Goth and Liberty

"Believe It"

it could happen to you,
a defect from the
wasted outskirts of los angeles
with a crumpled-up pass for the RTD
and no authority or trajectory
on the brink of insanity
you'd better believe it
because it's written all over your face
just a neighborhood reject,
out of step and out of place
you'd better believe it
would you ever have thought
persistence could prevail
against the almost
unbearable weight of the system?
with nothing better to do,
and no one else who you can look up to
you'd better believe it
because it's written all over your face
a political defect,
out of step and out of place
you'd better believe it
and the future is bright
when ideas run astray
so turn out the light,
a punk can't have a say
sometimes desire is all that's there
who said life was fair?

So...depressing people...who needs them? I remember this one girl from high school-- she was Russian or something and filthy rich-- and I noticed one day that she was drawing something. I said, "Hey, Xenia, whatcha draw'n'?" Then she said it was a zebra. But it looked like a regular colored in horse. I said, "don't zebras have stripes?" and she turns to me all enigmatically like she was a fortune teller at the fair and says, with a straight face, "Sean, you know how people have good days and bad days? and that's a lot how zebras have black stripes and white stripes? well...my zebra's all black."

So you're zebra's all black all the time, huh?

Then you don't get to call it a zebra anymore, okay? The world gets it that you're sad and you're confused as to how to properly express the dissatisfaction, but don't count out that little thing called discretion. You see, people in the world, a small portion, believe that everyone should ultimately be able to do what they want. "The Party of Principle." As long as no one gets hurt, but that only furthers the advantages for stupid people and expands the realm of excuses for the socially retarded. Little Miss Black Zebra will paint a picture, write a poem, tattoo herself with an indecipherable blend of Egyptian and Celtic symbols, slice, dice, chop, and flay her skin because someone told her to "be yourself." Fuck that-- I don't like the idea of a nation of "yourselves"; we need a unified culture and a nationally held standard on things which will be allowed to enter into the market of thought and creativity. No more bullshit about Avril Lavigne and Evanescence having artistic merit. It's pathetic how people with ACTUAL talent are fine just surviving in the margins, as if limited exposure is somehow a badge for the innovative. I blame Ayn Rand for converting so many jellie-minded-slack-tooth'd-wig-rattlers to the modicum of "Objectivism". One would hope that with a philosophy grounded in absolutes, then there would be no need for a rant in this space, but lo and behold the grand inversion of taste. Because, frankly, if everything is concrete and objective, then things produced need no reckoning for creative value; after all, "creativity" is just an oppressive tool of subjectivity. Far better for a culture to have an onverabundance of creation shine like 99 cent tinsel on a banister than to search for REAL gems, apparently.

People say they listen to "everything" and in their case I am sorry. Sorry for these people too frightened to admit that there is bad music. Universally. B A D. And it's called RAP music and GOTH music and EMO music and "PUNK" music and "EASY LISTENING" and ROCK and METAL and DANCE and even motherfucking POLKA. The radio isn't a measuring of success, it's a tool for bandwidth, the simple access point, and unfortunately, the gateway has been deemed the pedigree. So a song plays on the radio. Big fucking whoop. Why the hell do I have to know the lyrics to bullshit song from a bullshit band called Maroon 5? Are they the next anything? No. Fuck them and the 20 million recording contract they rode in on. Ashlee Simpson, Britney Spears, and Avril Lavigne should all be lined up and stabbed through the eye with a single stick to save the world the time of having to find three sticks sharp enough.

I can't marry this idea with this idea. Christianity doesn't fit with Atheism. You know why? You try to marry two ideas without ever thinking that one of them might be less developed, weaker, or even flat-out wrong! So fucking ditch the objectivist crap and elect discrimination when you read instead of adopting the vacuous stare of muddled empirical thought.

SO in conclusion, she's a political reject, that zebra is a fucking horse, and you're not a dazzling snowflake, you're not the all-dancing all-singing crap of the world, you are not the dogma of a mediocre Brad Pitt movie, and you sure as hell are not the thing you create.

Everyone has an opinion

But not all opinions are equal.

On Education

Education in this country is flawed.

