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

God Granted Me This Fairytale Serenity

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”

I note, freed of that dark anxiety, the global mass extinction our over-existence nurtures every day

Calmly I accept the reality of a hotter, drier, dustier and dirtier world, where we all must live

No more do I trouble my mind over CO2 levels to which I must contribute but cannot control

I pursue zenlike tranquility, emptying my mind by flipping channels thru potentially anxious nights

Unregulated exotic chemicals in our drinking water can no longer disturb my meditative state

I placidly accept the degradation, poisoning and erosion of our precious soil by industrial agriculture

Loss of habitat does not threaten me, as I twitter safe and warm here in my techno-burrow

I gaze into that hazy and starless urban night with what I can construe to be a quiet satisfaction

There is a blind equanimity to be found in simply ignoring the poverty and suffering of others

Deep media immersion smothers and deafens any anxiety which might falsely overcome me

In a benignly-induced trance, I emptily partake of our grisly and unsustainable food chain

Verily does my true spirit rise above the ever-knottier cluster constituting our irreversible advance

God granted me the serenity to shut the hell up, bend over and take all that which I cannot change

I sagely accept that selfish vanity, greed and insecurity are key traits of modern day leaders

Endlessly repeating the simple mantra of You Cant Stop Progress properly spins my spiritual journey

I quietly condone piling debt on their futures while we waste the resources they need to pay them

I have learned that worry over our huge number of self-inflicted crises is but a false shibboleth

I can rightly get on with the future and leave our guilty past behind in a jumbled, half-forgotten blur

It is with a certain calm that I adapt the insensate gouging of good croplands into cheap stripmalls

My health and happiness have been enhanced by letting go my fuzzy and unrealistic youthful idealism

Trust in the wisdom of His inscrutable way has banished the awful uncertainty which beset me

I am able to drive right on past our decaying infrastructure without even a second thought

A vision of the seas as stripmined, unregulated dumps can no longer perturb my cauterized emotions

No more must I futilely obsess over our sacred, morbidly-bloated, utterly-wasteful military budget

I lost fear of bearing personal-responsibility for my own uninsured health and scam-complex finances

I simply cast aside the burden of wasted anger over our people’s ignorance, illiteracy and attitude

That I must work until at least 70 but will be laid off for good at 50 no longer fills me with dread

With the sublime detachment granted me by my meds I disassociate myself from humanity’s future

I have made a lasting peace with all the eternal, random, angry and empty noise we produce

Internalizing the temporal nature of our vast wastefulness allows me to see far without seeing it

Accepting our unique possession of eternal souls has revealed the wisdom of our divine dominion

Now I can embrace my tenured dull manager who remains willfully ignorant and bristles with venality

I can blandly cope with their artificially-induced stress over arbitrary deadlines on useless projects

I have been imparted the ability to disagree with a silence that they act upon as my tacit acceptance

It has come as a relief to see how easily I place ever more on that big pile of things I cannot change

God has granted me the wisdom to overlook, ignore, compartmentalize or be far too busy for

Their Phony Ecological Concern

So we buy a couple pockets of old-growth big tree forest and turn them into monuments

We’ll clean up one or two token rivers and plant a few fish and take many pictures

We can do a couple of clean coal projects and print a hopeful pamphlet on recycled paper

Maybe we could subsidize a model green suburb with garages back behind, in the alleys

A proof of concept community school or two should keep their expectations in check

We can publish voluntary standards on protecting croplands and leave agribusiness to self-regulation

We’ll study the decline and mutation of the frogs and make toothless scientific recommendations

Maybe publicize power plant mercury emissions so that industry voices a cleanup commitment

We’ll force cars to be 90% more clean and efficient, then put twice as many on the road

We’ll save threatened wonders by opening them to the miracle of corporate tourism

We’ll make cleaner snowmachines and ATVs and ask them to please stay on the trails

We’ll strive to recycle more paper to China to make our import packaging even cheaper

Some stamps with pictures of endangered songbirds will demonstrate our great concern

