ours are the voices of mice as the crushing foot- steps pass by
February 14, 2024
Ajax Kallistrate
How lonely on the sidelines of a sideshow when the big top comes tumbling down in a jumper with a name tag Hello, my pronouns! Settling 900,000 with a new suit of concrete beneath a drowning flood of three million, a poisonous flux washing through the blood of a keyhole shaped like a mockingbird coiled about by a rattlesnake, beak like a bayonet piercing the womb of a blind hag, stumbling over a line drawn in barren soil, center stage in a sideshow, the audience gasps in profile, in shadow, in a whisper as the curtain falls, let's take a bow, together, one last time.
February 1, 2024
communism is the end of all beautiful things
February 12, 2024
The man who gives you permission to commit evil becomes your master.
January 18, 2024
The trap sprung.
Bye bye
baa baa
to the white
sheep with the
shoelace in her heart,
to little old me who believed
the machine one last time
when it whispered,
"That can't be real."
I failed the only IQ test
that matters.
I failed the test of faith,
duty, obligation.
I failed.
I'm the dumb dumb
who evolved from TDS to
MAGA to anti-communist to
anti-Zionist, but the meta-
morphosis won't
matter when
the toll
of
twenty
years a married
woman comes due.
The moneychangers
under the electronic tent
demanded their usurious
interest, their toe
tag price tag
for a heavy
hand
on
the snooze button,
and the fatal flaw
has been replicated
in every cell
of my
body,
the bioweapon
replicated in
every cell
of every
pin
cushion
heart
of millions
and millions
of ordinary
people.
Mothers,
fathers,
children,
whole families
driven underground.
We drop like
livestock at the
slaughterhouse.
We've been counted out
of history, biology, unnatural
selection, the forgotten flotsam
of a statistic to rival the black
plague and bird flu, the fleshy
pavement over which the
destiny of the human
race was forever
altered by the
brutal hands
of the
most
evil
despicable
merciless
haters of life
to ever walk the earth.
You don't have to starve a population if
you can get them to starve themselves.
You don't have to sterilize a population if
you can get them to sterilize themselves.
You don't have to kill a population if
you can get them to kill themselves.
Genocide is a monstrous project.
This is the prayer of the Wicked.
No one wants to be born
into the generation
that sees the end
of the world,
and yet
here we are.
February 7, 2024
I hate how beautiful New York is in the golden light of January painted over awnings and ever- green boughs, the finches sing- ing full throated, unaware of the shame they've drawn up from a poisoned well, their bite un- softened by the sweet reminder of the endless dream, the constricted heart, the lidless eye, never to sleep again in the last days of the Republic.
January 16, 2024
Take five blocks of urban blight twice a day for four years and don't call me in the morning.
January 18, 2024
12:25pm and the bells rang out over the walls of city hall in the rain and we laughed as we ran to the bus.
October 3, 2023
One of the last beautiful days. Blue sky still in the morning. Lone cricket playing his lonely tune. That neglected atmosphere of September. Ragged end of summer. Fall coloring slender trees whispering in an ocean of concrete. A single piercing of Venus across that vast unrolling cloudless day break reflected as a seamless horizon in the panes of a faded store front. Rattle of plastic and metal leaves undisturbed the cool reach of a breeze along outstretched fingers. A transformation in undertones. Indistinct. Only by illusion made one or the other. Only brief as we must see all things as brief. A fool's fortune made by civil twilight. All alone here and glad to be.
September 19, 2023
I've lived under a cloudless sky where everything is literal, weather by the calendar, all drama internalized. I prefer virtual worlds, perfect one dimensional riverbeds, shining day and night, a meaningful grind, empty of needs, empty of want. The shoe-leather world is a spinning wheel, a destructive boredom, an empty wallet. I can't vanish anymore. I haven't seen fireflies in so long, heard a cricket, been prickled by green leaves. I see the sun. Sometimes. Gold scattering behind gray feathers. I sit on this concrete couch beneath a tree planted exactly eight feet from its neighbor, its leaves too sparse to shelter me from the rain. Tick tock. Silver bird with rigid wings crosses the sky at escape velocity, up into a future I don't share. I'm more attuned to the crows on the lamp poles, croaking over the roar of traffic, or the silent seagulls who've traded their beaches for dumpsters. The sun has risen into the clouds again. There's a gap, like I could reach my hands into that warm sky and wrap my arms around a treasure worth holding, a story worth telling. It's that imperfect future that drives me forward, that unwanted kinship with the unfinished, the incomplete. But a backlit pixel closes the synaptic gap and mocks my analog heart. It's time to clock in.
August 22, 2023
