Bob’s son is dead, his world ended a few days ago,

But he was at work today.

He looked at me and said How are you Marco,

and I didn’t really have a reply, Because

The unliving Eyes of striped bass

and rainbow trout

bore holes in the back of my head.

It stank like fish blood.

I wonder what is happening in Trinidad right now,

it’s a weird thing to wonder about

Because as far as my concern goes,

Everyone there

Doesn’t even exist.

To me, wage slaves in Thailand or China

are just a great bargain at K-Mart.

But what am I to those slaves,

who put the stitches in my clothing?

Do they think absently about Paterson,

and ponder How was Marco’s day?

Because their’s

was hen bu Hao!

The world is a psychopath,

so watch where you put those fingers and toes

And Don’t trust anyone

you wouldn’t piss in front of.

It’s nights like these

when I sit in Applebees

and stare mindlessly

at 20 different television screens,

watch young girls humiliate themselves

and men punch each other in the face,

And I have advertisements

and meaningless messages

poured into my head,

over and over and over again…

on nights like this

I look around as I sit, and

I just get tired of all this shit,

the ceaseless glow and the white noise,

the pleasure activated by sugary foods

and bouncing images

of cheerleader boobs,

the iphone molesting douchebag

with the backwards flat-brimmed

Penn-State hat,

The waiter who could be so much more,

the teenaged girls who think they want

to act like whores,

The bittersweet New Jersey of our dreams.

It’s nights like these I think

I just want to quit

America is rotting my brain,

and throwing potential

down the drain

This is a poem for the brutality

and consequent misconstrued reality

(alarming congeniality)

of the misguided illusion of normality

and magazine mentality

of overt sexuality

And the Glamour Girl fetish of our gilded Age;

All the women who believe they are expected

to live their lives 20 pounds underweight,

all the men who want the perfect bod,

Big muscles and Hot dates;

The machoman and groupie skanks

who inadvertently shape our fates;

When the ingrained and institutionalized

American facade of freedom

Has you acting helpless and dependent

We’re just a little bit East of Eden…

And fourth grade girls

who want nice racks

and are conscious of their calories

And loathe the body they’ve been given;

Here’s one way to put it in words,

It’s sure a circus show we live in.

To the old men who play bocci

And remember in the park,

To the young girls who play records

and dance alone in the dark,

To the chess playing gentlemen

of South Carolina Ave,

To the waitresses with children,

whose tips are all they have

From the corners to the porches

and the bus-stop tragedies,

From the empty dinner tables

and the ruined Christmas eves,

From the Hamptons and the gutters

of Miami Beach

From the poor Latino mothers

and every broken dream,

There’s a billion different stories,

but we’re each the protagonist of one

and through griefs and through glories,

It’s always just begun.

It’s important to live a happy life

and love as often as you can,

but it’s a hardass world we live in

that Nobody understands.

Thus Spake Marco

the coward,

the Hider,

The Runner,

the Liar;

Thus Spake Marco,

the stubborn immovable

wolf-born child;

Thus Spake Marco,

the Anarchist priest,

the philistine beast

Who rose from the East;

Thus Spake Marco,

the student of Aristocles,

or Plato if you please;

Thus Spake the New-born babe,

Still slick and wet from womb;

Birthed again in Suburbia

to forsee the coming

of our Doom.

why is it That I can love so much,

and yet, when it comes to loving a person,

I can’t get it out right?

I love plastic bags

and the George Washington bridge,

I love seagulls and polluted rivers

and crabbing on the side of the AC expressway,

but there’s some dumb part of me,

installed into my hard drive by a lifetime of programming

and generations of societal norms

That prevents me from saying

I love you

to another human being,

another creature of the same tortured species;

why are we made this way?

needless to say,

maybe someday

I’ll turn into a butterfly

and flutter away

and even though I like to think

that I’m fine by myself,

humans are complexly social animals

with a genetic desire for connectedness and dependency,

the way things are now

I get kind of lonely.

if we made up money to strengthen order,

then why does it make chaos?

hold up,

what the fuck is going on here

I’m crying and my heart is in knots

and my cousin got shot

for this shit.

somebody give me an answer quick

before I do some Tyler Durden shit

When you died,

why didn’t the world stop?

why weren’t the flags at half mast,

why weren’t there news crews

and streets clogged with throngs of mourners?

this isn’t what it’s supposed to be like

when a Hero dies,

there are supposed to be teams

of investigators trying to find out why

and maybe the mayor of New York,

the governor

Somebody

When the ambulance drove away with you though,

what was the driver thinking about?

His girlfriend or his mortgage?

why didn’t the crickets stop singing,

why weren’t bells tolling

and global ceasefires called?

Doesn’t anybody know

that the most important person in all existence

just ceased to exist?

what do I do now

I’m alone and I’m so scared

how can I go on

and does anybody care

Great!

A 21st century Caliphate

Sponsored by terror,

and fueled by hate

I guess is what you get

when you fuck with a state

for multiple decades

and make it too late

to get out…

So let’s send more young boys and girls

and dress them up like soldiers,

make them fight in all our wars

before they get much older

get some home inside a box,

and the rest just damaged forever

Say wow did they fight bravely

(got his head severed

by a bomb

in some simple diffusion error,

or blown up along the roadside

by some teenaged jihad aggressor)

All the same, let’s take a nice breath

of agent orange,

straighten our boots

and see some foreign

Lands;

Colonel Gaddafi, al-Assad

and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

certainly did their best,

Now the commander-in-chief

and his war-hound beasts

with their bloodthirsty greed will do the rest!

