Toxic Culture

The Blood you didn't know you had.

http://www.crisispictures.org


Dear Mamma,

The world is on fire, I hear. But I stay inside most days because I am terrified of knowing what exists beyond my comfort level. Because when we were kids, Mamma, they didn't teach us about the world when we sat for 9 hours a day staring at the chalkboards.

They had created a picture perfect world, full of facts and evidence, a science to save our feeble minds. But the scientists can't stop the fires. God can't seem to stop them right now either. This isn't what we were told when our primarily educated minds were being developed.

And I can't help but feel a little misled. The truth, the whole picture would have brought us much further, had they just let us know. But candy coated anecdotes of what the world is, I suppose was a plan easier to digest. Less headache, right? We couldn't be bothered by headache, even at the cost of progress and empowerment. And I wonder now, since I have been misled, surely there are others in the same position. And where have all of my peers been misled to in their discourse? I escaped, but did they? Can they? Can we create hop for a generation of kids robbed of their consciousness, for the easier escape in formulas, pills, television, and vicarious living through celebrity’s personal lives and the want-more-want-more-want-more mentality.

I dislike having conversations with most people. I find pop culture disgusting, and I want to throw myself from a very high concrete building when I engage in the world somedays. Because it's appalling. The misunderstanding. The lack of knowledge, this bankruptcy of consciousness that has been slipped to us in mass doses from that silver spoon, from the elementary school days of reciting our patronage to the American flag each morning, to the mass media marketing machines of our adult lives convincing us of the ailments and inadequacies that didn't exist until the pin-up girls and boys told you they did (and classified your inferiority in exfoliated skin, lean enough muscles, a big enough penis, voluptuous plastic breasts, and all the flora and fauna of such a manufactured existence).

It's not anything personal against these aspects of this American life, it's simply that I, personally, do not see the purpose, or interest. And I worry that these easy opiates desensitize us to ourselves, and to those around us. It's no wonder everyone is depressed, we've repressed our true natures by a neon screen and purchasing things as department stores. We can almost always recognize material value and interest, and when viewing a photo of a man (your brother!! a brother!!!) shot down by cops, it can only be seen as a material photo, not an internalized, very real event, with cause for concern and action.

Is this why the vast majority of our kind walk around self-involved, and not only ignorant, but dis-interested in the slow, but certain degeneration of our country and our world? If we don't care to live in a healthy environment, eventually, we will not have the luxury of living in one. If you do not pay your house note, your house gets taken away. If you do not care for your children, the government will take them away. If you do not nurture your freedom, it will cease to exist.

Everyone is angry, mamma. Everyone is waiting to be offended, to be attacked, and to saddle up on a partisan group, to distinguish their beliefs from everyone else’s. But we're not going anywhere like this, are we? The anger is just growing, and we're beginning to forget why we're fighting, but it's all we know now. Anger and segregation, a habitual mannerism, rather than a necessity. I’m sick of fighting. It never changes anything.

What ties the human heart to it's creed, is a tie that cannot be changed by force or by fire. A man will live and die with all in the world that is true to him. But we're still waging holy wars, trying to rob each other of those gems, which can never be stolen by life or death. Imposing our ideals upon everyone else. But everyone else did not ask for it.

My concern, what's been on my mind, is that, no matter how divided we seem, we're all here together, and that's never going to change. No matter how much blood shed, money, love, war, or theft. It's been that way since the start of time- it's tested and true, that we all have to live together. And to do that, we have to be aware, and steady in keeping ourselves educated to the world around us- because it exists even if we choose to ignore it. And the longer we ignore the world outside of our shuttered windows, the worse the world gets.... the weeds grow, the ground becomes unstable, the roots in the yard begin to destruct your foundation, the winds blow, the rain beats your rooftop, and eventually, the world will consume your beaten vessel because you've chosen to ignore the powers that be, rather than accepting them, and finding a solution to preserve your happy home. It doesn't have to be this way.

I don't have an answer. I don't have the slightest clue. My ideals are a scratch on an immeasurable surface than is rooted in thousands of years and lifelines. But I do know the answers lie somewhere in truth, self-empowerment, and awareness. And it’s time we all recognize that so you, me, and the rest of the world can move forward. Mamma, will you move forward with me?

To keep us from wanting more . . .

We tried to buy the world and it was never enough.

When we were younger we were hungrier. Starved for the solace secured in the self-projection of the self. The comfort in knowing that the world around you, too, would know you as you are without the social filters, without the freshly hemmed trousers, resting like a trophy down the fall of your leg.

When we were younger we did not know that our personal injustices were likely far surpassed by those without even the luxury enough to consider such spiritual repressions. Those souls whose daily battle was mere survival, to whom the prospect of the opportunity of developing a self would have been considered as fine a gift as fresh fruit, miraculously birthed from the deserts drafty pockets. A gift that would not be seen by such battered eyes. Nor the taste ever known of.

And there we were in our air-conditioned middle American homes, crying over our own frustrations of the middle-class warfare. Boredom, ignorance, and bliss. Our neighbors in the other worlds did not even have terms for such words. We got real good at hating ourselves, and hating one leads to hating the next.

We learned about education, and power, and monetary units we could hold in our hands like prophet’s words. Like a solution. We lied to ourselves and stood on our new thrones of ash to cast down potentials on the pure we had squandered. We drank heavy these distractions, as they comforted the ever churning mind, into its peaceful submission. We could hardly live the other way. What were we supposed to do? We were sad, and so affected.

