vegetable f’in aliens
1.)
it was broken and couldnt be fixed.
it was a clock that used to
tell time
but doesnt really do much now.
like an old man sitting on his porch
in a rocking chair…
scratch that,
an assisted living facility, not his porch.
its an assisted living facility and
it kind of reminds everyone
of where they used to hold people
when the stasi captured them for
leaving an open package of twinkies
on their counter top, back in the good ol’ days
of the gdr.
you cant save em, you cant help em,
there’s nothing you can do for them
because they are the broken old
clocks that not even the sunlight
will ever touch again.
they are forgotten.
so what?
its broken!
its broken!!
its broken!!!
it will never be fixed,
it will stay that way, motionless in time
until the light bulbs in the sky go out.
go will be too lazy to fix anything
because its been alive since forever
will never ever die.
it’ll get lazy and bored of
jumping and dashing from
star to star and planet to planet
and crazy black hole massive space fuck
to crazy black hole massive space fuck
and it will get lazy. eventually it’ll
break too.
can you imagine?
god being broken?
and not just christian’s god,
everyone’s gods.
every god everywhere
will be broken because every god everywhere
is really just the same god and it isnt really
a god at all.
just a broken stopwatch that cant be stopped.
forever ticking and ticking and ticking
like it is timing some kind of marathon or
lap of the human race.
HOW’D I DO THAT TIME?! DID I BEAT MY LAST RECORD?!
we yell up the sky asking for a
response from the ceaselessly
ticking
hallowed
stop
watch.
we hear nothing but distant rumblings of
thunder and all of a sudden
the weathermen were right.
it’ll rain after all.
good for them.
at least they arent broken.
but but but but!
god is!
time is!
everything else is!
even that sunrise!
when i wake up and step out onto
a rusty and old fire escape
i can almost reach the sun as it
struggles to crawl up and over the distant
and eastern horizon.
tired from its journey across the asiatic
countries and europe and africa and the u.k.
and iceland and the ocean.
when it gets to me it doesnt really feel
like shining anymore and has trouble
getting over the horizon.it is crawling
like a baby
and you cant do anything about it but
sit and look at it and yell at it.
call it a ‘lazy bastard’ and ‘lethargic rugrat’.
then it gets too hot and you yell at it,
then it gets too cold and you yell at it
then, when those dark and tenebrous and
impenetrable clouds cover it up like
a baby’s blanket,
you yell at it too because
its not there to give you what you need;
that
coppertone tan.
it cant really win,
so it is broken and it doesnt want to be fixed.
it’ll keep spinning
and spinning
and spinning
out of control until it gets so hot
that it explodes and takes all of us out
with it and nothing will be left because
the sun got depressed and broken and
committed suicide like a selfish emo kid
listening to radiohead in his garage.
when his parents look at those videotapes
they recorded of their sun
(get it?!)
when he was a child they realize
that they recorded over all that footage
of baby sun’s first flames and baby sun’s
gravitational pull
with their personal sex adventures because
they didnt really pay very much attention to
that little star and all the people he was providing for.
they were just too busy with
their new little sex swing
(that broke too).
so,
all of it;
every single jot and tittle
all of life’s little nuances
all the niches in life
that people live in,
its all broken and its all broken for all eternity.
no matter how patient you are, no doctor
(get it?!)
is gonna come into your room,
tell you to drop your pants and cough
as he cups your balls. with his white coat
and his handsome face
and even more handsome smile
and his hands that are lotion’d five times a day.
though it doesnt matter, his hands are
always dry because
he washes his hands fifty times a day,
he cups a lot of balls.