It is flawed because it is too subjective
Subjective learning rarely produces ambition besides apathy.
Apathy is dangerously contagious.
Rigid structure cuts out apathy for favor of embarassment.
Students can fail.
Students fail because they cannot read.
The language is the key to education.
Before teaching anything else, we must teach a child not how to read, but to.
Through literacy, we develop gateways to other regions of thought.
A man well-schooled in English, can understand Hawking as well as he understands Henry James.
How does one teach to read then?
Early youths, first must have their minds conditioned through recitation and memorization.
The faculty modern society has lost is memory.
Technology frees us to forget.
Rudimentary learning then, traps us in thought, culturing our behavior with a distinguished contamination of ideas.
Modern school if focused on cycle, when it really should concentrate on retaining words and language in a mind.
Asking a student to recite, for example, a passage from "Phaedo" teaches several faculties: A) the student learns, through comprehension, the philosophy of master antiquity; B) He learns to deeply respect discourse and rhetoric from his comprehension; and C) finally, he learns the value of academic image.
Point C, should be elaborated upon; the education is public, as Americans we have understood this; however, that should extend so that the student's progress is not private.
I hold that the reason for apathy, is its allowance into a life.
Apathy is disdained in a social group for pragmatic reasons-- even the most basic organism recognizes an unflattering appendage.
Condition the student then, to learn shame in stupidity.
Failure to produce, cruelly even, MUST be accompanied by a punishment.
Since career paths matter little to the unproductive, and parents cannot be trusted to enforce a school's humor, the task then falls to peers.
We know, thanks to modern sociology, how influential a youth's peers can be, and so it only stands to reason that peer pressure be acclimated to produce for the school.
Some would say this is cruel and psychological punishment, but to them I say, is Shame any crueller a badge on a young mind than a blatant lie and a bastard certificate of 'intelligence'? I believe false aggrandizement is far more harmful than a day's worth of hurt feelings.

We should also keep in mind that unlike the condition of their education, a youth is free at any time to apply himself and remedy the shame he feels; it, in effect, allows power to the youth over their status as opposed to imposing a gratuitous social condition and requirement.

So what shall we teach... For next time. :)

Gloating in Tenacious D Key

71229 ENGL 302 H19 Advanced Composition Fairfax A- 3.000


71321 ENGL 336 001 Shakespeare/Trag & Rom Fairfax A- 3.000


71334 ENGL 396 002 Intro: Creative Writing Fairfax A 3.000

71366 ENGL 447 001 American Drama 20th Cent Fairfax A 3.000


71374 ENGL 474 002 Milton Fairfax A- 3.000


71382 ENGL 498 001 Internship: Spec Topics Fairfax A 3.000
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Wow. I've never actually made it to a Dean's List before.



Oh my god, I did it. I fucking did it. Kage! Come here, I want you!
What what? dude, I'm sleeping.
Oh my god I fucking did it.
Did what?
The most powerful tool in singing technology since yodeling dude. Inward singing, check it. Rock singers are only rocking you half the time! The other time they're-- they're breathing...in! But not any more baby! Ha HA! Not with inward singing check it out


"And then I start some lyrics
/and you can't believe I'm singing,
and I'm never fucking stopping,
/and I'm always fucking singing.
And now you know that I will never,
/stop the fucking singing,
I'm like a fucking one man band!
/I'm like a fucking one man baaaaand!

And I can sing like that all fucking night.
Yeah but it wasn't really nonstop, there was a slight pause
Ah, shut up! Fuck you. And you know it sounds even better when fucking singing in! Shut up-- fuck you! You fucking dick! Always naysaying! Everything I create! You piece of shit! You create something like "inward singing!" You fucking sit on your tower...and nap...what's funny? You fucking bitch! Fucking...Cockaius!!!! (wd?)



You're fired from the band.
Uh...that won't be necessary...
Why's that?
I quit.

"Last week, Kyle quit the band...
but now we're back together. Uh!"

Be Still" Poem and Story

Today's selection for all you little internet reading elfs (who, let's face it, are as fictional as Santa Claus)is a reworking of an old poem and a beginning to a grand story. I wrote a monologue for Thomas a couple days ago, set a decade later. I want to trace how resolve for survival can pervert itself into a negative prejudice. It's all a flashback. For those who want to know how the flashback ends, Thomas escapes, but he loses his fingers to frostbite. For some reason or another, I tend to use the contraptions to collect my thoughts rather than standard handwriting. It worries me because I feel that I cannot think and retain ideas unless I'm at a computer; I would say technology frees us to forget what could matter. Photographs, blogging, all of this shouldn't serve as a reference to a person's particular state of mind because once the thing is written or copied, the person goes on obvlivious. People do not learn from these things. People are narcissistic and there's a small point of pleasure in people like myself who are pleased with the appearance of our words on a web page. Enough of that.

Be Still Be Still

“…your body is pollen; your mind is pollen; your voice is pollen. The trail is beautiful. Be still.”

Though the storm heaves
Her drum; the chill
Is never severe.
Be still; be still

As a loud light's bending
Signals harsh climax;
The end's never ending.
Be still; be still.

Where is she? oh, where is she?
I heard her say the sigh,
The lady's never free.
Be still; be still.