It’ll be far cheaper to say we are raising people’s awareness rather than taking any real action

We can pass more landmark legislation and then quietly fail to deliver on the funding, once again

We’ll slowly adapt our children to dirty water, fouled air and a squalid, littered over-population

We’ll call for comprehensive reform, created by lobbyists, and then poison it with unrelated pork

We’ll un-muzzle our scientists but let our corpro-media out them as wackos with clever soundbites

We can shout above the noise pollution that it is not an issue even worthy of any discussion

A greenish packaging change and an All-Natural slogan ought to keep our numbers up

Concoct phony market-based solutions to problems no free economy was ever meant to solve

Label it expensive and intrusive gov’t regulation and play it off against families, jobs and money

Showcase opportunities for a few starving children but don’t ever even mention slashing population

Talk of reducing emissions to 1990s levels like that would restore some kind of half-assed equilibrium

Promote a couple show species to star status even as our global mass extinction gathers speed

Propose a bulky, readily-subverted cap and trade scam instead of a simple carbon tax

Institutionalize calls for further study as a means for simply continuing on with business as usual

Contract out pre-determined research results and trumpet it loudly towards our own sales ends

Advertising our warm commitment to future, family and environment should gin up wide good will

We’ll trumpet a little renewable energy research while permitting more new coal-fired plants

We’ll say we’re good stewards but depend on higher property and sales taxes for our existence

Just ignore military recommendations and keep the bloated cash cow bases in our own states open

We’ll pay off liberatarian ranchers if a wolf takes a cow grazing for next to nothing on federal lands

Sportsmen will soon adjust to expensive, trucked-in, hatchery trout in dirty, drying reservoirs

We might restructure capitalism to factor in phony environmental costs to avoid socialist regulation

The MulltiNats will cure societal inequity by simply reducing all workers to a bare subsistence level

A high self-esteem and vast sense of entitlement

We want stimulating and secure jobs that pay well with lots of free and untaxed health benefits

Yes, and my devotion to my children should be at least a partial criteria for my promotions

We need lots of leisure time to share with our families free from nagging financial worries

Don’t want OUR lives to be totally dominated by such boring demands as work and money

Have to be able to focus on pleasure-seeking and still be pushed up that organization

We should remain in line for fat bonuses without sacrificing our wired online souls

Our precious children shall remain as the first and most important priority of our lives

Wont sacrifice social networking for overly-long periods of like, focused concentration

Striving to fulfill ourselves with an unending list of quickly-forgotten adventure vacations

Still balancing work against life even though our jobs are so quickly being offshored, forever

We demand that we be accommodated - Even as they have us train our 3^rd world replacements

More fast-food family time in front of corpro-entertainment is what nurtures our spirits

We need space to assimilate the fractal twittering in which we have immersed ourselves

More and more we choose to chat online over struggling with whatever project schedules

A high self-esteem and vast sense of entitlement ensure that we maintain a proper focus

We need to balance this work life with high CO2 emission trips to extreme sports venues

The Music is important and streaming services are setting us free from tired office slavery

Just got to have an investment home but there’s no time to try and learn to take care of it

Looking for more, over the screaming kids and squawking media during our own free time

We demand a richly rewarding sex life, colorful entertainment and a good night’s sleep

Need time to shuttle children to and fro and it better not be held against me by the boss

Quite happy using a negative savings rate for all the best in life, which we so richly deserve

They simply must keep increasing our benefits without ever mentioning any higher taxes

No way are we letting our short and precious time here be frittered away on trivial jobs

If they expect me to learn some lame new skills they better be paying me to do it from home

Going to free up some home gaming time nuking instant dinners and setting paper plates

Look, my kids and family are what’s important but I’ll sue if I don’t get the raise he does

You might be my boss, yet I answer only to my personal savior during our private dialogs

You best care for Mother and insure my kids without some death panel healthcare takeover

Won’t fret over the fine print technical details if there’s a catchy sound bite available

