Malcyon Descends

"malcyon descends"

and their swords of flame,
which advanced every army
that ever walked this earth,
became unwieldy
grave with anger
rapt with bloodlust
incensed by bloodscent.
what once seemed light and obedient
grew forcefully intense

each sword became the birth of a new star,
brighter, hotter, heavier, more dense---
and like a new star, the swords issued new orders
that burned the dark expanse,
while the cosmos about them churned in response,

"come to me" they said, separate but in time.

and the leaders, the wielders, those dark knights,
saddled on flame shod horse,
were thrown by turn from their dark steeds.
broken necks were wrought for their dark deeds.

with swords aflame and these dark stars amok,
though the dark leaders were blood craving,
the dark leaders' bodies fed the dark star flame---

and then that flash came!
bright as an ethereal dawn,
hotter than a star core
more commanding than the black hole of dreams---
instantly blinded were the armed hordes of man,

the flash!
crippled our will and our willful,
stunned our cunning, and ruled our ruthless.
made children of men standing,
and children stand account for men.

the flash!
snipped our hearing shy of one frequency
and tagged our exposed skin--the blood mark bare!

in that flash!
we became conscripts in a new armed horde.
those who could see without sight saw her descend

Lo! what we saw there---
the seven swords aflame rose high as toward heaven
the seven nation warriors stood still with shame
the seven nations stood naked without warriors
the seven swords that rose converged to one point
and her light craving hand eclipsed that corona
seven dark fingers caressed the hilt
seven more molded the swords flame
and Lo!
her battle axe was born---
seven and seven were clenched into a fist
and Lo!
her battle axe was borne---
and laughter
laughter, laughter, LAUGHTER!
bellowing from every dead belly
ever buried on earth
vomited blood and mud
a torrent of laughter, blood and mud,
rained heavenward till the ground oozed the sky,
in that heat, all became mist and death stench,

hear this now, hear it---
sulfur will have no name now from this time hence
and we will have no other sense for smell---
for sulfuric fury became the rain,

and her voice
coursed through this malevolent fog in waves,
cascades, ricochets, flak bursts, thunderclaps,
of crescendo and decrescendo, of pitch and maw

O Michael, O Lucifer, O God---
for who could see, what we saw!

and the voice we could hear!
an aria of aural agony, as never told nor dreamed,
raped that last frequency left to our ear---

i could see her, my vision clear
a beauty is she---
dark eyes that drank light
dark silken hair
in a long tight braid she wore,
a battle maiden, made for war,
darkly clad with no armor to see
but a bright chalice of blood
emblazoned on her crest
shadowed only by the contours of her breast
a man made minister of grace
body supple, innocent and chaste
shoulders like a steeds
eyes deep, ashes for lashes
and eyebrows keen
two asymmetrical dances of light
danced on either cheek
her bones sharp, her perfect smiling teeth clean.
and when she spoke, she spake as dream---

~my children, my boys, ah my girls---
my fathers and mothers,
my dead and dying, my fairy tale dreamers
and my nightmare marauders, oh my saints and my dear sinners---

you are now my minions and wrath bearers
you are now the excellence of my work
you are now the song of my harp and lyre

i have come to you
this time for the last
with new law to lay upon you

for this i hold that was your swords
is now my axe
and these i command that were your hordes
are now my whores
and this i wage that was your war
is now my chore

so then have at thee, lay down and be still
for this is your end of days
obey me all and i will spare the shadows of you
that i burn into the ground~

and with this final message that came as light
Malcyon came down.

angel’s descent

when i stepped from the space balloon
seventy-five thousand feet above the earth,
i was alone in the cosmos---
a gamma ray chorus tingling my ear drums,
a wild ice bursting my finger tips,
a faint cinnamon scent of moisture
gathered by hyper-ventilating in my face mask—
                                         but when i stepped, i sprang
                                         this, a fatal swan dive.

