Children of the West Rest Easy

Passed out on bathroom floors
Condoms floating in toilets
Bad phone numbers scrawled on foreheads
Hair pressed into the vomitus of libertys new shackle

Life
At the Academy of Donkey Kong
Passes with few hiccups
Then on to that visitors center dubbed the real world
A few bad nights
Remember the good times
Then go choke somewhere
As a favor to strangers

Matthew Good

Gathering Stars, Exiting Deities

Teen angst challenge
A wide world of sports
The slip and slide social club

Ransacked views
Cheap people to do worldly repairs
You get what you pay for
With people who fuck for money

My inner cheerleader swoons
Ambulance attendant entertainment
A heart locked like a safe
Laughing gas stuntmen to blow it

Danced out
Thankless endings burden the projector without theme music
We tragic siblings fated to despair
Lost on Trojan shores trapped under the ruins of lights and makeup

Matthew Good

I Have Become My Parents - Circa 1985

When I was a kid I took for granted many of the technological developments regarding home computing that must have confused my parents and those of their generation. These days I find it amazing the knowledge that young people possess regarding computer operations and web information.

I have become my parents - circa 1985.

While I somehow doubt that my grandfather would have cared to learn how to use a computer, were he still around, I’m sure the technology itself would have made an impression. Every time I visit my parents I find myself in my mother’s office doing this or that to what was once an old PC of mine. And to this day she is still amazed that you can actually play music on a computer while simultaneously e-mailing. My father, on the other hand, has no patience for it, resulting in my parent’s homepage being Arsenal.com - a single click. And even then he’ll sit and wait for a television update before he’ll walk ten feet and click a button.

Even though I wasn’t all that adept when it came to computers, or computer related things; when I was 15 I had a far superior understanding of technology than my parents did. In 1985, when I was 15, popular, cutting edge home computer technology looked something like this…




The mighty Atari 2600, even though in 85 it was getting old.



ColecoVision, which had Zaxxon, making it more desirable.
But like the Atari, by 1985 it was getting old.



As you can see, graphics were advanced. Depending on
the resolution of your "monitor" (aka your television).


Despite the fact that there were actual computer systems available, no one much cared for them. Of course they would become more popular as the years passed, but in the early 90’s everyone I knew still had little to no understanding of how to do anything but the most rudimentary tasks (such as turning monitors on and off). Interestingly, kids half our age at the time were far more adept.

While I have, over the last year, struggled to educate myself about computers and the web, my knowledge is still a mere fraction of what many 15 year olds inherently understand. My niece, who is not yet three, can already play educational puzzle games.

And when I was three? That’s right – I was eating food out of the cat’s dish and running amok with the pop-and-go fisher price vacuum.

I can only imagine what my grandchildren will be able to do with little to no effort when they’re teens. By then I may have actually learned how to do more than manipulate Blogger templates (and only a handful at that).

Blog On Blog

To visit my official blog, click here.

Over the last few days I've posted a few entries on my personal blog that have caused quite a stir. One in particular, which made mention of gay marriage, resulted in the swamping of my inbox by those less than impressed.

Today is international human rights day world-wide. Of course, being that I'm active with Amnesty, my entry today revolved around it being human rights day and relative human rights information. Interestingly, the entry has received minimal comments. Given that - what I find very telling is the obvious distinction many obviously believe exists between gay rights and human rights.

Gay rights and human rights are, of course, one in the same. Those that oppose gay marriage, for example, often claim that if it is legalized (which it is in most Canadian provinces anyway) it will somehow open the floodgates allowing other sexual deviants; the right to demand their practices be legalized - the two most common examples used being bestiality and pedophilia. This sort of logic smacks of the same kind of rationale used by racists that have claimed, over the centuries, that non-whites are physiologically different and thus inferior.

Can you imagine applying such logic to the civil rights movement? If people were to say -If we give blacks the vote then God knows rapists and mass murders will be demanding that their passions be made lawful!" To me it is the same sort of twisted logic that paints gays as being sexually deviant and incapable of loving.