Gotta balance my tired job, sullen offspring and lying greasy politicians with hyped media events

Looking for more than being a veal calf in some prairie dog cube farm, even if it’s in hi-def 3D

Went to a couple yoga classes and got a few cotton shopping bags around here somewhere

Wont see me end up eating and draining thru tubes that are changed out by low-paid immigrants

Eyeing a 300 hp hybrid and thinking about subsidized solar on top of my un-insulated roof

Looking way beyond the mundane rat race almost every Sunday down at our mega-church

So, you can tell I do see there’s so much more to life and that I carefully balance, Having It All

Turns Out

Turns out there really were some reasons why we needed them silly bugs and birds and frogs

Now we see we should have been a little bit more careful with our once rich farming soils

It’s hard to believe that overfishing a few species brought on such a broad collapse

Who could have ever imagined that we weren’t actually our only one true god’s chosen people?

Guess we really should have paid just a little bit more attention to our crashing literacy rate

Turns out it was foolish to always spend so much building costly weapons and ginning up wars

Unexpectedly, it’s revealed that mergers and acquisitions were only for creating lavish bonuses

Despite everyone’s firm beliefs, that fabulous real estate bubble burst, just like all the others

Whoever would’ve thought the free market wouldn’t provide affordable universal healthcare?

Somehow we never noticed at all as we so rapidly tainted our vast stores of clean, fresh water

Turns out that our sheer numbers created problems too expensive and complex for us to fix

Wow, so those constantly rising temperatures really did mean something, in the end

Didn’t realize that sterile, bio-engineered moncrops would all succumb at once to identical pests

So surprised that filling the oceans with plastic particulates would collapse the marine food chain

Struck dumb by finally noticing that, when all the oil was gone, we hadn’t sought real alternatives

Turns out the bankers got it all so very wrong, even without burdensome government regulation

Turns out we shouldn’t have rolled empty credit card debt into our homes as often as possible

Why look at this, it really was stupid to pay $200/mo for phones and $150/mo for cable

Huh, so, snowmobiling, jetskiing and OHVing are actually destructive and not just family recreation?

Well, goddamn, those outsourced jobs don’t actually make way for the new and better ones for us

Maybe letting the greedy, vain and sociopathic be self-appointed Masters of the universe was wrong

Turns out that conglomerates could find it legal and moral to profitably adulterate their products

We never dreamed they’d lay us off forever at 50, in debt, with no savings, pensions or insurance

Cutting costs by blindly trusting outsourced, foreign ingredients wound up poisoning customers

Looks like giant, shoddily-built, energy-wasting McMansions might not be the way going forward

Stunningly, doctors and Pharma realized they made much more money on treatment than prevention

Turns out stalling safety regulations for more research always saved firms money in the short run

Later on, their own bloated estimates indisputably proved the problems were far too expensive to fix

Come to find out all our thousand tiny household sources did add up to a major pollution issue

How surprised we were to learn that double meat bacon cheeseburgers were not actually healthy

It seems silly that dutiful paper recycling was sent all the way to china just to wrap up more imports

Turns out the big banks were actually blackmailing the market with demands for a no-strings bailout

Turns out their imaginary only one true god was on their side just as much as our own was with us

Nobody guessed our kid’s future would not be brighter than our own was, once we were done here

Oddly, the all-important economy collapsed once it destroyed the very ecosystems that supported it

Turns out not even a trace of our messy presence remained after the passing of but one geologic era

Disentangling Our White Noise

A constant background noise; especially: One that drowns out other sounds

The void left by the forgotten songbirds is seamlessly filled by smarmy advertising messages

The roaring diesel fumes wafting softly into her crib do not stir this safely sleeping urban infant

News reports of inept, corrupt and wasteful governance no longer provoke any real response

Endless sad studies are smothered behind the deafening background noise we continuously create

Wild fish are not startled by gently falling acid rain from distant hissing coal stacks

The awkward silence of a clear-cut is unnoticeable atop growling wreckreational vehicles