i was caught in the lightest air,
the extreme atmosphere, much too thin, 
feathered my arching body
and gave no resistance to my entry.
and there came, in myriad thrill,
a rainbow stinging dots of the eye
flashing before my vision—--
          i beheld a third of the earth's surface,
the rockies' and andes' timeless glory,
more like car rust than mountain range,
the phallic thrust of florida into the gaping gulf,
the bulging belly of brazil, fertile, alive,
but the nuked nevada desert below
                                       thirsty for my blood.

what brought me to this lonely height
and spurred the first step of my launch—--
why an angel descends from grace,
why the wingless final flight
but for the sure understanding of abandon?
i felt it for a moment, so i felt it forever,
the abandon, a wrench in the abdomen
                                       when i saw how
                                       you looked away once.
but in my whirring glee, dream or ecstasy,
with my life winding down by terminal velocity,
six hundred miles an hour pushing earth to body,
i saw your face in the clouds
not so high above wyoming—--there because
you mentioned it once as a fine place to go,
you were smiling your kind carefree way
and i felt it happen,  even of clouds,
your smooth non-tanned face melt my core.
                                      what have i done?
                                      what i have done, is done.

i strove to give you space so i floated toward heaven---
but staring at heaven this long ascent has bored me.
i miss your breath on my lips,
the curlicue of your dark hair,
the enchantment of your reading voice,
the softness of your fingers on the hairs of my arm,
i miss your nearness, the life of you.
so now i have jumped, as an angel born from heaven,
without wings, looming over the world of men.
a final prayer escapes by wordless whisper—
                                       visit me love,
                                       find me,
                                       my body shall lie in sand.

to the morning then

i came to morning
with a jam and couldn't
find it in my head to
make a warm spot in my bed.

so i said here's my bed,
then i fed on a crumb
on my shirt from the food
i had eaten an hour ago.

i would have said yum
but i coughed instead,
coughed till muscus ran,
coughed till my lungs bled

and ran and bled up my throat
and into my hands, which
i wiped on my shirt where
the crumb was i fed to myself

before the cough.
then i sloughed off the covers,
off my bed, and sloughed off
the clothes on my back

and legs till i stood naked
and shaking and coughing still,
but moving much faster
both in body thrusting

and mind numbing laughter.
where am i going in my
swaying moment here? i hear
my voice tone. i know

i will fall soon i hope
i can fall flat on my bed.
flat on my bed
flat on my bed

heard in my head not to
hurt my head when i fall
flat flat flat flat flat.
in the morning i will find

that i fell flat on my head,
in my bed, sloughed of clothing
and aching for more crumbs,
ready to jam through and

jam it again--in the morning,
in the morning, oh in the morning!
         well, to the morning then.

how the bards run my allergic reactions

waking me now, there are demons who sing
sonnetry poetry (oh how lovely!)---
bound in this awful sad form that is me
the demons claw my brain mass and sting
nerves in me till bluish light radiates,
then the bards of old rise and stretch and dance
taps and jigs and signals to imitate the
words and music, rhyme and reason, rants and
chants and all the happy bullshit they love.
bark is what i am to them and they ride
me and i obey for they all reside
where my heart and mind and soul were born of---
they are dust i breathe each day and sneeze by;
and the          and the          and the
songs i sing them are my allergic cry.

The Citadel

I Hacked President Obama's Email, Here is the Letter

Dear Mr. Secretary,

Out of the countless thousands of letters and facebook messages I receive on a daily basis, I am allowed by my handlers to respond to only five. This response is my fifth and final of today's quota and I choose yours because it is in keeping with a message I meant to deliver in yesterday's weekly address to the nation, about the importance of citizen vigilance in the fight against domestic terrorism. The message was stricken because it made no particular point at all, or rather it made a particular point but was too closely telling of a top secret government research program for which we are in no position to field questions about.

