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HIT PLAY

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The shrink innocently asks me to tell her a story

As if we don’t both know what we’re doing that day…

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I watch him like a damsel on the railway

He walks the way men think men walk

The followspot reflects on his hair gel

And I think to myself, that’s a lot of hair gel

Wraps thighs around his date’s thighs

I dub him the human condom with hair gel

He fingers her fingers play–

Smolders at the blonde behind–

Ogles the crop top crossing the room–

Turns to leer at my tits, what’s new

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In this night market on the lower east side

I can’t tell if the glasses are real or polycarbonate

If the cushions came from Urban or a market in Oman

What matters is that meat here chooses the selling

Even wealth can’t spare desire from anyone

Like a classic six, each heifer holds an open house

In the factory farm system of Manhattan isle

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In the land before people started calling me ma’am

On Tuesdays I’d go dancing at the bebop

Yet the bebop isn’t somewhere I can visit these days

The bebop has since closed its doors

The men and their guitars have all gone home

No one even gets drunk there anymore

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You perform the rules until the realizations hit

And then you will have to perform again

And when you think you finally won this goddamn pageant

You’ll learn life’s a sideshow, the world a circus tent:

There is no fire exit, they painted it shut–

Dropped a curtain on you, letting out the fly–

Couldn’t say if we’d been front lit with a 50 or a 36–

To me it was all just Rosco number five–

The curtain always weighs at least 500 pounds–

If you lose weight they just take the costume in–

The proscenium limits motion and distorts sound–

Things here are never quite theatre in the round

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I remind myself, apathy’s not striving

When it comes to playing chicken with a mack truck

Like the latent peach fuzz on a woman’s chin

The line between empathy and tolerance is made up

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Waiting on some justice you’ll never get

Living doubt when you know that dharma’s fucked

Seeking out stimuli to confirm the belief

It looks like depression and goodness me

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So afraid to yell at the gods

As if gods had never heard anybody scream

Ordained surrender was never so holy

The change starts when projections leave

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Read my fortune, like we aren’t lost for always

Living auto-fiction you’d never sell

And since doubt leads to demonstration

No one can stop the runner but himself

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Anything you say or do is threatening

They’ll call you things that get under your skin

A sign, a symbol, an ode to what never was

Just a grand majestic thing that reeks of sin

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If the icon shows up telling you to change or die

A burning bush isn’t gonna do the trick

The message loses meaning on its emergence

The less defined, the more active you’ll get

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This magic isn’t fate or cosmic science–

You’ll perform on repeat until right or death

We’re talking object permanence and safety

And it’s theatre of the mind within every breath

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Convinced freedom was the only goal

Didn’t know you could have anything else

Didn’t know there were things you couldn’t live without

Because you’d never been without before

There were so many things you actually needed

People had a tendency to need the invisible

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There’s a version of reality I keep swinging by

Where I stop fighting, but I don’t give up

Nobody ever changes for anyone else

Yet law and order’s prerequisite to play

You can choose to suffer in this tournament

Or abandon each family system you vomit up

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In this story, I perform a cow who is unaware–

Vaudeville butcher tour revenge of the heart

In the drive thru at mcdonald’s, unfurling pin curls

Hope the self-made burger I eat isn’t made up

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Build walls from ply I saw with my persona–

File a claim with Spirit and manifest the law

Learn firefighting so i can light myself

Make poetic justice the pyre of choice

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Picture wakefulness in every surgery–

Open door startle in the middle of therapy–

It’s peak David Lynch and dare I say it’s sexy–

Knowing magic is the most human thing of all

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You reverse the curse, like in Johnny Baseball

Portray the things you wanted to own

Stop romanticizing the dead before you’re ready

Learn control first requires a damned fall

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I am here, a designated gross observer–

Delusional substitute at whom neuroses you project

Yet somehow I’m suddenly in charge of everything

The power flips your deception into living aspect

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My vestments are pure imagination

New scenery dots the same mise-en-scène

See the cow jump over the snake…to bite its own tail

See the small dog laugh at ceremony’s end

So, for sport, for symbol, and, of course, for all your dead gods

I breathe tabula rasa, tabula rasa, start it again

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