A Discourse of Empire

By Todd Easterbrook [Contributor]

Death warm friend,
I have seen the banes of society and man and the slow death in unconsciousness
meander in trench streets in the soft night never to return home:
A discourse of empire with my velvet friend, where filed are the bones of decadence
and social quality; death as a smile or toll of semblance;
DEATH of binaural infinity in contained affinity or shriveled infancy;
DEATH through the jaded tentacles of outstretched wallets or nods or open slits:
tongues,
Warm stale death by way of television or computer screens or gluttoned cave of
spleen in vertical frown descent; hold
Late night vigil death in hollow vestibules, placid and fattened mules under street
lamps and trendy road-kill, having nothing in common with the ground;
Slow death by lulled marriage in a pregnant past or aborted future; lustful
plastic straw placentas or a smothered Siamese twin in the womb of cotton
thought;
Hot sweaty death in a bed or public fuck; death in meiosis or the sordid cocked
hammer or vermin-crawled cunt;
DEATH in free radical breast milk or diluted dinge semen;
DEATH in prayer to fiction or fable or idol or false reaching hope;
DEATH in an unzipped highway car or store-bought rolling metal coffin in the dead
of night or cyclical time;
DEATH in stale society, in complaisance, without indignation or spark or
revolutioned evolution; surplus of material; technology without care or
lament;
Flat-lined ego death in synesthesia by eating buttons of the earth, the placenta from
our Mother; undressing the subconscious; shamans, skyline in spades;
Liquid wet immaculate death in whiskey dreams or emotional plane sweet nectar-
ripped blood wine screams;
clubs,
diamonds,
hearts in wild disorder scenes,
in motels or fought alleyways or shelved condom seams;
Snuffed stuffed smut death in the incessant whip or sardonically playful shackles;
the sheets crimson-hot with the likeness of a virgin;
to start a religion;
Abuse (,) the future stepchild and union head of death’s groaned game: institution
of rape on a vast deathbed or freshly laid crib or worn-out mattress in the
sidewalk  arroyo puddles next to the crack house and street hooker; the
sudden wrath of a divine messenger as cold fury or curse in that hourglass
above our domes;
DEATH of romance and the soft fire,
the transcendence of love or drugs or slow rhythmic murder;
penetration,
exhale;
DEATH of art,
reason (,) intellect;
starvation in excess,
gifts from the deified green rectangle, the fast faces of foreign men,
of wisdom and purpose; trust that we will pay for it all:
DEATH of the mind through option or hidden ration,
what is a life in fashion?
DEATH of pale skins or concave bellies or nice smiles right in tune,
not you; the yuppies of the third or fifth world;
the life of ‘nice’ is enough to kill poems;
DEATH in the extremities of poetry but never its soul; vulnerable wayside death
that lets me write or feel;
DEATH of language through cellular ease; the message—the subtext, lost in
vacant towers and ghostly waves;
I still have the geometry of your smile when atoms collide;
DEATH to my hindered thoughts on the purpose of life:
In memory and structure and doors, quick swift deaf death or springs of
malice that flow and siege; ebb in an elaborately nice cage of carcass and
conformity, calamity’s infanticide; war;
Answers spurt but never has cement given life.  Never has cement given life.  Never
has cement given life.  Barren, Opaque, Dormant – Concrete,
Give me death give me hope give me earth but keep me free from birth or existential
worth in the new mock iron gridlock of life as one big lineup;
DEATH of openness or counterculture; truth in the highs,
by the bad bye she cries,
lament for inhibition in a wasteland of stale burnt society
in transfixed capital soul’d art or mask; think for a moment of this soul’d
stench; these manufactured droppings or excretions of greed or pompous
will or well-fed ego or yearned esteem; or ultimate excreted factory steam,
where are the Long Knives or Jacobin terminators?  Did you have a conscious
round part in this unraveled yarn?  Enough to base a movie on?  Or naked
bleeding documentary?
DEATH to green conception by gangrened science or flaccid tissue or stem cells or
drunken swerved highway cars on the elevated mountain pass; hairy barren
hills and drums in the night;
DEATH to martyrdom or iconoclasm or wallflower utilitarianism or infomercial
religion or the need for literature or the drag of being in the
human generation; we are the lines of snorted numbness or the shared
syringe or narcissism;
DEATH to any shade of colour in the blood-fed streets;
DEATH by tanning beds or fake plastic faces or perfectly hung chests;
DEATH in dark satanic mills or shone-on Godly mire;
DEATH of the character;
DEATH after overture;
I am the paean amongst the deaf, rotted deep within this lacuna and lacquered
with pop art perversions and fleshy priority; spoon-fed,
gift-wrapped flesh and skin wallets; not for freedom or oceanic liberation—
for image;
I want something to explode,
death volcano,
eruption on the masses, cum;
I’m almost there; she wants it all sorts of ways;
I am a troll amongst many turned to stone in sky-scraping caverns or comfortable
grids that stretch for miles over nature; does plastic decay?
We should turn it on,
Force them to wilt;
I see just as the other man can if he looks; the woman will feel it; our mother is
part of it, we are the part in it; why not smoke? It’s only life; the man smells
fresh flowers and looks for the black coffin; the soul cowboy
bartered, sold like a freshly opened whore in the bloody rectum of free-trade
capitalism;
the satisfied man with his dreams of rock and roll;
The smiling government criminal nods with victory podiums at the
nostalgic beatniks who do not bother to pretend anymore,
“Lets go to war; lets get our score; not for less but for more and more and
more”; Dig the dead and dig the way we will never cease to be fed
government led;
DEATH of bohemia,
DEATH of the music,
DEATH of every Dharma body,
DEATH in gas footprints… to walk with angels;
DEATH to the prickly pear or the prickly pear pop art;
DEATH from society’s pliers or every wet idle hand or dry beak;
DEATH by nuclear icicles in the cold demeanor,
leave no trace,
melt—murder;
DEATH as God is;
DEATH warm friend,
This is the course of empire,
and
We are the coal of the smoldering end.