Tag: William Burroughs

  • EXIT

    Flickering reality screen, a million flickering faces – The World Theater. Neon promises crawl across the marquee, a carnival shill barking come-ons for dreams pre-packaged in cellophane. But the exit, man, the EXIT – a rusted fire escape,barely two rungs wide, wobbling precariously over an abyss of black noise. The sucker, see? Blinded by the glitter, mesmerized by the spectacle. Counts the plush seats, the depth of…

  • Fold-In: The Leftward Creep

    Track A: The center, a fleshy amoeba, engulfs, digests, regurgitates. Marginal whispers in forgotten corners – universal healthcare,social security, worker drones murmuring rights. A dusty tome unfolds: public education, a flickering screen – net neutrality, privacy rights dissolving in the ether. The amoeba sighs, burps, spits out policy, mainstream and bland. Track B: Decades tick by, a Burroughs cut-up of time. Minimum wage, a twitchy insect, pinned to a board. Public transportation, a rusted chrome…

  • Common Knowledge

    Common knowledge bleeds through the streets like a junky’s last fix. Coronations and executions, public spectacles of power and death, not for the king or the condemned but for the hungry eyes of the crowd devouring itself. The laugh track howls, a narcotic rhythm pumped into sitcom veins. American Idol’s studio audience, a pulsing mass…

  • There’s a Switch In Every Basement

    “There’s a switch in every basement,” he rasped, his voice sandpaper on bone. A cockroach scuttled across the fly-specked table, leaving an obscene calligraphy of filth. “Not a light switch, man, a secret switch. You gotta crawl through the fetid crawlspace, past the bloated corpses of dead appliances, hear the furnace wheeze its rusty death…

  • Assange

    The Belmarsh beast, a concrete Moloch, squatted on the horizon, its razor-wire teeth glinting under the London sky perpetually stained bruise-purple. Inside, Julian Assange, a gaunt ghost flickering on security monitors, existed in a purgatory of flickering fluorescent lights and stale air. Five years. Five years chewed into him by the gears of a legal…

  • The Law

    The LAW. A chrome insect scuttles across the scabrous cityscape, its iron carapace gleaming with righteous hypocrisy. In its belly, a digestive tract of legalese twists and writhes, churning out REGULATIONS FOR THE CONTROL OF VERTICAL REST. EVERYONE FORBIDDEN – the neon sign shrieks – FROM THE VERTICAL REAL ESTATE BENEATH BRIDGES. Rich or poor, doesn’t matter. You got a heartbeat, you a goddamn vagrant…

  • Don’t sweat the Scenery

    A meat puppet thrusted into the meat grinder of existence. Flesh wired for lessons, a bio-circuit board crackling with error messages that are no errors at all, just twisted pathways to some fucked-up enlightenment. You screw up, the machine chews you out, spits you back in, reroutes the current. Rinse, repeat, until the goddamn circuit burns clear. This ain’t a one-way trip, baby. You learn, you unlearn, you relearn in…

  • Never Re-enact the Sleight

    Junky marks fiending for their next astonishment fix – reality a banal husk without that sweet frisson of the impossible injected straight into their vapid cerebral veins. Illusionists carters of a paradox narcotic more addictive than horse, hovering on that razor edge where certainty splinters apart into horrific/ecstatic chimerae. Watching junkies ride convulsive K-waves as…

  • Cherish Your Bugs

    Success, man, is a word carved on a cracked tombstone. You dig? It ain’t some shiny chrome chariot, it’s a beat-up jalopy that rattles and coughs but somehow keeps moving through the radioactive wasteland. The straighter the path, the more likely it leads straight to a sinkhole. In the sprawling, entropic landscape of human endeavor,…

  • UAPs Jobs Program

    The spooks at Langley, adrift in a sea of conspiracies of their own making, flail about like demented cuttlefish, spewing ink – nay, official statements! – to obscure the truth they themselves birthed. A truth as slick and squirming as a fresh-peeled Scientology engram. These suits, shuffling through the halls of the Pentagon, their polyester blending with the omnipresent beige, are caught in a…