he doesnt have a syringe with a magical escape,
and if his walls could talk they would
tell you that all of his syringes are
broken anyway and that there is
no relief within the confines of his
office or
patient rooms or
operating tables or
even that bathroom with the nice smelling
urinal cakes and hospital graffiti
(for a good time dial room 545)
(dr.liebowitz {waz here is scratched
out and replaced with} is gay)
(i hate you niggers and jews and cocksucking
faggots and cunts)
{because there is always one racist and sexist
and homophobic redneck in every bathroom stall
everywhere as long as this planet continues to
create people that create bathroom stalls
which wont be long because the sun is going to
explode}
my only advice to you
is to go get some popcorn from the machine
before that piece of shit breaks too.
sit back and watch the fireworks as
the world comes to an end.
maybe smoke a hand rolled cigarette
if you got it
and drink some whiskey. meditate about how empty
everything is and how there is really nothing here at all.
or you can pray to whichever god you believe
in and ask it why it is broken
and lazy.
or you can just look at the stars with
your cigarette hanging out of the side of
your mouth eating popcorn and drinking jameson
straight out of the bottle.see them stars
go out one by one until the whole midnight sky
is just black
and black
and endlessly black.
i bet even that will break too!
maybe turn some other color
like burnt orange or
some wine color and
wine will spill out of the heavens!
flooding this earth like back in noahs day
except no one will have the time build an ark,
everyone will just get drunk from the wine,
(and have a lot of sex)
until they drown!
like the way any good bacchus should die.
if that happens no will care because
everyone will all be drunk, all of us!
the little babies and
the children and
the boys and
the girls and
the men and
the women and
the old people in the goulag
assisted living facility
(instead of breaking rocks they sit around and look
at potatoes and try to play wii without
breaking their hips, its torture!)
will all be high on life, singing and dancing,
carrying on and not caring because the
wine will taste so good. even after we die
and our lifeless, wine stained bodies are floating
around the world we will still be happy.
then some alien race finds our bodies covering a
planet and inside of our houses caught in
the middle of drunken coitus
we will all have smiles on our faces
because thats the only way to die.
drunk and happy.
after those aliens see us all,
smilin big ol human drunk smiles,
and they’ll say something in their alien
tongue which roughly translates into
“BIG FUCKING PARTY”
they will leave this planet with smiles on their faces
because homo sapiens know how to live
and even more importantly,
know how to die!
wait!!!!
maybe those lil green men can fix god?
maybe not. i dont think they are very good with tools,
just being green and
telepathic and
flying around in green spaceships that
look like your little kitten’s milk saucer.
they fly around on these saucers being green
and eat green things like
vegetables and
talk about green stuff like
vegetables and
live in a green world like
vegetables.
basically, they’re fucking vegetables.
2.)
i thought i was done,
but apparently im not.
i have to write more because
my fingers arent done doing
whatever the hell it is they are doing.
i love writing because you could
be sitting around with all ten
fingers up your ass.then all of
a sudden you jump up and
start writing furiously like someone is
pointing a gun at your manhood and you dont
want them to shoot because you want children.
someday.
with some dream girl.
dream girls!
because dreams are the essence of true life!
because dreams are like peeking in a keyhole
when your parents are doing it to see
how it is done and you are
scared
shitless
at what you see because you thought that
penises were for peeing and dangled because
they are very similar to elephant
trunks except that you cant wrap it around
food and bring it to your mouth to
eat it.
at least i cant do that.
when you dream its sort of like
you are living in a world populated by
your subconscious and everything that you ever
thought about or
didnt even think about but saw or
didnt even think about or see
but will soon happen within the next few years
because your brain is the all seeing
and all knowing god that we keep talking about.
of course god always was and always will be!
it is just a collective conscious!
everything everywhere has a conscious
even those old and dead dinosaurs!
planets and
stars and
even that black,
massive dyson vacuum
that is space.
and,
you dream that you are flying through
the very fabric of space and time to some
alternate land where you are king peepee pants
and all of your subjects are naked
school girls running around.
playing volleyball and
eating lollipops picked straight
from your garden.
so you shoot them all with a nerf gun and
all the little foam nerf bullets have a
nuclear tip so everything explodes all at once.
