IF BY RUDYARD KIPLING

THEN GOSUB 60

maybe you had to be there

anyway according to somebody it’s among the most famous english-language poems but i never saw it. maybe the limitation is in the size of the “english-language poems” population. or maybe we use different amounts of starch in our laundry, me and the tons of people who read it.

swear to you, first exposure i know for sure of, was these tennis players, ahead of playing themselves to death. but please, now dennis hopper, who will never read any poem of mine or my loved ones aloud, if i have any say.

personally i like advice poems and such. maybe my liking them comes from forgetting the advice as fast as it comes to me. i would love to apply these lessons, however stodgy however dated however narrow their intended audience, but my path is that of animal behavior or infantile happy surprises.

is “decay” a road? did i climax at birth? propped up by society, no, wound up by society and now the gears and cogs are quietly unreeling the spring’s last push.

you have to trust some combination of society and self. it’s useful to look at tory propaganda sometimes to ask myself, it doesn’t look like anybody can help me, can i get out? is there a nice suit i could wear, grab on the near side of the human pyramid and head for “the top,” and there, do, something, i don’t know what.

do i really believe people are — if not foolish, then full of shit — and if so when did i start? before or after i got frightened of fighting in the center ring? must be before. i never wanted to be in the present at all, on human terms, and the sense of separateness from wildlife was just as strong. what was different, and more enjoyable, about the animals and plants was their confidence.

people looked like machines powered by 100% renewable nervous energy. lots of sociopaths think people are like, i guess, “noisy” or “needy” or “liars” or something. i didn’t feel put out, or left out, except when i brought them to my attention. mostly i felt, you know, dead, because as i saw it only the dead weren’t in it for the auditions. they are… dead.

typecast, you could say.

oh. we are calling these words authentic, are we.

by authority of our ability to sound true.

no that’s not really it. i’m guessing there’s something i could find that would distract me and pay my bills without ruining the hard-won balance between love and hate by requiring me to give, you know, social aid. hey, look, i understand that cohabitation requires everyone to be said to exist, it’s a legal construct that really does make a difference in people’s lives. and because of how selectively we’ve set up our criteria, i look like a fucking moron to claim otherwise, without joining a mystic order.

i mean i don’t exactly think we’re a dream. our dream, “its” dream. that would be a lot of work, making up a complicated story about gods and fantasies and real true experience in another better galaxy and so on. i just say, “not here,” and eat lunch.