Nobody leaps to the rescue of croaking frogs replaced by giant, rumbling bulldozers, once again

Dirty waters and climate change now lie safely outside our self-circumscribed hearing range

Screams from the refugee camps are muffled by our shopping, work and entertainment activities

Constant identical reports of even more extinctions aren’t going to motivate anyone again

The ever-dirtier business of politics no longer galvanizes the jaded multitude even a bit

People docilely accept that in good times or bad, the rich will profiteer at their expense

Blathering leaders are not expected to solve real problems correctly, cheaply or on time

Our loud and illiterate offspring are simply part of a vast and privatizing, comforting white noise

The unfortunate are blown off behind our sunglasses, earbuds and cynically-texting smirks

Even Scot-free bailouts of unregulated legal swindlers who are ruining our lives doesn’t move us

Ever more wasteful borrow-and-spend programs cannot provoke some mighty voter wrath

Continuous broadcast of morally repugnant crimes have worn out our emotional responses

Distress cries that might otherwise slow our progress are safely obscured by a soothing traffic roar

The wise voices of our ancestors have been attenuated into the meaningless background noise

That invisible, anonymous CEOs are naturally worth their guaranteed millions is taken at face value

It is accepted that gutting our futures thru offshoring should earn them more whopping bonuses

That they merged and downsized us forever for quick profits will not set us upon them

We tacitly accept the morality of efforts to evade the spirit of our laws via compulsive loopholeing

Un-inspected, adulterated foreign food ingredients will not rouse us up off our beloved couches

Omnipresent evidence of over-population is obscured by the simple crush of so many bodies

The voice of reason is smothered by our hoarse attempt to curse over their many tangled jingles

That our own thoughts must now be produced as shouts is not perceptible to us within the din

There’s really nothing between the inaudible lines blurring advertising, news and entertainment

Our crumbling infrastructure does not decay nearly loudly enough to claim even a little attention

Endless strident sound bite repetition completely deadens the occasional quiet and reasoned debate

The deafening sound of devastating warfare drowns out those faint, weak-kneed cries for peace

Relentless repetition of myriad, simple but cleverly-coded messages digitally layers our angry brains

A world of screams and shouts and tears are melded into a featureless but high-decibel abstraction

Ungodly special effects are launched which cannot gain attention for more than a few seconds

Loud, un-syncopated random outbursts occur so fast as to blend into a surrounding roar

This deafening white noise creates our privacy and thereby we think, preserves our sanity

But the vast silence of the void that surrounds us still terrifies as it makes its now rare appearance

Creaking and Throbbing Arthritic Memories

They creak as they grind, cushionless, hard against each other as I again force them to articulate

Well, of course they ache, especially long into those dark and damp nights, as I lay nervous & awake

Stiff and inflexible, they make it hard to assimilate all the new data that constantly assails me

Their pain suffuses my entire consciousness and thus, they color all of my other thoughts

Arthritic memories, petrifying remains of actions I am now glad I can no longer perform

Their hardening deformations give them an unnaturally twisted and lumpy appearance

Their current importance and significance is merely due to the unremitting pain they bring

I suffer them in silence knowing they are my only evidence for a reality that I knew, so long ago

Their throbbing disrupts my sleep, making it even harder to distinguish dreams from memory

They leave me unable to stretch out far enough or quickly enough to be of any real use anymore

Nonetheless, their aching provides a throbbing indicator that my consciousness still continues

Their sharp points of pain are overlaid on that whirling, disappearing blur I know of as my past

Arthritic memories, hard and knotty reminders of accidents that, though I did survive, I still regret

With any jarring actions, they swell and grow so painful as to impede even normal movement

The balm of forgetfulness, so maddeningly effective in normal life, cannot blot out their images

Their swelling calcifies into the grotesque shapes of these frighteningly pointless nightmares of mine

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?