chunks go flying everywhere!
because,
lets face it,
you put a lot of work
into that damn garden.
then you wake up!
you are faced with a reality that you
dont want to really accept. you are
late for school or
work or
your childs birth or
your period or
your own funeral
and rush out of your door without
brushing your teeth or
eating any breakfast or
remembering your keys or
your gun or
your scythe (if you are the grim reaper)
(which most of us are anyway)
and you didnt even kiss grandma goodbye.
good job!
now she hates you and wont bake you
any chocolate chip cookies until you
apologize and get her a male whore
to satisfy her old grandma self.
yuck.
its ok though, you two have a system
worked out wherein she leaves a sock
on the doorknob so you know not to come
barging in and interupting the process of
nastiness.
so you fall asleep in the hallway of
your apartment building. before you know it
you are soaring through the mountains of
china with a hostess twinkie in your hands
looking for a good chocolate fountain to
dip it in so you can eat it and be delighted.
you run into li-po and han shan eventually
and talk to them, delighting in their poetry.
then you zoom off to japan to read a few
haikus written in eons old kyoto temples
and suddenly discover that there is no
such thing as chocolate! only your perception
of chocolate; if you close your eyes there is
no chocolate because your mind puts it there.
then you suddenly discover that
everything
everywhere
is perception and if it wasnt for
your mind there would be no world at
all just emptiness. and emptiness is
perfect.
you wake up because your grandma
has finished and the giggalo named
raul comes out of your apartment with his
bow tie and his smug sense of satisfaction
because he just made an 80 year
old woman feel good on the inside.
big whoop raul
i can bake my grandma a cake
and make her feel better you whore.
but you know he will just go back
to his condo downtown, look at all the
fish that are in his salt-water fish tank
and cry because he doesnt really have
any friends.
his pimp doesnt let him have any.
his pimp is a clown in the shriners circus,
not even a good circus,
the shriners fucking circus,
and his shriners circus clown pimp doesnt
allow him to talk to anyway or
go anywhere unless it is a job.
raul actually is an illegal alien from
the planet vegetable.
holy cow.
3.)
i need me a song!
i want to resurrect beethoven and
tell him to write me a song.i want i
t to be damn good or i will shoot him.
but he wont know what im saying anyway.
so he will get shot while i scream
GOOD RIDDANCE YA BASTARD!
and whatre you gonna say to me after
i shoot him in his zombie head?!
how could you say anything?
zombies arent anything to treasure!
and when there is a zombie apocalypse
i will be ready because i know where
all the good things are and that you shouldnt
trust anyone especially if they are
coming after you and ready to eat your brains!
4.)
look at this city!
its countenance is bright!
sorrowful!
happy!
and so melodramatic!
off in the distance i see a light on the
side of a building bright enough to be a star.
maybe its a spot light and it is shining
to the sky to look out for any airplanes
that might crash into it.
(too soon?!)
i think i will wait out here in
this cool night and wait for it to go off.
but there is a slight mist out here,
just enough to make all of the lights seem
more distant than they really are.
shrouded
mysterious
i want to see them clearer but i cant!
i want to take a fan and blow it all
out of the way so i can see the city,
hear it breath and hear all the sounds that should be coming from it.
but there arent any, night time in pittsburgh
muffles all sounds and all i hear
is that silence that is the
essence of all emptiness everywhere.
and isnt it perfect?
i imagine that on the distant
planet vegetable there is a green vegetable
martian eating vegetables and pondering
the essence of vegetables everywhere across
the universe. just like how im pondering
the essence of humans everywhere across
the universe.somewhere, somehow, our ponderings
will collide, creating something new and
beautiful. the big bang theory of motion and poetry.
and our ponderings they will form some new nebula
somewhere.
that must be how those are formed,
that must be how stars are formed,
that must be how everything beautiful everywhere is formed.
when two thoughts from two different beings
collide, something is brought forth out of the
shadow of life into the light and existence
and it is perfect.