As home hollows its hall
The road goes back
never at all.
Be still; be still

Thomas lifted a finger. His single finger was a rosy pink against the blank expression of snow on the windshield. It looked like a sliver of life in a page run without any marks. Snow was the color of obvlivion. Thomas touched the finger to his stinging forehead and brought it back to its foreground. The digit was red, darker red, like a brick burned in a fire. He bent his finger at the mid-knuckle to prove to himself he wasn't dead. It may have been a flicker of life, but it was enough.

Thomas' car lay at random at the clear indent of the creek. The cascading snow fall, built up, made the altitude and the ten foot drop appear like a casual dip. Now a wind had filled the crease of earth-- what's that? oh yea, "nature abhors a vacuum, Thomas thought, cold air pouring into his lungs.

He tried the door, but in the fall, the mass of snow left only one mark, and that was his entry point, which as the hour turned dark, began to cover itself up like a monstrous white snake gorging on a rat. He pushed the door. He lunged at it, screamed, cursed, kicked, whined, he even scratched at the automatic buttons controlling the windows. Nothing worked. Everything was shut solid like a can of pickled beets.

Looking out through the windows, Thomas thought it an enormous roll of paper covering the car. He turned the key and the car sputtered, gave a death rattle, and escaped itself resigning to its unconscious sublime. It was never coming back, Thomas was certain of that. He imagined floating in his car and all around him were clouds, brazen and midday, waiting for the sun to dip so that they might travel on to another part of the world. The freedom of flight. Thomas thought of no better recourse than dream.

He switched off the interior light. There was not even sound afterwards. No air breezed by him, and all he could see was what he couldn't; the car was buried so deep from light and breath. His breaths were unsteady, unrhythmic and alarming, aching his throat with each gasp. Too alarming, in fact, that Thomas was not sure they would continue past sleep. He could not wait.

With difficulty he found the buckle still holding him in place and released it. A click and a zip was hear as Thomas felt the buckle's icy steel in his palm. Gripping the buckle piece tight in his fist, the metal prong jutting outward between the knuckles, Thomas faced the window. The first punch his hand so much that he wrapped the belt thrice deep round his fist, making sure the buckle was still prominent. He jabbed because of his position. Jab after jab did nothing else but scratch the glass.

He then had an idea. Laying himself horizontally across the driver's and passenger's seats, Thomas pressed the buckle against the glass with one foot, the plastic under his shoe and the buckle sticking out. He pulled back his leg and shot it forward kicked at the metal with ferocity. Then a crack. Then another and another, the cracks tracing a more and more elaborate picture with each strike before the window completely came apart, and a micro avalance filled the driver's seat.

The snow was heavy enough that it wouldn't crumble if hollowed. The frost was bitterly cold, numbing his fingers with one touch. He had no gloves, he had lost every pair he had ever owned. Regretting his lack of protection, Thomas shot his hands into the surrounding snow and began to savagely claw.

Poet

Poetry today resides on the outskirts of action; the implausible and overly safe distance from existance. The modern poet tells no story except exhalts their own bravery in composition. The intrinsic achievements are worth nothing, in my opinion, if they do not hold water against a greater narrative i.e. the winding theme. Bond in poetry, as in Shakespeare, works to motivate characters. Tell me, what bond appears as Sylvia Plath bemoans her conditions. What story does she tell but her own and is that the measure of a poet? to have a conditional life suitable for autobiography. Some of us are not so lucky as to be born bi-polar and so we go through life with words like "my heart" and "my pain" inside small unopenable briefcases. Where they belong I might add. First, the reader must be made aware of the stresses of the character-- what good is it to have pain demark a being when the more interesting story is the origin of the so-called "stain of pain". I would sometimes spend my time lambasting the cruel diatribes and concrete abstractness which has haunted so much poetry over the years. By concrete abstractness, I mean the tendency for an artist to attempt to explain himself in an image by using an image which is more nonsensical than the feeling itself. John Amen is a practitioner of this avant garde, and more widely abstract poetry. Not quite on the level of Sitwell, Amen will sit down in front of you with a guitar, sing a song, then elect to tell you how he feels like "a stampede of horses running on barbed wire". Certainly the image is evocative, but evocation is something like seeing a bright blue square painted on a canvas at MoMA: The mind accepts the hue and enjoys it, but cannot comprehend why a blue square should have merit to be inside a museum. Likewise with the poem. That is why I push for narrative. For further concreteness in poetry. For Realism is the gateway to great poetry; the local color, the actual people will not be denied. Work today bears the weight of the presence of the poet, perhaps too greatly a weight, that each word is too intentional, too predicted. What we need is abscence from poetry and the poet. To be my ideal poet, I need form like a chocolate batter needs a baking pan and cookie cutters. Set in the oven and back away. The complete formation is out of the poet's hands, their only luxury and leisure now is an overhearing on the audible life of a lyric.

abridged edition An abbreviated or condensed version of a work. Abridgement may be done in order to save space or to cut out passages which are thought to be unsuitable for some sections of the reading public. School editions of Shakespeare were often abridged (and still are occasionally)lest the sensibilities of adolescents be offended.

