SCREED

I can say nothing to you you'll hear


you are part of the New Machine

new technology based on the old blueprint

based on holidays for the bosses

but no holiday for their laborers


you got yours

you could care less about anyone else

you submit you comply

and grow a callous on the heart


you cultivate like a trophy

and when has that ever been different...

when the bosses call the shots

and we dance to that tune or die slowly?


and me...my part in this?

I was raised on dissent

I recited The Waste Land and Howl

I listened close to Desolation Row


I was trained by Woody and Ginsberg

and Patchen and Rexroth equally

and slogged through love

and experienced things reading Leonard Cohen's words


confirmed after the fact...

I was raised in their traditions only to find

they were the last of their lines

they were the last voices to be heard


who spoke of the human heart

and the shit in which it beat relentlessly

and I am as aimless now as any bedroom visionary

wishing for a magical overthrow of Reality As Is


as if Full Frontal Metropolis were a possibility...

explain that to your children before you submit them

to drugs and the ignorant theories of psychologists and social workers

married to the Status Quo of normalcy and capitulation...


but if you even think of rising up and challenging

this wretch state of affairs at least know you've got

you work cut out for you...Evil has dominion of the earth

and if you think you can overcome this and win some


moral victory think again and think hard...

for the real work of relief from this oppression

will be one kindness between each of us to the other

and every agenda of the ersatz masters of the earth


will only hunker down against it at every instance

it reveals itself...

nothing in this earth will prevail against it

unless every soul that doesn't buy in stands firm


in its refusal to be done to death by sociopathic cogs

in the infernal machine...the New Machine that is only

a new face on the eternal grief of being in the world

where Evil has its dominion...


I have nothing you'll receive from me...and God help me

I have as little to say as the next man...we're all at someone's mercy

and we can only hope it is mercy

and if that makes a difference then this screed won't be


totally in vain...for why speak if no one"s there to hear?






Content (c) 2008 -2014 Philip Milito. All rights reserved.