Late Night With My Pickled Brain

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

Low hum.
Whirling micro fans.
Silver shovels, bronze spray tans.
Gold dust women out-running the shadows.
Soothing rain completes me.

Zagging and zigging and zugging.
Through easy traffic.
Passing truckers loaded with loads of trinkets.
Made by the tiny hands of exploited Chinese children.
Jobs that union men once did before they became dinosaurs.

Scorched Earth and empty orange groves.
Dry sea. Wet air. Upside down flock of seagulls.
Mudslides. Discarded empties.
Corroded car batteries. Splintery benches.
Governor doesn't know where he slept last night.

Loaded dice. Sleight of hand.
Hijacking dreams when people sleep.
Inserting intrepid memories.
Biting my lip in my sleep.
Traveling in crowded buses, but in someone else's dream.

These things are not easy to explain when understanding is even harder.
It's that... it's just... it's not easy.
Art is art.
Until it becomes self indulgent tripe.
Tripe, if seasoned and prepared properly, can become a gourmet dish.

We have selective memory as a community.
We have myopia as a country.
And even then, we can't trust ourselves.
Can you look in the mirror and not throw a stone?
The house of cards will collapse on Humpty Dumpty.

Revisionist memories have staged a coup inside our head.
Erasing and deleting.
Eliminating the awkward and smudging out the miserable.
Extinguishing thought terrorists.
Squishing them like doomed ants.

Spin. Propaganda. Hyperbole.
History is written by the winners.
Like a fascist state.
Ordering the ministry of education to re-write history books.
Future generations will only learn about half-truths.

And never know who flatters the prince the most.
We stare at clocks four seconds too slow.
Mixing cocktails with toxic spirits.
Chafed encounters.
Drenched. Absorbed. Saturated.

Bon Jovi's frazzled 80's hair is the cultural equivalent to elephant diarrhea.
The excess of the "me" decade makes everything else seem underhanded.
The haves own everything.
The have-nots barely have $14 in their checking account.
We stopped cultivating culture.

Evasive phone messages.
Senseless guilt.
Despicable focus.
Reading books you shouldn't be reading.
Silently judging the supercilious culture.

I knew a rich girl who had no clue about the external world.
When she was 10, she ate gourmet cheese sandwiches.
She ask her maids what was it like to ride the subways.
Now she's getting married in Santa Fe.
I pretended the post office lost the invite.

Hatred shouldn't exist.
Yet it thrives in a petri dish the size of Los Angeles.
Try to understand the evolution of a sitcom plot.
Examine the impressive scholarly arguments.
Declare your profound ambivalence.

Addicts cannot contain themselves.
Roaming the slums for a 24-hour product.
Humanize the experience.
Sad and feral.
The flicker of the TV in the darkness makes me feel less alone.

Cat ladies die on couches.
Urine soaked carpets beneath their feet.
The pungent aroma of ammonia.
The famished cats fed on her toes.
Then they ate each other.

Illogical infantile pleasures.
Be wary of excessive pleasures.
Dangerous daydreams.
We are only vehicles.
But when you're brain stops, that's it.

Close your eyes.
It all continues.
The distilled thoughts.
The muted memories.
Everything.

Raids with masks.
The bad guys always wore masks and black hats.
Lack of participation in the ponzi scheme makes them suspicious.
The thinkers will be marginalized.
Unless they buy into the snazzy commercials pitching fancy red cars.

The moon's gravity is 1/6th of Earth.
Astronauts and their movements were handicapped.
Slaves to their own bulky space suits.
Do you dream in outer space?
And what do cosmonauts' farts smell like?