After Every Spring

and the dog-days of summer

Comes a long hard winter,

and it just gets tougher.

Drone-strikes for Jesus,

Heads for Allah,

and Missiles for Elohim

God sure is a thirsty bastard,

bloody old and grim.

Humans live such tortured lives

and have unparalleled capability

to destroy and hate

You have to give us something though,

Cause boy, can we create

Invisible people are everywhere (supposedly

living on invisible lands over invisible oceans)

There’s an invisible war going on right now, my invisible country

is fighting some invisible enemy.

In some invisible city there are invisible crimes transpiring

and invisible happinesses.

Invisible brides walk arm in arm with their invisible fathers,

and invisible beasts stalk the frozen invisible boreal forests.

An invisible girl

was kidnapped by an invisible assailant 12 invisible years ago,

the invisible police never found her;

Wow, the more I think about this…

All that really IS visible right now

is my desk, some books,

and this poem.

Poetry is when you find a windshield smashed with a baseball bat

and you smile,

thinking that the little pieces

look an awful lot like diamonds.

Poetry is when the seagulls

hung up in the night sky over the casinos

look like plastic bags,

Drifting on the dirty, gentle summer breeze.

You see, Poetry

is taking a breath on top of a parking garage

and closing your eyes to cry

where nobody’s going to stare,

and poetry

is thinking about what’s out there

What’s going on in every housing project,

and why is that man holding his face in his hands?

Poetry

is not nostalgic,

is not a sexy boy kissing a perfect girl,

it isn’t using logic, it’s more

Poetry

is just being able to stand

and look at yourself and at others and at the pigeons and at the world

and shed tears because it’s all so perfect.

Poetry is being able to understand

That taking a child’s hand and walking down the promenade

is not just motions, it’s not just an action.

Poetry is realizing that every brick and nail that makes a city

was laid by hands that were once as small as those,

That every grain sand and piece of land on which we stand

is all the same;

Poetry is opening your eyes to the miracle

of the neon lights on a Corona sign,

seeing a squirrel for the first time

and living your life,

I don’t know how else to put it,

just write

Marco, the streetlights glow just for you!

Your smile makes the traffic signal change,

and your Eyes

are the two most beautiful puddles

I have ever seen.

I don’t wear designer clothes

and I don’t do my hair.

I don’t sit and write dumb shit

from a fancy high-backed chair.

Seated on a barstool throne

in a Hooters booth in Wayne,

I’m the son of suburbia

with concrete in my veins

And when all this is gone,

my legacy remains

in plastic bags

and empty Fanta cans

in the dump on Staten Island

or in the Meadowlands.

You think I don’t see those track marks from crank,

I can’t see that your hungry eyes have sank?

Keep trying to hide behind excuses and lies

and it’ll show you why you’re twisted up and broken inside;

You want to shoot it up your veins?

Some Mexican mud inside your blood

gonna help you kill that pain?

you put a demon in your body

to murder your family while you watch,

so now sit back on the couch and relax

to that smackety smack smack

with your eyes rolled back

and hot vomit on your shirt

Thinking you’re less than dirt,

so what’s a little more gonna hurt?

5 bucks for a bump of that dirty brown,

A little bit of white right from Chinatown?

It’s not too late to flush that tar

and even though it’ll leave a scar,

that’s better than another dead kid in her car

You can do it and I love you,

so please

don’t give up.

Just read it in the news, Atlantic City’s going under

Where’ll all the addicts go? To Pennsylvania somewhere

I don’t know what could be sadder Than watching a city sink,

Sliding beneath the waves Of that green eternal drink

Walk out on the Steel Pier, 3 tickets for the Ferris wheel

And it stops all the way on top

Feel the breeze pass through your hair

And as you sit up there and stare

at what this place used to be,

Can’t you see

what it means to me?

Never mind, because to you

It’s a rundown town

filled with whores and dirty bars.

To you, it’s skanky streets and public housing,

cheap souvenirs and dollar-dogs.

You see the homeless sleeping underneath the boardwalk

and you want to leave

the 72 cent underpants at the Super 8.

You want to get away from this place,

the broken needles and the pain,

the casino commission and the crackheads.

Now the lights are going out

along Atlantic Avenue,

and the doors are sealed

With the boards they’re being nailed to.

Governor says we’ll make it through,

but I don’t know if he knows what to do

so there goes another city,

Sunk into the sea,

I wish you understood

what this means to them and means to me.

Take me to Canaan,

to that blessed land

Where Messiahs walked

and teachers taught

From cities made in sand.

The whole world’s dick

is in it’s hand,

and they’re trading nervous looks;

but Israel a Jewish State?

I don’t think Murders in that book.

This can’t keep happening forever,

somebody’s got

to pull the lever pretty soon,

Russia sits and mocks the West

as they play the game,

Africas forgotten still

(Has anything really changed?)

And all you Tamils

better run for the hills,

Cause Sri Lanka’s got more camps to fill

So get on over to Australia,

See if Tony Abbott’ll have ya.

Don’t take what I’m  writing to heart,

it’s just a little poem,

I just want to play my part,

(some things are better thought than spoken)

All this is exciting,

but it’s three whole worlds away!

I can’t be concerned with human rights

when I’ve got work today.