Veil Of Marketing Illusion

Ongoing deep discounts, sales, clearances and special offers build a sense of permanence

Continuous anticipation of quickly-forgotten weekends, holidays and vacations sustains us

The very newest constantly beckons us forward into a quite-obviously, endless tomorrow

A thousand advertisements draw each of us warmly into that timeless consumer firelight

Soothing background music hypnotically imprints us with eternal marketing mantras

Careful spins reformat issues into sound bites that the average 3^rd grader can easily digest

Within this media immersion, we dream ourselves passing thru eternity at these daily lives

Homogenized spokesmen blend seamlessly to envelop us in an easily-accepted and secure cocoon

Our lifestyles have reached a permanent climax in the pleasure-seeking 3 minute present

We pre-consciously dismiss evidence contradicting the eternal happily-ever-after diorama

The circle of family and friends bonds us tightly to a shared dream of unending belonging

The void lies almost totally obscured and unconsidered behind our colorful veil of illusion

We need only strive thru all time at becoming the beautiful models their ads portray for us

The infinite circle of merchant-stoked holidays fosters in us a comforting notion of immortality

Together we tread the great wheel of relaxation, refreshment and entertainment

And our bright mega-churches finance a seamless transition to a familiar eternal paradise

Next week’s episodes draw us forward smoothly without any static-filled interruptions

Stopping to smell the roses as we grab the gusto while living for today totally occupies us

The unknowable actual number of our iterations allows us to assume we perform an infinite loop

Cuddly and warm images help obscure the sharply-tattered edges that we must rightly ignore

The afterlife is marketed as the ultimate in all-inclusive vacations in a truly eternal paradise

Those who pass away are expensively packaged for the exciting but safe trip to come

Our powerful mass hypnosis mostly keeps any consciousness of the eternal void at bay

The rapid pace of change obscures well the tiny hourglass filling in right over top of us

The nattering of bobbing media heads lulls us into a comfortable sense of security

Advertiser-safe news holds our focus adjusted safely inside the blinders they so cannily provide

The cartoon theme of Personal Responsibility keeps the disaffected securely in the game

Sacrificing our reason frees us from agitating contemplation of any cracks in the mirror

There is absolutely no reason to think that this consumer lifestyle cycle will ever cease

We walk this treadmill seeing a well-lit and unending path towards the happily-ever-after

Socialists and creationists equally shielded from the near absolute zero of utter black emptiness

Even on our deathbeds we rest assured of an eternal well-being within these shared illusions

Namaste, Butthead

    नमस्ते

Namaste, oh, venerated Master of the Universe, the divine in me recognizes the divine in you

Surely you are the Best and the Brightest as evidenced by your truly transformational greed

Greetings, oh beloved next generation whom we have so carefully brought forth and protected

Soon you must ignore us as but irrelevant and doddering, purposeless and lost, old fools

I recognize in your greasy and sweating obesity the effort to attend to that internal eternal

Layers of fat distancing you from the illusory clamor of the too material and very temporal world

Namaste, oh wise and beneficent CorproExecs, meditating inside safely locked compounds

Your lack of morals reflective of the Great Void that you will so soon rejoin once again, forever

Namaste, to our eternally patient and long-suffering domesticated, vegetarian cousins

Our industrially-efficient, franchised holocaust surely earns each of you so much good karma

Salutations oh lawyers, your gifts wasted on forms of deliberate and unnecessary over-complication

Now that you hate yourself and your once-honored profession, I would almost share your pain

I bow to you - Fat and loudly cursing, proudly illiterate, drunken, redneck fellow pilgrims

May your ATVs and pickups, jetskis, snowmobiles, dirtbikes and speedboats always loudly bray

Namaste, rich and well-connected son whose only real job has been as a political sock puppet

Greatest success on your new career as elder statesman, we await your fairytale memoirs

Namaste, my criminal brother, clinging to your brutal lifestyle like a wet rat in a dirty flood

I respect your cruel focus like the looming empty eternity into which we are both certainly slipping

Yaar, I feel that overwhelming force which drives your greedy and so short-term ambitions

I honor your selfish centering amid this turbulent confusion that leaves us with but a hazy blur

I nod in admiration, holy snake oil salesman cloaked in odd vestments and stale traditions

Making an honored, tax-free living pimping worthless divine life insurance on fictional eternal souls

Namaste to my 1 billion brothers shackled to unspeakable poverty and inescapable filth

We could each share about 1/5 of a cent and exhaust the $2M they say I need for my retirement

Namaste revered arms-producing protectors, for holding phony bogeymen away from our shores

We dare not speak against fat annual budget increases lest we be labeled Soft On Defense

I watch in awe there, my target market brother, as you manage to ignore so many issues

Your Zenlike focus upon consumerism blocking out the squishes foolish socialist squeaking

I salute your botox and cosmetic surgeries, your hair dyes, implants and your miracle fat melters

For surely these all help you down that great Middle Way towards a wider cosmic understanding

Namaste young peasants working 14 hour days, sleeping 20 to a room who earn $100 a month

I support your struggle for a better life by charging the cheap goods you make but cannot afford

Namaste, all my fundamentalist brothers of every ignorant, uncompromising and angry stripe

I recognize your merciless, amoral righteousness as a but a short, violent prelude to eternal paradise

May your devotion to the mindless pleasure of explosively-empty corpro-entertainment be exalted

For just how far can it be from the enlightenment gained by daily repeating Om Mani Padme Hum?

Gone Off in Empty Silence With So Much Unsaid

You had always lived like the time to sagely compose your real message was still to come

But actually you’ve gone off quite silently now, and it seems likely, into eternal emptiness

You felt you waited patiently, still ready to make your statement or to take some real action

Now, it’s hard for others to really know if you were the silent type, or just another empty shell

Gone off in silence but not without leaving a wide trail of random noise and messy litter

As far as we can tell, the space you leave behind still unsullied by any conscious reflection

Your blurry recollections, sloppily stored, simply evaporate, unsorted and un-distilled

That is, finished but not summarized, finalized but not completed, gone but not packed up

Went away unprepared, unwilling and unable to form even a short and sensible goodbye

Borne off, you thought, before your time, with yet so much you had never even started

Carried off of the couch to the hospital, then to the cemetery without even a decent interval

You raised your hand far too late, buried without even having thought out a real question

Gone beyond our limited communications even should you find your true voice at last

We will label it a so-called mute testimony and say it was really all you planned on leaving

Caught off-guard and carried away in silence, or did you actually have nothing at all to say?

Hey! Nobody could ever read the beautiful thoughts that may have existed, but only in your head

You have departed, having tacitly accepted things as they were going, and are going further still

Now you have left it to us impute your beliefs merely from your mundane habits

We can’t know your brilliance and grand emotions from your so very ordinary life

Though your soul may have been filled to bursting, it has all evaporated, without any residue

Your wondrous family surrounds you now, but you call each one by a different name

With the drugs, you cannot realize that they know you’ve already gone off in silence

The past is closing in around you because you can no longer process the present

Though your greatest works still await you, there is only a future that you will not experience

Yet, there still are those many things you would have, could have, and, likely, should have done

In your mind, you kept reserved the future for those special tasks that you were born to do

But the short time you paused was confused by a drugged pain, in impersonal surroundings

The last thing you read was another bill and the last thing you wrote was a check

You did not plan on your self-numbing repetitions halting without some decent interlude

There was only time to cap off your life with a short period of deliriously painful suffering

Torn away so quickly and completely with barely time for the briefest of regrets

Gone off in a silence that we can only try to differentiate from a simple & mindless emptiness