Now We Sneer Ourselves to Sleep

Please, hear me out…

Amid coldwar American business cigarette masculinity
a pyrotechnic technicolor cyclone hatched at the Pandemonium Farm
—a far-off strand of a dream stung the scene like gibberish lightning
whose flash was glimpsed not in oddball dustbowl solitude

but en silversizzling rocketpopping rapidblasting masse.
Performances of innocence erupted over the earth
so fragile you could hear a flea fart through the circus circuits
of ceremonial Yes! Yes! sex whose erections were antennas

tuned to vulval flowers whose primordial power shook
and rocked fear down to its last trembling wall
with plunging tides of crashing flesh so desperate with loneliness
no one could ever forget the urgency of their birth

which was death blotting everything everywhere
with nightmare catatonic catastrophic despair
hissing through the atomic air on a cold raw coil
that burrowed into the nerves and haunted even the most quiet

wiring of the mind and presided like a sky over the Party raging below
punching radiant dents in the deadening air with foolish judo
fueled by voodoo: blues, booze, vats of acid, stunning smoke,
any gambler’s trick to lift life from its crypt in the grip of reckless ecstasy

and BLAM! that kamikaze jackpot in a flashing crash went bust
in a burst of authoritarian assassination hardass madness
that chased us into our caves where we wallowed in shadows
and followed occasional flickering strands of scattered sun

that faded fast and we slunk back to our lairs to sneer
that nothing lasts and we’re no fools and we’ll soon be through
with this gyp of a life so why try too hard if we’re fated to fail
—we’ll just hide inside ourselves with pills to still our nerves

and kill our dreams. And the sun dies in our sleep.



.