Arizona speaking to a technician in Calcutta about a balky DSL modem built in Thailand -- and getting absolutely nowhere.

Lexicon au jus

(Toward an erotics of the anthropophage, an exotics of the familiar.)

Broken meat: table scraps, the only fit portion for slaves. That for which they grovel and tongue-loll.

Failed meat: contorts the body, draws into crippling spasms until one lies still in double failure (spousal and corporeal).

Twitchy meat: that which is to be mortified; that which is to be the host in a new pharmacological communion.

Wretched meat: rotten and generally moribund; no longer an adequate buttress for the frame; wreckage of an endeavor poisoned; ALSO the inevitable result of the amputation of emotions.

"Whoso list to hunt . . .

". . . I know where is an hind." -- Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder

"And Devil take the hindmost!" (your attitude; my emphasis).

Did you feel a quickening, a great upwelling of power, in casting aside he whom of all the those of eyes be-scaled you did transfix and enthrall 'til you were his all in all?

Flung from his lofty perch of serene accomplishment, he now writhes upon the spikes of base abandonment, all so you could test your womanly mettle. Bring your parts to market, and trade them for counterfeit coin to restock the horde you emptied -- a horde of inestimable wealth, but by you unesteemed.

We will stalk our futures, you and me, and rake our nails against their featureless backdrops, knowing that what was once could have ever been.

Fling one more dart, D---, and pray your aim is true, so I can sag before the corridor of bleachéd time, mercifully spared its horror.

No Great Relief without Great Agony

Mein Gott! The pain is exquisite! She rips her elbow along seldom-used muscles to break their years-old spasms into tractable bits of meat. On these she rubs linament, and I am thrown back into my body by the pain of this massage.

"No great relief without great agony," she tells me with a look of reassurance. But behind this look do a detect a glimmer of sadistic glee as I writhe and scream and bite sheets and slap walls under her ministrations? Glee for the stress and torment I put her through these past few weeks when I was under the nefarious influence of Zoloft, which warped my personality into a lustful bloodthirsty maniac who dreamed of anthropophagic and coprophagic treats?

I sit here now, possessed of my own mind and girdled with the ache of hip muscles ridding themselves of acid and other slough. My pain is her reward. My pain is deserved.

Acimyhc Xe Sued

Betrayal spins round me like the jeering faces around the dizzy freak. Made to feel he is a house divided unto itself, this freak supplicates before the priest, who drops the host upon his tongue as he mutters the benediction, "Deliverance in this life." "Consecrate the ovine faithful unto me," the priest cries to the heavens, "and I promise you (k)no(w) quailing before the knife; you shall go to your quietus quietly, without protest, without a whimper or a tear of regret."

The freak loves no one, friend--not even himself whom the priest is charged with protecting him from. The freak sees bodies as meat to butcher for the gustatory delight of all. Sharpen the knives, then, and ready the spit; the hour of feasting draws nigh.

Grant that this sacrifice be made acceptable!

Terror-peutics

The slow poison of serotonin had me in its grip yesterday: chemicals of the body turned against it by insidious latter-day concoctions. My muscles frozen into ricti--rigor mortis of a corpse still living. I shake my fist in rage at you, Zoloft. You bring me bloodlust in lieu of promised oblivion, degeneracy instead of deliverance.

Fourth Dispatch from Samsara

I am a guttering candle; the wick has burnt to the base. Only enough light to say goodbye, to show a friend the door. . .

His New Favorite Toy Is an Almond

I wish I weren't so poor; I wish I were a "Sugar-Sweet Candy Boy" lording over Ukrainian starvelings with high-end shades, slick little calfskin boots, and novels devoted to designer cologne. Then I feel my life would be complete.

I wish I weren't so poor; I wish I were in command of my own mind and not enthralled to a soulless, orchid-loving pill pusher who appears intent on keeping me trapped in the infernal mill of "Big Pharma" and managed care. Then I know my life would be complete, and completely mine again.

I wish I weren't I weren't so poor; I wish I could really buy the world a Coke and teach it how to sing--sing one note of such plaintive poignancy that God could not help but hear and restore us blind and backsliding subjects to grace once and for all. Then I feel my life would be complete.

"The grasshopper lies heavy . . .

. . . and there is nothing new under the sun."

Rolling over on carving knives while lying on red sheets means auspicious circumstances.

I am torn by she who tore me from her. I must now make insincere ultimatums in order to claim a consolation future, to wrest from her an agency cold and barren.

"The grasshopper lies heavy, and there is nothing new under the sun."

"Turtles All the Way Down"

I will feed the bellydogs stew-meat meant for Cerberus.

I am a twitching corpse--flyblown later. . . .

There is nothing but perception. There is nothing behind perception. Perception is everything. I walk in a different world than my psychiatrist who uses chemicals to fray the fabric of my perception until there is nothing but rags. This is the only real possibility; otherwise, it is "turtles all the way down."

Cogito ergo sum, expressed as gerundives, becomes "thinking, therefore being." Does this mean ipso facto and a fortiori "being, therefore thinking?" No, no reflexivity, just a false mirror, a broken chiasmus . . . perceptions of a broken man.