so vegetable martian brocli and brown human alex
are pondering our lives and the lives of our
brethern and they collide deep within those black
silky depths, exploding into a cloud of
lights!
colors!
space gasses and dust!
stars!
the stars will have the gravitational pull to attract
all the other ponderings of life
and other lives of all of us!
humans
vegetables
netherbeings
ghosts
gods
mystical creatures
and all the people that live on that
moon up and above that is floating
and will never come down.
and then on the seven day we rested and ate vegetables.
fin
oh!
a boy named jack,
sitting so freely on a tree stump,
put his head into his hands and closed his eyes.
trees surrounded him to comfort,
sun peeking through the branches
he is like a child peeking over the shoulders of adults
to see what has happened to
a boy named jack
who is sitting so freely on a tree stump.
there is a bottle of sprite that is jiggling around as my fingers play on the keyboard.
and
it is jiggling and
reminds me of a mad man’s hand has he writes on the back of an old receipt, his hand jiggling jiggling jiggling because he has a nervous twitch because he thinks there are men after him all the time; he writes stories wherever he can and his room at the loony bin is covered with words and so is his body and so is his brain.
he writes a story on the back of his nurse’s reciept for three double ended dildos, 5 bottles of water based lubricant, a sex swing, and 10 lollilops. his story was short and simple and reeked of mad poetry,
he is like a new age han shan,
he lives in his cave and he writes and thats all he does besides being forced meds and smelling bad,
and he doesnt mind the smell
and the drugs aren’t too bad, but they make his hands jiggle cause they make him paranoid.
there are always men after him anyway, for that time he stole a banana from that italian grocery in bloomfield.
jigglely hands jigglely hands!
strictly for the use of words,
he bleeds them,
he sees them,
he eats them sometimes when he is hungry,
and he sometimes also shits words after they have been digested.
then he’ll eat it again.
but,
when he was done with his story he ate it, but before he ate it he read it aloud to his walls, because he thinks they are real live people because he is in a loony bin and thats what he is in for.
talking to walls.
he read to them:
hwaet!
old english
a command
for what ears?
listen
hear that quiet
sound
as it falls from above
god
spiritual
wants us to
hear
tell
your tale
sweet like
honey
tell
your tale
beautiful
lonely.
i
will always
listen.
so please
tell me.
and then he ate it and it tasted something like edible underwear.
YOU ARE NOT TO BLAME!
there was a church sign that read that in big white letters, the type that slide into a black board and then covered with smudgy glass. behind the sign there is a tall church that looks like it hasnt been used in years and is falling into a state of melancholy. above that is a sky blanketed by tenebrous and gloomy clouds that stretch onwards and onwards from horizon to distant horizon and they look like they go on and on and on and don’t stop until they reach god’s brow. but the sign tells me i am not to blame, so next time mephistopheles reaches up from the womb of the earth to grab me as i spin away and out of control i will tell him i am not to blame. he will look at me with hazel eyes burning with blood lust, his face a beautiful and soft face, his skin red hot embers glowing in the hazy and warm and dark night like incense; he’ll look at me and tell me, in a voice that could cause any man to weep, that he doesn’t rightly care. in front of that hallowed sanctuary is where he will reach out to grab me with his soft skin that burns, and i wont even get to see those pearly gates.
but,
i am not to blame.
there was no chorus!
a song without one, it blew his mind. it blew his mind right out and it was freezing on butler street right outside his apartment on a sunday that was bitter cold and glittery with snow.
so now, without a mind, he sits and listens to the ambient sounds of an old house with no heat with his jacket and scarf on trying to ponder the interdimensional sound rift that is slowly dancing out of his speakers and into his ears. it sounds as if someone, somewhere, spilled a lonely glass of cream and it is meandering about on a hardwood floor, seeping into the cracks and dripping onto the hidden entrails of an old and abandoned mansion somewhere in the heat drenched south carolinian country side dotted with trees that are covered with kutsu.
