beatitude

Beatitude
for those who howl at the storm [published in a journal to benefit survivors of Katrina]



Bless this mess.

Bless beat up beat down street cats, homeless black flag crossed refugee country angels on tilt.

Bless state orphaned looters broken down with survival-era heroism and no first aid kitchens.

Bless victimized victors vanquished on imminent emergency response time
natural disaster terror threats and hands in everyone else’s pockets.

Bless poor and presidents, every person a star and every star three squares and a roof.

Bless incorporate wage slave desperados, t.v. commercial babysitters, executive burger flippers, consumer culture customers on the skids.

Bless hungry ghosts haunting wrecked weekend getaways and goodwill dumpster ghettos on their last sick day paychecks.

Bless bedraggled airline stewardesses afraid of matchbooks, box cutters, and tennis shoes, whose only sense of home is checkerboard farmland highways, and micro slot machine suburban sprawl terminals.

Bless brawlroom baristas and coffee dive waitstaff struggling under dishwater tobacco crumble tip jars. Just because they’re behind that counter doesn’t mean they’re not human too.

Bless pimped up street jugglers and dead city escape artists turning tricks for body and soul to pay rent, car insurance, and student loan sharks.

Bless crimethinking freedom schemers who gave up the 9 to 5 to run amok and lease life forever.

Bless peyote hyped interconnecting white shamans chasing Don Juan sundance daydreams across all borders.

Bless flesh-happy renaissance burning men looking for a high noon love all alternate reality fix.

Bless Pabst-smeared punk road warriors fighting through drunk culture haze for an immediate reality fix.

Bless broke gas line drivers waiting for an alternative fossil fuel fix, and giving up to ride bikes off into the chemical sunset.

Bless millionaire junky patrons and their visionary anarchist precious krylon field painters.

Bless transcendent bumrush superheroes screaming schizophrenic saxophone rooftop rage times and dancing like their revolution already came.

Bless scumfuck outlaw hobos hopping midnight railways and dead end super shoulders to escape suburban driveway destinies.

Bless transgendered and transvestite rioters screaming "Give us marriage licenses or give us death!" before getting beat up by cops and moving to Quebec.

Bless old beat jazz hipsters still blowing back alley blues brotherhoods.

Bless mirror ball DJ pirates rocking late night airwave triphops for the few lost souls who still tune in.

Bless gonzo journalism deep throats shot fear and loathing into inner space daring the rest of us to follow.

Bless radioactive freakshow faeries who give a patched glitter fuck all
for their blatant lack of pop-fashion etiquette.

Bless new age hippy witches growing gardens in abandoned mine fields, selling herbal tonics, lucky charms, and carrots on the street between teachings on natural abortion techniques and yoga.

Bless urban alchemists and ultraculture iconoclasts building shrines to dead post-post-modern deities in the trash heaps
and envoking quantum storybook utopias for world peace.

Bless sci-fi Columbian poet taxi drivers building earth ships, underground railroads, and farms for their families to live on, while they drive drunken nights home.

Bless political prison cell penpals incarcerated for no crime but being young, black, and high on life. Possession of passion now warrants D.A’s death chair.

Bless lonewolf madmen hermits living on Christmas tree farms and under train bridges, crying softly for the end of the world to come back home.

Bless lovers fucking lovers over and over, lovers using losing scripts, using each other to forget themselves, lovers clinging to moonbeam memories and yesterday’s dirty dishes, lovers laughing to stay alive.

Bless bastard love children of rainy day DIY mothers, raised in city to city punk show communities and never knowing their father’s sins.
They are the future.

Bless strung out children middle-classed on ADHD, MTV, domestic violence and too many sugared cereals, who learned about sex drugs and rock and roll in elementary school bathrooms. They are also the future.

Bless text messaging teenage bloggers tapping collective conscious cyber-rumors in their edge city isolation, just to talk to someone, anyone, before signing off for 6 a.m. bedtimes.

Bless outcast high school trenchcoat gangstars shotgunning blacktop bully vendettas, taking everyone out with them because they didn’t get enough attention at home.

Bless middle-aged soccer moms putting on make-up to join blockbuster cults of split personality.

Bless tubefed grandmothers dying for the only forgotten piss-soaked rest home they never believed in and wondering which of their divorced children’s children they’ll never see again.

Bless bearded Italian grandfathers buried in last simple century but still getting up each morning to wander sidewalks and rue the latest chainstore megamall.

Bless burnt out industrial revolt cities choking on exhausted workforce smokebombs while the next generation flees to even bigger bitter metropoli.

Bless dirty pigeons pecking through candy wrapped gutters with the zombie bums and alligators for a bite to eat.

Bless spring weeds cracking concrete soot factory parking lots.

Bless cemetary deer tribes dreading helicopter search engine lime lights.

Bless stars spinning dizzy ozone layer degradation night terrors, spinning ancient stories we no longer hear through air pollution street lamp cacophonies.

Bless amazing disappearing rainforests, zen praying monkeys, factory farmed mutant chickens, beefalo, oilslick oceans, drug commercial spiders, humans in New York zoo exhibits, genetically modified square watermelons, and the rest of our semi-intelligent designs.

Bless kneejerk allergic reactions to dairy, peanuts, carbon monoxide, white noise advertisements, and society in general.

Bless psychiatrists and pediatricians and insurance lawyers who can no longer tell the medical industry’s id from its super ego for all the Prozac they snort between patients.

Bless psychic bunker t.v. evangelists pushing pastlife redemption alien saviours and clean teeth that will never come.

Bless Hollywood armageddon backdrops, hallowed gaschamber headlines, fnjords, and unreported tsunami hangovers.

Bless third world distended bellies, starving AIDS epidemics dispossessed and in debt to manifest destiny dinosaurs.

Bless the damned, for we have already inherited the earth.

Bless Mammon, whore of Babylon’s oil pumped mammary glands.

Bless bullet manufactured civil janitor policemen, rank and filed to kevlar, tasers and fear of a black and red world, who throw down their badges and join the looters in the street.

Bless war mongrels and scare managers who threw down their own get rich quicker dreams to fulfill the system’s slick annihilation fetish fantasies.

Bless soldiers fighting soldiers fighting to stay alive, chained to command structure identity strippers killing mothers under star spangled bombers. Bring our children home.

Bless terrorists fighting history fighting to stay alive in caves and palaces and on your street. The Earth is their home too.

Bless suicide bombing religious extremists exploding limbs all over their father’s evacuated homes, apartheid walls and resurrected temple mount pipe line revelations.

Bless patriarchal psychophants tilting at Che Guevera disciples tilting at windmills for their miserable people’s freedom.

Bless the goddamned pope, even if he was a fucking nazi.

Bless Coca-Cola fueled dictators and IBM funded death squads, all oppressed oppressors and those who rise up to throw out the dirty pocket change of corporate democracy.

Bless America, bastard hate child of civil rights revolutions and pogroms. You never knew your parents, poor thing, no wonder you can’t let the rest of us just be. Bless you.

Bless us all.