You see, as the president, I am not allowed to deal in conventional overarching wisdom when addressing individuals or nations. I am meant, as your president, to speak only of particular events, rarely in advance them, and most times only in response to them. So to say to the populace, at any given moment, to watch out for this or that, is to say to them either that there is something we are worried about that they must watch for (which would cause panic), or that we are up to something and need citizen input and data from their diverse body to contribute to our secret mission (which could lead to insurrection)

On the government to-do list, one of my personal agenda items is to ever improve the operations of this government. To advance this agenda, I and a few others in my cabinet, believe that it is a necessary good to institute more meaningful questions to government employees, in the form of surveys, designed to evaluate the psychological soundness of the employees who serve in government positions.

It was a startling fact when i first encountered it, an internal survey revealed that 73% of our government workers were in some way mentally unstable, that is more than 3 times the national average! With such an overwhelming statistic staring us down, we really had two choices before us.  The first choice was to simply lament the statistic quietly and try to cover it up, because its rather embarrassing if you think about it (I mean, it begs two questions at the same time---is there something about our government system that drives people bonkers or are they crazy already and its just that sort who naturally gravitate to these important positions?) and also, the cost to the taxpayer for treating the illness would be too great for them to bear, it would seize our annual budget and lock up other spending.  The second choice also includes a cover up scheme, but with these measures we would try to embrace and harness the lunacy in someway. We chose the latter, because funding was already available. You see, Mr. Secretary, I believe that in every setback there is a song.

Perhaps you are unaware of the behavioral patterns of schizophrenics. You are of course aware that schizophrenics are mentally ill people who roam about and look normal and may even sound normal but in some large way they are definitely not normal. Inside their mind, they are principal actors in a play written specifically for them. The reasons for this, generally are unknown, though there is a tenuous link between a heightened presence of dopamine in human brains and the symptoms of schizophrenia.  Secretly, we have our researchers trying to understand at least one thing about schizophrenics regarding their brain wave patterns that could, in time, unlock a door to a very important national power.

Now getting to the heart of your matter---Revenge is a common theme in literature. I find revenge stories are just as common as any other theme. Yet it always surprises and intrigues me when someone is able to add a new line, as it were, to a very old verse. This yogurt cup incident that you're dealing with falls in a tricky category---it is both horrible and intensely brilliant. And just the fact that revenge is part of this story is an important clue for us and, taken in context with the other details of your narrative, is helping our investigators track down the perpetrator right now.

I can tell you that while writing this response, a team of 7 Federal Bureau Investigators are cross referencing possible leads of perpetrators who may have played this "prank" on you. The leads are being filtered using a psychological profile derived from the details you provided in your writing. A list of 22 names has been generated. Of that list, 17 are government employees, 9 of them have security access great enough to pull off such a stunt. 5 of these employees are individuals already on a special "high alert" watch list.

You see, some of our employees are schizophrenics. They have access to information on a daily basis as necessary. Yet this information can also ignite their sometimes nightmarish understandings of reality. They are, in a sense, walking time bombs. Again, this is a given and we must decide how to proceed---whether to disarm these bombs or harness them for our special secret needs, as we have tried to do for years. We acknowledge the illness, that's the first step. But we also reserve the right to blow things completely out of proportion if it suits our purpose.  For instance, though this perpetrator is mentally ill, yet his actions can easily be construed as a sort of unknown domestic terrorist plot, since schizophrenics are often a danger to themselves or others and there are plenty of doctors who would sign off on such charges. In a certain way, Federal government employee schizophrenics are powerful. We just can't let their power wielding go unchecked. So we, as responsible government officials, investigate this power and apply appropriate checks and measure to it.

Fortunately for us, schizophrenics usually operate using an unknown-to-them self-defense mechanism that gives them away. It comes out quickly during questioning. I am told now by the psych report given me by the FBI, that we now have in custody all five of the nuttiest government employees living in your immediate area who had access to probate and could have effected the crime against you by manipulating the justice system of surrogate court.