there wasn’t any chorus to begin with, really.
the eternal song that plays over and over on monotonous repeat is made of a single snare drum snap every few beats and a note that lasts for centuries and centuries. a drab note, possibly within the a minor range, and it is being played on an old cello that god found in the basement of his parent’s shack in south dakota before he became god. there are no words, just feelings; feelings that jump out at you like a theif in the pitch black of night, feelings that make you jump up and down like an overactive flea, feelings that make you want to take bubble baths with candles nearby, feelings that make you want to ride that one trick pony called reality to the end of the world and crash into that cold brick wall called death.
a chorus for this song isn’t what the world needs.
it needs him to pick his frozen mind off of the road before a reckless car comes thrashing down butler street like a juiced up football player and destroys the thing before it can even be used properly. it needs him to rediscover everything with that certain child-like wonder that now lays dead in the back of his frozen mind, there is some bright and yellow caution tape surrounding it and a crew of crime scene investigators swarming around like little ants gathering a piece of sticky candy that some lost child dropped from his mouth before being shoved into the back of a windowless white van. it needs more people like him that live day to day and day to day and sooner or later stop caring about the days to other days to other days because it is all the same old song on repeat.
and no chorus to make it interesting.
these nights and days can be filled with the longest winter hours, and that snow that comes down like stardust from the black vacuum doesnt help with anything much at all. of course, for my friend jimmy, the winter season is the best season to sit around and be melancholy about everything. he tells me it happens every winter, i guess winter really just symbolizes the death of a year; those pretty little flowers have buckled and crinkled and died, that green grass you used to walk barefoot across cant tickle your toes because its under white freezing cold, most of the trees have given up reaching for the sky and their vibrant and tender and green fingers no longer pray to the sun gods.
needless to say, i can see why jimmy gets so strange this time of year, i dont think it ever really helped that his birthday was the very last day of the year. hours before 1984 passed away, never to be lived again, he was born to a mother and father that would soon divorce and create a mostly fatherless and confused life.
but he never really talked to me about that.
he did used to write me letters; he and i kept a rather eccentric correspondence. us both being writers and both wanting to prove to each other that one of us was better than the other. jimmy’s letters were always long, wordy, and hardly made any sense. his dribble drabble form of writing was non-linear at best and also kind of confusing. however, sometimes he would suddenly have some glorious epiphany about his life (which usually happened during the winter months) and deem it neccessary to tell me about it. he talked a lot about love, he is absolutely smitten with being smitten, always searching for it but not really ever knowing if he found it or not.
thats because jimmy didnt know what love is.
thats the tragic thing about him, my dear friend is always in the muddy boot heel of reality looking for something that lives a few feet above life’s shoe.
i think it resides somewhere in the chest; he even acknowledged it when he used to write me, he used to state that, ‘its all in the epicenter of life, the core of our existence, the place where dreams live.’
i still believe him saying that is just him practicing his dribble drabble writing craft.
he stopped writing to me just a few months ago, his last letter was type written and i could tell he took an immense amount of pleasure crafting those sentances. each black and crisp letter seemed to be filled with a bittersweet sense of joy and longing.that happens a lot with writers, we cant hide anything at all. all of our deepest fears and secrets and wishes come into fruition via our fingertips and the emotional and psychological fruit is ready to be devoured by any eye hungry enough.
which was a good thing for jimmy, he holds a lot in and writing is the only way to get it out.
but, i digress.
his last letter to me was the epitome of his writing, it was 9 pages long; telling a story of a little fruitfly that lived in his old apartment and the dozens and dozens of offspring that eventually come from its loins.
it was a curious kind of work, each page being a day in the life of the fruitfly, told from the fruitfly’s own mouth, until finally, at the very old age of 9 days, it dies alone in the corner of jimmy’s kitchen while his 500+ kids buzz around not even paying attention.