We Burn In Each Other’s Hell

‘Quite literally, one man’s perfect heaven is another’s absolute hell’

I’ll always be with her in those early days back when we traveled lightly far and wide together

She’ll spend most of our time at the tiny cottage by the lake where her tulips opened every spring

Saint Mother wants nothing more than to be able to dote upon her dead son, for all time

He most surely rots in hell for his lifelong addiction to violent crime and various drugs

His vision of heaven was just to be left alone with his own solitary pursuits

She had always wanted to meet and to really get to know him intimately

All 5 of the dogs we had thru the years, will, of course, be a part of our afterlife

Somehow we shall be able to always pay sole attention to each of them, all at the same time

The fondest family dream of one of the kiddies was just to all be together once again

For Mommie and Daddie, just seeing each other again would be part of their burning in hell

I wont hear you blatting your fool Harley thru eternity as I slip quietly thru the forests

My children’s mother never forgot me, but I’ll be with the trophy wife who conned me

I always hated my lazy, fat, foul-mouthed sister-in-law, but loved my darling spouse

They got along so well that, of course, she shall dwell right next door to us in paradise

I remembered my brother best when we were boys, bluegill fishing at the cottage

In my kids heaven there is the beery uncle who smilingly picked them up with one giant hand

He relaxed in the garden of delights as promised by his beloved Quoran

We will dwell, of course, in the house of our fundamentalist lord in a puffy Christian heaven

Their Jihadi suicide martyrs lay forever with 17 virgins in a paradise of Sharian ease

From our heavenly vantage point we watch them suffer in a hell where they must always remain

They went on to unknowably more punishing rebirths but with at least a hope of eventual escape

I, however, was condemned to hell forever for my puny acts in but a single wasted lifetime

His favorite team would always reign as champions in his lamely shallow idea of paradise

Likewise, all the hated enemy’s fans would find the same vapid dream coming true as well

Each one true god’s heaven must surely be separated from those of the other unbelievers

But all men shall dwell together in brotherhood and understanding in eternal paradise

The blind shall finally see the human form in all its colors and arrangements

The appearance of the fat, ugly or deformed will somehow be invisible or unimportant

Will his fondest dreams of golf and new cars come true or will he be meaningfully enriched at last?

Must I somehow learn to accept and find I love all those many I could not stand my entire life?

Will the dead know our bygone futures and will we know all the dirty secrets of their pasts?

There must be something in the illegible fine print of their disclaimers that we don’t yet understand

Help Me Not To Hate, Let Me Just Ignore

Curb my hatred of the proud and scornful ignorance that loudly proclaims our superiority

Stifle my loathing of greasy car salesmen, lying real estate agents and one-track CEOs

Help cap off my intense disgust with monomaniac self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe

Shame on my anger at the purposeless noise from which we derive so much simple pleasure

Help me not to hate pale political compromise, as satisfying to all sides as cold oatmeal

Stop me from wasting energy railing against the corrupt nature of organized religions

End my bitter diatribes over the rapid and unconscious waste of all of our non-renewables

Let me blissfully ignore the brutal, post-modern efficiency of our food animal holocaust

Grant me relief from my wasted worry over the absolute non-issue of human overpopulation

Control my wish to club those falsely cloaking themselves in so-called Traditional Family ValuesÔ

Halt my useless ranting upon the utter unsustainability of our vapid consumerism

Help me overcome the overwhelming feeling that, this time, the sky really must be falling

Make me just ignore their canned and dumbed-down homilies read with smarmy & self-assured smirks

Enable me to silently accept an ever-filthier and even more degraded natural world, every day

Reduce my revulsion over the grant of divine souls only to us by the musty gods we alone invented

Deliver me from my pointless and weak concern over our agricultural soil microbe communities

Stay my hand from smiting the lawyers, accountants, insurers and financiers

Help me not hate the unquestioned spending of more every year on our so-called dEfense

Don’t let me attack our wise but pale corporate masters safe inside their locked compounds

Staunch my concern over such inconsequentialities as breathable air and potable water

Deaden me to the grating noise of their witlessly destructive gas-powered ‘wreckreation’