Of the five, one in particular has expressed a pro-communist sentiment. He believes that, "quote" we all must handle the shit stick together. I hope you wouldn't ask me what he means by that exactly. I'm thinking it about now and all I can come up with is that he may have selected you at random to be the recipient of this mistreatment because one is just as good as another. He has been using his position to advance this agenda. You are not the first to receive odd parcels from deceased members of society. This is clearly an arrogation of his duties and a symptom of his schizophrenia.  His outlook has created a major aggravation to a relatively small portion of our citizenship. We believe that you are his latest victim, or rather the latest citizen to share in the folly of his mental illness.

Since this man is clearly in need of help, we are going to help him. He will be charged, quietly, with domestic terrorism. He will be sent to Saint Elizabeth's hospital in Washington, D.C., for treatment. His pension will be exchanged for the cost of his indefinite hospital stay, so as to avoid any additional strain on the backs of the American taxpayer.

But it will not end with mere hospitalization. At St. E's, this individual's mind will be exploited for, what some psychologists in the F.B.I. claim to be, telepathic potential. We apparently have a psuedo-military trial program going on there, where we are attempting to develop and weaponize the brainwave patterns of schizophrenics, specifically their delta waves.

Rest assured, you will not be receiving any more packages of yogurt cups. Also rest assured, this man will be treated relatively well. No shock therapies. In fact, his condition I am told will be encouraged, for the hope of harnessing the delta wave patterns of his mind. Delta waves are a detectable component of the overall workings of a mind. It is believed that schizophrenics have excited delta wave patterns. Waking dreams are said to be states involving heightened delta wave patterns, which may explain the schizophrenic's tendency toward illusions.  It is also believed that these patterns, if excited to the right levels can potentially yield significant telepathic output.

Should the research trials of this individual generate promising returns that contribute or directly lead to the break through our researchers are looking for, you will be rewarded for your service with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is an equivalent for a civilian to the military's Congressional Medal of Honor. In the meanwhile, I encourage you to continue your good citizenship and properly dispose of the crate of yogurt cups. I am told that recycling day in your neighborhood is Thursday. We are notifying the waste disposal company contracted to do business in your area of town that there will be a large crate waiting for them this coming Thursday.

Please continue to do the right thing.

Ever your president, and sincerely so,

Barack Obama


P.S. to occupy your mind in the meanwhile the recycling festers on your lawn, please visit the God Bolt blog for more poems, essays, and commentary. --B.O.

Ichor Flow

The brilliance that made Heart beat the horizon
With warm vanity and counter Autumn’s air,
Also gave that Crimson force enough to shun
Our fear and say, “No frost will bare this hand’s fare.”
The day the cold came, it confused our will
With love, and quilled our skin with blood to mend
Our words, and woke the cure to our tongue’s ill—
That day we mortals could breathe by a god send.
That day we felt the sanguine humor—graced
As aural light falling on lays of plain—
Incite us to become the demure and chaste,
Giving our Heart strength to graze its lovely grain.
   That immortal brilliance that put fire to cold
   Is the divine right of the mortal soul.

The New American Scholar

I wrote this essay about 6 years ago for an Expository workshop I was taking at Northeastern University.  I can say with certainty, its a good piece of writing.  It concerns the American education system, the necessity of discipline, the pitfalls of lackadaisical work ethic and the severe weight of student loan debt.  It also concerns the illumination of self-education. 
If you have friends or family in college or preparing for college, send them a link to this blog entry.

“The New American Scholar”

I live most of my life avoiding the Daylight. At dawn, the world awakes and distractions roam the earth. The T-train starts riding at six. By this time, inbound commuters have fluttered by my Beacon Street window for nearly an hour. Road workers, who are not supposed to start work until 7 a.m., move into position with their vehicle’s back-up signals blaring. The telecoms are doing work, too, and forget about it—I’ve heard their jack hammers since four strikes of the clock. It’s a winter morning so the building is busy heating up for its residents. We’ve got radiators for heat and little monsters in the floor boards banging the heat into the pipes for us. Clink clank, cla-clank!