i really havent heard from jimmy since.
a perfect little story to tell when there isnt much time left in which to tell it.
so as the saying goes, you jump out of the pan and into the feiry gas burner that was flicked on just moments before by the big and invisible but omnipresent hand of god.
and while you are burning up in that hell-like aluminum pit on that heavenly stovetop you realize that it isnt a better situation at all, and that it would have made more sense to stay in the frying pan to be sauteed like the little chicken tender you are. but those thoughts you had before about escaping and being free are fleeting now as an intense blue flame eats away at your nerve endings until you cant feel anymore and before long you are just a black little smoking crisp that is about set off god’s smoke alarm.
he gets mad when his smoke alarm goes off too.
so what do you do?
you keep on your path, is what you do. the flame pit is only so big.
i’m sure you can find a way out of it, you arent completely lost.
are ya?
Winter comes and it chills spines something sacred,
and when that snow comes dancing down from stars
it covers the ground like a soft silk blanket ready to be
ruffled by busy busy feet.
and winter comes and it chills the noise out of things,
and when that snow comes falling down its quiet and
serene. it drifts down in such hallowed silence that not
even god will make a sound.
and winter comes, and winter comes, and people spend
their time trudging through slush and sludge. feet get cold
and hearts get colder. words bite like the wind in january
and cut right through to your core.
and when winter comes it comes in quiet and sweet like
a first time sex outting and leaves roaring and ferocious
and passionate and impatient like a raging sex addict
looking for his fix.
it comes slowly, it comes slow and beautiful;
first snow fall and things are dusted with purity and holy
white on white on white.
stays like a bitter taste in your mouth:
snow turns into gray slush and gusts cut through your skin
and not even your lover can warm you.
leaves like a jealous ex;
sun shines her bright and gorgeous face and you realize
that it’ll be a better time of year.
and winter bides her time until she is ready to woo you
all over again
next year.
i look outside and i see a lot of snow coming down and coming down.
its all being tossed like a magical confetti party that just pops out of tops of buildings during a parade,
its a parade of night-time elegance and it is all too cold and fabulous for anyone to really watch it.
i love the cold though, i love the cold and i love when it is snowing miserable little pellets of icicles against the backdrop of a sleeping but lit up city. its all so melancholy and full of emotion. god, up there in the black heavenly depths that fold and fold and fold like a silk blanket after a full night of sex, well, he is pouring emotion all over this town as he shakes his little salt shaker over us. the emotion comes out sticky and sweet and thick like mrs. buttersworth straight from the fridge and it covers everything in gooey glucose overload.
and then i stand there, in that cold, i stand there with my skin getting harder and thicker to keep me warm, i stand there with all of my blood rushing to the parts that need the warmth the most, i stand there like an immovable fixture; street lamp perhaps. i stand there and i picture myself running naked through these streets, barefoot and ready to love. freezing myself to the core of my existence but not really caring all that much.
god, and what about all of that love?
snow comes running down to the top of my head and i can see myself running to her house to love. to be warm to the point of sweating with love. i can close my eyes and see that eternal depth of wonder and mystery. as if shes some forest and i’m lost within, or an ocean and i’m adrift, hanging on with dear life to a piece of driftwood as those waves crash over me. i sometimes let go, let myself sink to the deepest depths, surrounded by warm waters. i sometimes get lost, deep within that forest, finding a grotto and laying my head down to rest.
and that feeling? when you are lost?
it isnt really you being lost at all, it is the feeling you get when two beasts become one.
its that feeling after a night and a morning of something so completely raw and unadultered.
its when passion rips through the sheets to say hello, its when nails dig deep into skin, clawing to get at each other’s hearts, its when two pairs of lips find each other in a dimly lit room with a candle that just burnt out and smoking fragrance, its when skin touchs skin and electricity sparks and is shared
light bulbs go off.
snow just stopped.
i love the quiet after the storm.