That is all.

Decrepit
Spoiled
Tragic

All of the things I've had to put up with from the opposite sex because somehow I was born with a tender effeminacy; so preclusive to my being that activities aren't worth action if women are not involved. Let me make this clear. No more hiding around in corners. Time to come clean with what I feel.

Women are loathsome creatures. They are arrogant whiny inspipid human beings. Their guts are nothing but piles of humor vitreous, neverending, cold, dank, impersonal, and horrifying. I have never met a woman who had the capacity to reach the grand apexes a man could. They are, in effect, minimal things which deserve subjection. I will no longer impede my own self, my own potential, to the charms of some...bitch! The world is a cruel and hierarchical nature; the egalitarianism women strive for only diminishes the strength of the world. They can call me bitter and unloved, any self loathing is gone for the sake of projection. If to the pure, all things are pure, and I have never seen a pure woman, then it should only follow that I extricate myself from them-- ignorant beasts! Rape would be a reward to the shallowest woman because it scapes them into the victim status they so lovingly adorn through generations. I don't feel sympathy for a captured heroine in a story because I know them to be victims always in real life. Women serve no other purpose than to further the aspirations of their companionate male. Instead they spoil minds. They wreck havoc on the lesser mind, Rap Culture idolizes and over values the pursuit of women, as if that was anything else except a nihilistic venture. Wittgenstein tells us to look into the signs of things, to learn the word from the perception. When I see women, now, all I see are degenerate organisms preying on lust, their lascivious laps accepting all breed of heroes, only to cut the hair, castrate the epitome and reduce the ideal to their own subjection.

That was a character from my story, about a young boy who tries to castrate himself. It's based loosely on the Hemingway short story, "Kilimanjaro" I think is the name.

I don't know why Celia still bothers me. It's been monthes. Maybe it's the fact that I was completely cut off for lack of any decent rejection. It fucking bothers me and I do not know why. She was nothing but a rude cunt, and yet I feel like I have some matter at fault. It is not for want of logic, I have been rejected enough to understand the myriad of equations which, for one point or another, do not include me; however, it would be comforting to know about something I could improve upon.


Taming the Heart

I'll become an ascetic.
I will starve myself and cut
my body off from the world
of luxury and desire where
I have fattened up as at the teat
of some indulgent monster.
My argument is in tatters,
and, I can not help but feel,
and so is my heart. Oh my.
It has been a while since
I've bandied that phrase
about the page. My heart.
The word written screams its origin,
the strings of fluid connecting
to the screen from my chest
seem fresh, wounded, unafraid of honesty.
I worry so much about cliche,
it is no wonder I have never spoken
about my heart. Each time, it insists
at the back of my throat
like its very own enigmatic heart beat;
the guts rushing forward, tumulting
and turning the basis of my organs,
inverting everything, ensuring
chaotic divide until my spleen rubs my lungs,
my pancreas pumps our blood,
my fingers point out of my skull,
and my heart pulses behind my eyes,
thickening the brine with sour dye.
My heart. Out, then in again. Polishing
the bone and unloading Past
like a New World frigate.
It grows fat on the outside.
I wonder if it will ever
fit back inside the cage.

Forged

Iron. Iron in the gun's barrel, loaded with the atoms;
the bullet was always a concoction of iron and dust--
dust is the real building block of the universe--
ashes to ashes is like rust blossoming on rust
and everything decays. Sad. Pity. The world turns,
full of iron. People wear iron in their mouths,
nasal pouches, tongues, and ears. clits
and dicks now come with iron, bits
of metal in temples and chests. It wasn't long
ago that there was less iron in a frame
than in the earth. And from the earth, iron,
carried like infants, still yet valuable,
by steel men made of steel and from steel.
The world reads like a periodic table,
and all the things you thought you knew
existed, you wish you had forgotten;
how the iron ripped from boulders,
trucked to suburban worlds
and risen to urban lands would someday
become an ironic bullet.

I am not that photo album sticker-laced
from college days; that griefless zombie
gripping heinekens like philosopher stones,
rolling over, tasting light-- touch taste.

It raised my brain, taught the flexing tree
of coiled nerved to muscle-move bones,
taught how paws scrapped, taught how tigers paced
as fierce intelligenc in the capital city.