My cat wakes up around this time. He can hear my neighbors walking around in the next apartment and he gets excited. I have a long hallway where he likes to sprint from one end to the other, back and forth, all day while I try to sleep. At the moment, he has a toy mouse in his mouth. He jumps up on the bed, where he knows he’s not supposed to play, and I am forced to my feet with a water spray bottle in my hand. “Hector Rex!” Hector vanishes. I return to my desk, save my work on the computer, and then retire to my bed. My girlfriend has just left the apartment for work. Her day begins, while my day is avoided.

Hector Rex, circa 2005 

Before I fall asleep, I load up my CD player. Today we’ll listen to Stan Getz, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, hmm…Nora Jones, and, let us see, oh yes, Pink Floyd. I can appreciate the point of view Ralph Ellison takes in his essay “Living with Music.” Without this music, I’d never be able to get sleep around here. He says live with music or die with noise. I agree. And I’ve adapted my own mantra from his: Sleep with music, survive the noise.

I enjoy an ascetic lifestyle, in case you may be wondering. In my latter college years, I have found there is but one way to get work done and get sleep—I work at night when everyone else is sleeping, and I sleep during the day while everyone else is working. I could never be as productive on a daytime schedule as I am on a night time one. There are too many distractions. And I choose not to swim against the stream while I find that swimming in the same stream at different hours is the least resistant path.

My lifestyle is truly exceptional. And terrible. I endure, or rather subject myself to, this exile in the good faith that someday I may emerge and live in the Daylight with my fellow man, once more. But for now, I am a student, chained to my desk. And I must get my work done before my loans come due.

Though our circumstances are similar, Ellison’s fortune is greater than mine. He prefers hearing composed music to the random chaos of the external world. He is distracted from his work by his noisy environment. He is idle at his typewriter. He has the luxury to sit still and tell a story about the effects that noise has on his writing and how it produces idleness in his typewriting finger tips. Ellison has that luxury and that’s where we differ.

I must stay focused and use all my free time to educate myself. No time to write loquacious ditties on my next door neighbors. No time to stop and chat. The Great Clock reminds me my loans are coming due. That is precisely why I avoid the Daylight, why I elect the viscous path through the Nighttime, why I am exiled.

Ralph Waldo Emerson would not be pleased were he to find me here, chained to my desk, spot-lit by one hardworking halogen lamp, or slumped fetal at daybreak, sleeping while the world about me hustles to work and Pink Floyd’s cool crooning insulates me from the world’s opprobrious bother. I believe Emerson would scoff at my resolution and would rather prescribe me a retreat into nature than a retreat into my study.

My dissonance with Emerson comes from my being anomalous to his logic. I am, rather, a New American Scholar. And so, Emerson has  little to say to me that is not infuriating. I wish I could spare a month, or a week, or even a weekend to go on holiday leave. But entering lakeside tranquility to spend days roaming the forest for clues that unlock the secrets of natural manhood is but a pleasant fiction for a New American Scholar, like myself. I am a student and have the loans to prove it. I thus cannot afford time away from my desk. I cannot even afford to break the chains that bind me to this desk.

Yet I was not always as mindful of my scholastic obligations. I was once a wilder lad, and care free of my inhibitions and duties. But that was before my rebirth and christening in the order of New American Scholars. Those were the days of self-mutilation, my college lackey experiences, when I shot two holes in my boat before casting off for the farther shore.

My early college days were haunted by distraction. And indulgence. And short-sighted activity. And long-term damage. I spent my days in much the same way I do now, asleep and idle. Classes were irregularly attended. My assignments were turned in to my teachers half-assed and wanting depth, for I lacked the ability to focus long enough to find and make a lucid point.

