I do not practice, I preach. I come with the words laid upon me by my
frightened forefathers, from the unholy mouths of babes, from
house-wife earth in all her majestic decay. I come with the words, I
leave with the money. Come on. Take the money and run. Until the
voices stop. Until everything stops. The sound. The air. The cars and
police barking at the doors of the impoverished.
What happens in the art world stays in the art world.
The earth stops and our stagger stances do nothing and we fly off the
face of it into the atmosphere. We are angels. We are one with the
heavens. The miserable heavens. Made of colorful garbage and dead
aliens and mysterious grandeur.
Art is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
I take out my words like rusty weapons, like a lonely politician in an
airport bathroom, like a cheerleader starved for fatherly attention. I
take them out one by one and distribute them among the newspaper men
and the academics and the huddling masses yearning to be bored to
death.
All I know is what the news knows.
All I know is that you: my friends and enemies, are just as sad as me,
just as broken as broken bottles, dirty underwear, fingerprints, the
sound of a familiar voice, a misguided sense of self-importance, an
unbalanced checkbook, who does the dishes, how will it all end, drunk
again, watching home movies, watching your weight and enjoying life to
its fullest.
You’re one in a million, but that just means you’re lonely. It’s
lonely at the top and smelly at the bottom and there’s no place to eat
around here. So I eat my words. I chew them, swallow them whole. I
shit them out like a heroin smuggler. Lips drenched in shit. Shit
drenched in the piss of anger, the heat off the back of struggling
artists hunting for hope, dreaming of communist pot luck dinners in
heaven. I fish in the morning and write theory in the evening and in
the middle of the night I cry out in despair. What now brown cow? Why
have you foresaken me? Why does this always happen to me? How many
angels can I fit in this body bag?
Misery loves a company man. God bless the child who’s got his own set
of steak knives. Should I bite the hand that starves me? Familiarity
breeds contempt.
My work is eternal. My work is the sea. My work is a boot stamping on
a human face forever.
Life is a tale told by an idiot — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you;
ask what you can do for your country.
It’s a lie, that story about the musicians playing as the titanic
sank. They didn’t play. Who would? Let’s be serious. Let’s be childish
and free. Let’s change the world. For better or worse. Far worse than
that. I’m sick to death. I’m hungry like the wolf. I’m mad as hell and
I’m not going to take it anymore. Except from you. You are the light
of my life, my friend, my alpha and romeo. There is nothing in this
world that I ever wanted more than to feel you deep in my heart. You
shallow son of a bitch. More is less, more or less. Stop breathing for
me. I can’t fight this feeling deep inside of me. There’s gold in them
there hills. Diamonds in the rough. Dirt in the diamonds. A cry for
help mitigated by years of listening and reading and struggling to
understand the nature of existence. You poor son of a bitch. Suicide
is painless. It brings on many changes. Turn and face the stranger in
the corner weelding a knife, gritting his teeth, thirsty for blood,
bleeding heart liberal limousine cocktail-sucking shit swindler.
Preaching to the choir. Singing at the top of our lungs. Breathing
black air from the farts of historians. The insurgency begins with
you. Two paths destroyed in the woods. My words are chosen to
simultaneously reflect my deepest self and to make sense to idiots.
And that has made all the difference. I was born into a world without
walls, into a world with headless suits and Citibank and vending
machines and macintosh computers buried in baby brains and a
skyrocketing birthrate in debilitating poverty and a plummeting
birthrate in the land of milk and honey. Babies shooting up and down
in the atmosphere like apple blossoms floating in the wind. Floating
like farts in a room. Silent but deadly. I am a snake amongst the
weeds. I am a gardener on a jetliner, cultivating indifference. You
are my rhubarb of impossibility. Life is for the living. Get started
dying. Choosing my battles. Cleaning the bathtub. Drowning my fear in
alcohol and unhealthy relationships with the opposite sex. What
exactly is sex the opposite of? A small death hurts worse than a big
one. I’ve got a lot to live for. Seize the day. Kill a commie for
mommy. Do it for yourself. Get onboard. Believe in yourself. Love the
one you’re with. When I think about you I touch myself. The first rule
of fight club is shut up and kiss me. There must be order in the
universe. There must be condoms in the sock drawer. There’s a place
for us, somewhere a place for us. Peace and quiet and open toed
stilettos marching in block formation through the strip malls of
Southern Jersey. Packing heat. Stealing the show. Educating our youth
so they can have the opportunities that were denied to us by our lying
parents who told us to chew with our mouths closed and be nice to our
brothers and worship an unjust God and tie our shoes and ride a
bicycle and sleep our way to the middle. Because we don’t need another
hero. We don’t need no education. Because I’ve got to have faith. Like
a rhinestone cowboy, so are the days of our lives. Waking dreams, wet
dreams, particle accelerators imploding useless universes in our
brains. And all the while, the rich get richer while the tough get
what’s coming to them. The mouths of babes stretched over the long
cock of the law. Justice is blind from too much masturbating. You’re
nobody till somebody fucks you from behind. You can check out anytime
you like, but you can never leave. What happens to a dream deferred?
Maybe the dream just goes away. The eyes are the window to the soul.
I’m a funk soul brother. I feel good like I knew that I would now. I
don’t want to wait for our lives to be over. Let’s end things right
here, right now, in this dirty motel room, both of us with our pants
down around our philosophical ankles. I owe you the truth in painting
and I will tell it to you. I owe you my life, my liberty, and my
pursuit of whatever piece of ass walks through that door in the next
five minutes. In the future everyone will be a foundation. In the
future everything will be different, better, brighter, full of light,
full of themselves with a stupid cowboy swagger, chewing tobacco like
Saturn devouring his children. Spitting it on the ground like
breadcrumbs to oblivion. The higher I go, the further I stare into the
abyss. The bigger they come the more they enjoy it. Don’t trust anyone
over thirty. Fuck the police. Here comes the judge. God bless this
mess. Give me a break.