The condemnation of Gay marriage is not, as many claim, simply the defense of traditional marriage. Those that would claim that they have no problem with what they term;the Gay lifestyle; but oppose Gay marriage are obviously not supportive of gay rights and therefore not wholly supportive of all human rights. For if it is permissible to tolerate; Gays but not support their right to be complete equals under the law, then their rights as humans are being limited.

How are those guilty of such bigotry to be approached when much of it is rooted in religious bias? How can those who claim to support human rights openly condemn gays when that is itself a human rights abuse; just as religious persecution is? Both are interesting questions.

Paris Hilton's Vagina

A choked highway
In and out of a riot drug metropolis
Slicked with cheap oil
Fast and easy, slow and hours long
Paris Hilton's vagina

Ghetto rock for Princess
Pipe pages, a sticky magazine
Slow tongue in the basement
High on the American dream
Paris Hilton's vagina

Ah, Weekends

Innuendo
Voices clamor
Glances bust the neighborhood blinds
The half dazed answer

The golden calf breaks in half
The heavens split, lightning and Thx
And then, as if rehearsed, nothing

My jaw feels broken
Been like that for weeks


Mite

Asleep in our cars
Educated Styrofoam
Footnotes of the sophomore jinx
Several of ten commandments met

Children turned plastic foot soldiers
Parading May Day tiger’s teeth
The world sees brutality two ways
As horrible
As horribly accomplished


Parade Of High Risk Effendis

Combustible
This age of exasperated information
Of Mary Shelley engines
Of twine collecting undertakers
Of $19.99 a month voyeurs

Contempt itself is worn through
Sullen and evacuated to some empty pool motel world


Wild Boys Of Oz

Beat into me
The oxymoron
The jewels of tedium
Parasites cast off on prison shores

The continents heave and evacuate
Pulling back their hair the moonless hands of Loki
Adjunct, breathless

Where are we but ruined
If not self-saviors then to what rescue looked
Nocturne artists smug with divinity
Abandoned by all gods but one
The machined patriarch of Oz


Small Box Stratosphere Language

From a basement:
Insomnious, drugged
Labouring to produce life
Pick locks for the suburban Alcatraz

From a basement:
To the floors of attics
Pink insulation blankets
Five bucks for food and smokes

From a basement:
To metropolises
To the offices of liars
To the steely castles of usury

From a basement:
Into feverish, vomiting disbelief
Spent and turned a pay cheque
Fingernails on cotton chalkboards

From a basement:
Three blocks to the water
To float still in the well of it
To ply life with exaggeration
To grin at whatever notion lives in the sky
And sink


Labour A Protest

An ocean over, night slips day
Melting weeks drip months
Smothering cries, the frustrations of stones
All pragmatists by right

On the streets, the corners, people sleep
Figurines and chipped heirlooms
Coolly regarded
Distant, animalistic, removed from civilization

What truth for the lie not to become
Biblical dust swarms the surrendered
Laid out for the rains to bury
A foreign reporter anguishes them
Snaps a roll of film


No-Town Choir

The groan lifts
Like Yankees greeting Pickett
Eerily pronounced and wavering
Up along the cement tree trunks
Through the windows of capitalist Princesses
Buried in ears pasted on balloon-heads

Name branded, copy written
This fortress of our fathers impenetrable
Defends the deaf


Tide With Speech

Wash this filthy world one stone at a time
Put back mountains, forests, presence
Bathe ineptitude virgin white

See these hands rebuilt
Not towns or outposts or mammoths
Taken up residence in the second bedroom of the world
A whole generation of rocks skipping on water


Pole To Pole

Roll over
A sound
The kitchen, the stairs
The past lives
All is immovable
The governance of a remembered lethargy

The future arrives
Omnipresent, electric
Orwellian kisses plant the feet, open the dresser drawer, cock your hammer

In your sleepy suburb the enemy is come
To feast on children, dogs, cats
To bolster the national resolve
Keep you piecemeal in the saddle bags of some headless Hessian