Maybe “lack of ability” is not as accurate as a lack of care for work, in general, or an over-care for play. I spent my nights reckless without attention or focus. I played video games with my dorm mates. Large 16- or 32-player ‘shoot’em up games’ that would last well into the early morning hours. If I managed to escape the video game bogs, it was only to go clubbing for a night or to hit out a fraternity party. Never to study for longer than an hour. Never to research to freshen up my mind. Never to work hard or embrace the harrows of intellectual reverie. Never to push my collegiate mind the way I had once pushed the athleticism of my body in high school.

Indeed, distractions were abounding and I was seemingly defenseless. I came into a city college out of the loins a small town high school. Leaving my parents’ custody, I felt a heavy veil uplifted and all my vestal quality washed away like the emulsion layer on film. I became a negative through which the orange glow of Boston’s night life would shine through and burn a terrible image on the Oak rings of my young adult life. I became America’s Reckless Youth paying America’s Top Dollar to play America’s most elaborate game: College. College Idiot: There’s your reality-based show. Go produce it.

In the old days, Emerson’s American Scholar went to college prepared to work. The Scholar of my day is shoveled from high school into the post secondary compost heap—that’s the American Education system nowadays. I was not prepared for college when I came. I understand that now. And I had been highly placed in my class in high school. I was an honor student. I was well rounded. An athlete and a leader. Ambitious. Dedicated. I even believe I was virtuous.

Yet I fell hard when I came to college, for I was unprepared to handle the endless array of distractions. I admit, there were a few virtuous pagans on my floor in the dorm (or Residence Hall, to utilized the administrator’s adored terminology) during my freshmen year. These few would never join the fray on game night—not for Quake, not for StarCraft, and certainly not for Half-Life. I envy these Old School Scholars for their integrity and dedication, for their sheer resolve and will power to stay focused in the face of their fellow’s ever pressing ploy to lead them astray.

And every night, now, that I tend my lonely vigil at my singly lit desk, I say a silent prayer that they live long and prosper. To my mind, they are the free ones, the unchained ones. They are the Scholars of early merit. And so they don’t need loans to prove it. Why am I able to pray for them and yet loath Emerson’s preaching? I do not know, for sure. My bitterness is chaotic. I suppose I have a natural fellow feeling for the members of my generation who have the gift of self-awareness and have escaped the myriad gravity wells of social distraction. Whereas Emerson simply represents a history of scholars who had it better than me, theirs is a history of life without distraction by modern means. Emerson’s generation had very little of this modern type of distraction to contend with their studious minds. Nothing so attractive as a LAN-based virtual melee with thirty of his closest friends drew Emerson away from his books. The progress of our age has achieved a new irony.

I have learned to control my focus in the midst of distraction. I wear a hair shirt, so to speak, like an old monk. I buckle down and stay busy and live without the frills, or the gratification, for now. More importantly, I have found an object to pursue. I have a vocation in mind. My calling is to absorb a tradition and locate my point of departure. I am becoming an Artist. Or I already am one and am growing strong in my artistic skin. So having found an object worthy of pursuit, I am dedicated once again. Perhaps that was the problem all along.

I came to college without an object in mind, with nothing to pursue save vague intangible uninspiring notions of a career in law or politics or something similarly as fashionable, represented in a movie I may have seen growing up. Well, problem solved now. An artist I am become. Only took four years and a hundred fifty thousand dollars. I will not waste anymore time or lose anymore money.

If, at some point in the year, I go out into Nature, then I do so as a minor indulgence, a guilt ridden vacation. I will not go into the woods seeking a new way of life, or the city of God. I will simply acknowledge that I am ever captive in the city of man. I will acknowledge also that the city of God is but a myth to my fancy, and an uninspiring one.

