I Like Muscular Writing...

I like muscular writing.  I’m sick of odes and bullshit covered in convention, words used for their sound and not their meaning.  We swim in bullshit everyday, so why the fuck would you want to commit more of it to a page.  Why not ape Bukowski instead of Thoreau?  One feels real, while the other, it masks reality and puts it out in the countryside to die on the side of a road like a carcass trophy.  Symbolism standing in for meaning and meaning is everything.  We’re not as clever as we’d like to think we are.  We are as transparent as the words we use are concrete.  Why fuck yourself out of clarity for veiled swipes at being understood in some esoteric way.  Clusters of words strung together in the hopes that your cleverness will be appreciated and not the feelings that initiated them.  Most writers tell lies disguised as truths because their fear is being found out that they are just hacks and literary grunts.  Belching daily over a page only to be left with a queasy feeling that you’ve said nothing.  You’ve made no impression and confused understanding with prose.  Word monkeys bangin your chest with a thesaurus and dictionary.  Saying nothing, words devoid of heart and worse, of interest.  We’re surrounded by it.  Pages and screens splattered like the walls of a grisly crime scene.  I like muscular writing, save the gentle shit for your therapists and children.

Operation: “Shopping”…Or, A Middle-Class Version Of Scorched Earth Politics

Storm the castle

Plant the flag in softened, well-trodden dirt

Shop at the ramparts super-store

Grease the tank wheels

Roll over everyone

Keep progressing, moving forward

With slow, mannered precision

Lock step, eyes fixed

Well-covered and camouflaged

Might hidden from sight

Out flanking, out ranking

Without questioning, orders followed

Mission accomplished with minimal collateral damage

Greater goods and services rendered

Civilian living in a boutique war zone

Gentrifying armies

Just enough clicks away to be considered soft targets

Entrenched in bunkered cubicles

Manning cockpit cash registers

With pilotless drones set loose in shopping malls

A focus group enemy of the state

Buying and selling each other’s secrets

Honorably discharged

Into a bloated wallet

Faces flushed and covered with consumer scars

This is living large in an age of large living

This is today being lived in yesteryear

No purchase will bring it back

Storm the castle

                                                                            Repeat...