He could consume everything with a single swoop. He found more in wanting more, and he paraded in this gluttony for a few years. He was running to and from the gut of these things, in a roundabout, circular fashion, until he once day ran back into his own arms. And away from inadvertantly killing himself, by the previous excursions. He seemed surprised I should understand this falling, but should it be any surprise at all?
We’ve all been trying to annihilate ourselves since birth, by force, by right, or by walking through the lines of fire, on our way to someplace else. Honey, I’ve been choking on those words so painfully long as you have. And I hope we don’t have to any more.

Because more,
Is never enough
For the insatiable soul

It’s not in the crisp green papers of freedom
It’s not in the golden brimmed bubble in the mug
It’s not in that plastic bottle with your name on it

No it’s none of those things, which provide us the freedom of confusion
It’s always in the things we’d prefer to be confused of

Cause they sting on the tongue as they exit your mouth
They tremble in your throat as everyone’s having a good laugh
And they stick to your skin like the sweat of another
Who feels like they should have been there from the start

So as our brown skinned siblings are plowed down by our boredom, I sit here with my new vision. I received glasses today, and have seen more distinguishing lines than ever before. And I talk about the other world as if I knew. As if my mother had been blown into stars by sensationalist antics and their mighty forces, as if my best friends had died without even trying. There may not be stained battlefields of bleeding red, of flesh, and demolition. And I may be trite and self-involved by even tainting such happenings with my own colors and visions, but it’s the best I know how. And my privileged, freedom bound friends have, in fact, been dying their mighty deaths, by the hands of their own repressions. But we, we here in our “civilized” world, we have the privilege of the walking dead, in their burial suits of gray, flimsy white-washed skin, jaundice and wanting more (air, life, love, peace, a fucking hamburger?). We watch our dead as they go about forging a life, filled by haunted memories of what once was. Our imaginations of ourselves. While the other side of the world has us to blame for their lover’s and loved ones tombs of eternal sleep, we too have ourselves to blame for the graveyards upon which we walk every day; the vast neon streets of candy-colored flesh in New York City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, all the way down to Little City X, America. The walking dead firing its weight to the eternal dead. I’m wondering who is fighting who, and if it’s fair to point any fingers at all.

You see, sadness and hate are world epidemics. And they plague our evil President like they plague the linen laced extremists blowing up the innocents in the name of their saving grace. It’s easy to forget how to live, when we’ve fogged up the glass, that could only be wiped clean by good love. We’ve become so consumed by fighting, either for the fighting to stop, or simply firing the guns, that we have nearly forgotten how to love. And now, most of us would find it easier (and more practical), to scream at politicians, or simply fire a gun, than to do something as simple as say three one-syllable words. (without flinching or thinking that the world might end).

And is life worth preserving if the preservation bears no fruit? Why is it so critical, so important that we stop the killers from their killing? If you want to stop the babies being aborted, you damn well better have something waiting for them on this other side. You better be sure you give them life, if you deny them death. You must sleep in the bed that you make, not force others to lay there. This is critical. That our good intentions, can march further than just principals, and the moral, and deliver those good intentions to fruition. Once we have stopped the killing, what should we have that warrants living for? These do not singularly exist. If we are so overzealous to stop death, and the hate, perhaps we should start exercising our capacity for the opposite as well.

And I’m trying to find some sense in this delicate web. The best way to invest the good intentions. Because we are unaware of most of what will grace us. Too inexperienced to know of the celestial that will sweep our paths to come.

So, I’ve been reading the news,
Been thinking of how to use it, and
I figured it’s best to just keep pushing …..

Until we’ve arrived.

And I wonder,
Will a lifetime ever be enough,
To keep us from wanting more?

The First: God in Man

There have been a series of firsts
All of which I was unable to commit to memory
When they were a first
Because fresh minds do not know of their impending life’s significance,
Until the moment has passed

I was thinking of a friend, a special friend
Remembering when he had sent me postal mail
Inside, a creation of true form, made by hand
With intent and ideals placed beneath it’s crisply sticky package
It like was Christmas for a kid, with faith not only in an imaginary man,
But the good of man kind

Upon unraveling his gift, a creation meant to serve as tangible evidence of loosely placed feelings
I received a sharp pang in my belly
Like had never been there before
The mundane day had broken it’s own skin
And now there were streams of bloody tears turning from the source
It was good to be alive again
And there was God in that package in that way,
Making me see God in the man.

And when you see God in a man
You love the man
But the man is no more than a hazy façade of atoms and skin tone
Tactile charms, curious fingers, and open wide tongues
You think you have found what is worth holding on, but
it’s really the God you want

And sometimes a simple man will deliver
Deliver the gifts you did not know you needed or were even looking for
He’ll get caught in the doorway, between the words that prophets read
And the uncertain spaces left waiting on the pages in between

But now as I have seen the ghosts divide
and the mystery distill from the science
of this
I have seen that the man is no more than a myth
Charming, warm, but nothing more than an imaginary magic man is to a wishful kid

He is not the bible or the serpents tongue,
Or the apple, or the cavalry’s guns
He’s a man who showed you some,
Some of what now you can’t remember

We were just searching for truth
And once, we thought we had found it
In the God that we could channel by
Mortal fingertips and two dreamer’s prowess

There was a first evidence of truth
Progress
And the love that a man can deliver
Thought he was not the one, who should deliver you