Emerson’s or even St. Augustine’s idea of a City of God is a waste of  time for me to indulge, it is impractical. I have student loans. I am  chained to my desk. And every minute I falter, every minute I am idle, I tighten the shackles that bind me, and I close the door to my future one inch. This door may never be re-opened, and there may be no reversing the damage of idleness. I have already slammed the door half shut on me, by my unfocused collegiate entry.

In my comeback and finish, I resolved to fit through that door, squeeze through what space is left by that slotted crack, and make my exit. In preparation, I learned I must get small and live small. And I have since reduced my life somewhat to the barer essentials, as Emerson and Thoreau advocate. Maybe not all the way to my fingernail, but nonetheless I am getting small.

I am now wary of what I allow to cross my path—censoring anything detrimental from the commercials on television or the radio, to fast food and pizza delivery, to video games—I am resolved to let nothing impede my advance. I stay focused so I may one day wield my object and become a Master of the Arts. But I must do so from within the city walls. For I am student and have loans that chain me to my desk while I earn my Art and its tradition.

Beauty placates. Emerson’s beauty was Nature. Ellison’s beauty was music. Both expressed their feelings through prose. I find beauty in both Nature and music, in the inward and outward gaze. And I know my beauty will be Art. And I do have faith that Art is better than Nature. Making Art yields less consequence and detriment to my future than making Nature. I can also control Art with more facility than Nature. And my Art will not harm anyone.

Nature harms. Nature is the bitch that bites us. Nature is the killer. And though a killer like Nature can be beautiful, I believe it is the kind of beauty you naturally hide from, or want to hide from. Here I am and there you are: I hide from Nature because I know it’s bad for me, Natural and its natural agents and its natural laws.

Nature, in my sense, is not the trees and the birds and the fish and the stone. Nature is the sights and sounds of the city, its quiet, gentle whispers and flagrant declarations—my next door neighbors humping, the imploring eyes of that widow across the street, the beautiful and coy stranger on the train. Nature approaches me in the form of low interest rates and zero percent financing for one year. Nature makes me swoon at a two for one deal. Or hungry at ninety nine cents for a burger. Or famished before two slices of pizza and a coke for two bucks. Or pensive at twenty percent off a purchase when opening a credit card account. Nature whispers God damning things into my ear. Nature is the signal that touches my eyes and draws me away from my Art.

Now I’ve gone and caught myself up in the contrasts of Art & Nature. Let me acknowledge now that Man is Nature. And the natural man is cruel and will enslave other natural men to feed his body and the body of his own kin. I am enslaved by natural men now. And in my bondage, I have created the notion that the artistic man is clever and will not be enslaved by the natural man.
An artistic man may never be tripped up by distraction or noise or lose focus under social misdirection, for he will assert himself, daily, in a manner that is appropriate to his Art and deferential to his Nature, all while evading the throes of social servitude. The artist will produce and that is all that matters in the ever consuming storm of nature. I know this even as I am chained to my desk, writing, studying. It is quite possible that I only believe this and do not know it in the scientific sense of knowledge. My only proof is myself, my terrible case.

I am enslaved by my fellow Natural Man. I entered this servitude of my own foolish volition with the vain hopes that I might one day find the means to rise above it…in short that I may one day become an Artistic Man. Now I must believe in this pursuit, in its object, in the artistic man’s ability to transcend the servitude of natural men—and if I ever lose faith in this belief, then I am just a natural man, chained to a desk by a student loan, instead of an apprentice loose upon the halls of an age-old tradition.

"yankee doodle plastic boy toy ballad"

i'm a yankee doodle dandy,
   i'm a yankee doodle boy.
i've got more stuff
   if you want to smoke.
i betcha do oye-oye!

i'm a yankee doodle dandy,
   i'm a yankee doodle boy.
i like to sing with so much glee
   that brings me so much joy!

i'm a yankee doodle dandy,
   i'm a yankee doodle boy.
don't be alarmed if i stop and strum,
   i'm just a plastic toy!
   i'm just a plastic toy!!