No house is a home partitioned
Like the earth, lines define from a great height this separation
But lines are only lines

It’s your house
Take it back


Burnt Airplanes

A hammer
A swarm of bees
The dripping sun
Wrath and sand swept agonies
Vengeance drives taxis
From oasis to oasis
From town to town
Between the legs of giants

Into the southern swamp go the pasty white boys of Iowa
The pocked skinned boys of Missouri
The slick ruffians of California and New York
Chewing gum, spitting insults
Flabbergasted and sleep depraved
There, but not

Dancers
Out of step and time
Meeting clumsily for brief touches
Breaths of moments, tickled bloodless
Acknowledging, trampling feet, recovering

The air carries their music through the streets
To Mosques and hospitals
To sleeping houses where kids dream on the rooftops
Of burnt airplanes


Cowboy Is King

Doses of dopamine
Some Neo-Solomon to secure the pillars of Rushmore
Fraud and his father parade rape
Flashing hundreds, doing lines in the can

Given to you straight
And still just the bravado of gutlessness
Packed into jars and pickled extinct
Some lame old thing called liberty


This Year's Recreational Drug

Without big teeth
Without commercials for better fabric softener
To breathe and contain a thought

The car’s in the ditch
In it my collection of Cash cassettes
Wet, covered in shit
Passenger to the sleeping venue of my brain
Listless, bloated, relieved

I remember, as everyone does
A cloud ringed version of a time without ideas
Without vagaries, without pains

I remember, as everyone does
The one absolute
The womb of innocence
Inapplicable to us now
The result of some strange law passed by robots

Memory
This year's recreational drug


People Parts For Your Gas Tank

Poised a wreck
Teetering
Acrobats without middle ears
Dogs, all hungry, beg the winds up
Bones shown through wounds menu their lust
Blood for ketchup, food for oil

I’ll trade you my banana for your chocolate pudding
Because I’ve got a bad feeling about all of this


The Greeting Card Brotherhood

A factory shadow
Rusted roofs, weed gardens of molding recliners
Five and dime evangelists stalk the isles of Walmart
Jeffersonian romantics gazing the velvet vistas of Guthrie’s sing-song
The socialist run out of his skeleton
Picked clean by the slithering Roy Cohen slugs of the American forest
This land is the automaton’s land

God is great some say
A percentage at least
Where they are to be found is a profound mystery
God’s work remains painfully his alone


Panacea

Where am I
If not here, heaving air
Where am I to look
Along the cold, foggy shore
For your light

Remote people
Adrift in urban destitution
In the new cities of tomorrow
Languishing under the lowbrow
Suffocating
Coffined in mortgages

What am I
If not alive within you
Where am I to Mecca
Along the cold, foggy shore
Without your light
Without the possibility of a clear morning


Dear Terrorist

Dear terrorist
Hid in reification
Plan me an ending too terrible to broadcast

Our crossing prophesied
Each day reaffirmed me by my betters
Steady like the deliverance of mail, like the drone of transformers

Dear terrorist
Subsiding on portions of rats
The future has been gifted you beyond your wildest dreams
Unbeknownst to you, you are master here now


The Location Of America

This, a hammer to beat the foil of despair
Vengeance pounded and wrought from wreckage
Jackboots to step the globe and in quicksand wear

Free men all in pretense
Babes of ocher hewn streets
Abandoned and known only in Hollywood
As the location of America


After Tonight We Will Never Bleed Again

In a trance
Perfect hair and perfect lips sell the world
Oceans of cola
Forests of fantasy
Minivans gleaming atop Mount Mutual Fund

Writers nervously check over their shoulders
Entombed brick by brick by heavy handed salesmen
Voices lost in a cacophony of finger nails on rock keys
Scratching out eternity

Oh Lord, in thy eternal kingdom – grovel!
Burnt to faithless ashes, my neighbors depart
I am left here witness to their corpses
A last vessel of those abandoned truths
More ancient than even you