Stop me noticing as one beautiful and perfectly adapted species after another just disappears

Keep my mind from dwelling on blackmailed bailouts doled out to banks with no strings attached

Lower my unrealistic expectations regarding our own morality and intelligence

Aid me in not dwelling too long upon the microscopic insignificance of my own tiny voice

Help me not to hate the self-promoters who have to grab the microphone in front of the cameras

Show me I should not look down upon the ordinary sloth, ignorance and obese over-consumption

Quell the anger that arises when I hear the foreign tongues, quite at home in my own land

Let me not even bother to scorn the venal, profit-seeking of the entertainment or tourist industries

Save me from drowning in a rank skepticism fueled daily by all of those so very sordid current affairs

Quiet my rude sarcasm over our hi-def worship of hulking sports illiterates in skin tight pants

Quench my disgust with their never-ending Quick and dirty and the permanent Just for now

Stop me shouting over the stirring faux-patriotic music of their euphemistic sound bite hyperbole

End my squishy concern over all the things that are destroyed daily, without even being noticed

Halt my cynicism as their reasoned debates degrade into loud, twisted exaggeration and blatant lies

Help me not to hate myself so much for being so inextricably dependent on all these ugly things

Doors closing, potentials shrinking, daylight fading

Doors closing, potentials shrinking, daylight fading, time wasting, excuses multiplying

Systems failing, cadavers stiffening, stores boarding, hopes dashing, futures constricting

Viruses spreading, costs increasing, wages reducing, species disappearing

Baby girl smiling up from food stamp shopping cart

Arms spending, rain dirtying, litter decaying, wounds infecting, fugitives harboring

Advertisers braying, cutbacks rippling, healthcare delaying, emissions ignoring

Beer refreshing, credit shrinking, rivers festering, literacy declining, frogs mutating

Santa Maria in a long skirt, pedaling slowly to hospice

Evil lurking, politicians smirking, bankers grasping, soils disintegrating, blogs croaking

Germs resisting, suburbs vivisecting, dream recurring, heaven awaiting

Studies denying, particulates hanging, entertainment stupefying, executives whining

Mountain trout darting in tiny, steep stream

Faults slipping, choices narrowing, paradigms shifting, bulldozers eviscerating

Cash hemorrhaging, hopes dashing, factories idling, teeth yellowing, ears ringing

Production contracting, jobs outsourcing, homes foreclosing, skies darkening

Apple tree blossoming in empty parking lot

Cattle slaughtering, cancers spreading, cosmetics hiding, results faking, meadows raping

Paint flaking, milk coagulating, lawyers siphoning, lobbyists bribing, budget trimming

Pupils dilating, scandal enveloping, profit taking, depression developing

Blackbirds gathering noisily in trees pushing out leaves

Analysts proclaiming, researchers probing, veils pulling, drapes drawing, curtains lowering

Scenes shifting, mud tracking, hidden seeking, riddles speaking, death cheating

Fairytales smashing, fish flashing, markets crashing, eyes casting, breaks taking

Old meth queen seeking toothless truck stop redemption

Breaths gasping, mines stripping, tails wagging, children begging, feet dragging

Souls losing, bills piling, credit drying, military muscling, signals mixing, whores enticing

Peasants liberating, senses straining, liberal bashing, tranquility trashing, shells raining

Safe reading in small warm light on rainy evening

Rejections automating, pilgrims seeking, preachers groping, nerds networking

Deficits mounting, hopes glimmering, research denigrating, soil eroding, pigs torturing

Music drifting, benefits cutting, retirement postponing, education rejecting, odor cloying

Small box turtle trying to cross busy road, all alone

Sunset amazing, thunder rippling, rainbow shimmering, distinction blurring, years hazing

Quiet shattering, knowledge smattering, reason fleeing, minds making, trouble brewing

Glimpses fleeting, shadows playing, echoes fading, memories remaining, life saving

Abandoned door creaking, opening and closing, only from wind