 A long time ago, deluded people thought the world was round. So silly. They thought the sun was a star and the earth circled around it at an incredibly long distance. They imagined the moving stars weren't stars at all. But giant balls of rock and or gas that traveled likewise around the sun. How naive we were to think so. I'm so happy the world is flat. A little curved, yes, but flat nonetheless. And I'm so glad that heaven is so close. That odious company can get you there if you push the right button. But why take an elevator? When you could fly a carpet or a winged horse, of course. I'm so glad we took that package tour to Shangri-La. And even though everyone on the bus was late in their 15th or 16th life, remembering the clattering sounds of their walkers on the bus steps will always make me smile. Remember when they ran television programs whose primary focus was to debunk magic? Really? Remember when televisions were only screens you couldn't climb into and play inside? Oh, I have some sunshine and a mason jar I've been saving for today. I've got some dark clouds in a basket when we need to make it rain. I've reserved a star to sit on for dinner tonight. And I've packed a basket with molinary sandwiches and imported wine from China that's so clever it uncorks and drinks itself and then wobbles away unsteady. And we can play that game. Where we make shadow animals from the moonlight with our hands, darkening California with giant hopping bunnies or what might be a chicken. And you can meet me there, flying on a carpet from a heaven that's really there. And I'll be running late so I'll take an elevator up there and I'll bring a blanket and some cards there and the world will spread out wide under our eyes as magic is real and all of those things happen for real and not be an impossibility like me picking up a phone and you would be on the other end because when that could have happened it didn't and now that it can't it won't and the sun gets all self-important and forces the planets into line and stars scream out beyond comprehension into a deep void across time and space and my carpet lies on the floor just lies there going nowhere and when I sit on it neither do I. Most sci-fi movies lie to us. When starships battle in space there are no zapping sounds or explosions. Everything happens in perfect silence. A silent war. I don't know why this sounds more discomfiting to me. When you watch the video of a tragedy with the sound off it seems like less and more of one. Less because it doesn't seem real. More because you feel worse about yourself. Because you feel less about the victims. That said, hearing pain and anguish and seeing it without seeing it might be more powerful. The oral landscape from my bedroom window is all pain and anguish but at times late at night it descends into perfect quietude. One that could explode in a moment in a shouting match or a squealing break crunch traffic wreck on Mission Street quiet in a place that always wants to scream. It's the same as that dreamless sleep that follows a long day of physical labor when the junkies on the sidewalk stop their snore but not like space quiet. There's an underlying ambient hum that I imagine are the combined heartbeats of San Francisco. Anything but synchronized. The sun is sucked clean out. The sun is sucked clean out like a living breathing person reduced to a glass glassy eyed doll. Cape folk. I've rewalled paper in my block where you once could see cracks now you can't. They're still there but you can't see them. I've repopulated soma streets with Walmart greeters who ask for nothing just say hello with a hollowness behind their eyes. I've adjusted the color balance of the sky to a bright marine layer gray so all outdoors is blanched like the set of the Channel 5 news. Not sure what is more shocking. Blood or bloodlessness. There was once a river running in place of 8th Street before all this probably no more than a thick brook and I wonder if the live oaks grew up to the end of what I guess was the 600 block of Mina covered with monarchs and pale blue butterflies and those strange thick California deer would graze the high bank where my second floor bedroom window is. Not sure if it's true but it's been said that the city fathers back in the day named the alleyways after their favorite prostitutes. If I squint hard enough I could see Mina in the light of a kerosene lamp in a sparsely furnished 19th century room as far as alley goes Mina is more prominent than most so I assume that more than one city father succumbed to her charms in my mind she has raven hair and when she moves she could be Asian or Mexican or native or Russian or black in the dim light she can be anything but for sure she's always half something and half something else. Somehow against the circumstance of her times she overcomes the fate of so many other Soma alley girls and outlive those who paid for her services and tried to win her affection with a street sign or not. Maybe her paramours, the city fathers named the street to assuage the guilt they felt for treating her the way they did her blood on her hands like the blood on the needles and hand wipes and sidewalks that litter her namesake where people punch their feet sitting on a street trying to summon something when there is nothing decorating my enveron with snack cracker wrappers and orange plastic needle caps and the river that was a street is again the river but it has no water only blood and it's always in flood drains clogged with bodies killed by a contagion of despair and I can't step outside for fear of being swept upon it and the sky cries blood until it doesn't and that rare rain falls a powerful cataract from above and everything that seemed irredeemable is brightened by heavy clouds and my neighbor hands a roll of garbage bags out through the gate to those outside on the sidewalk to become improvised plastic ponchos and the drains are still clogged but with the leaves of magnolia trees falling from the branches to imitate armadas of boats piloted by incompetent sailors bouncing off each other and wrecking in a pile in a pond caused by the incompetence of the Department of Public Works Mina, oh Mina, the DPW lets you down and the junkies let you down just the city fathers let you down and I know that I've let you down because everything I know about you I've made up past your first name and having known people in the sex trade that's probably fake too but I try to put color in your cheeks and it's sparkling in your eyes and bridge our times before you and me and everything that has been will be wallpapered over and your street, my street, our street becomes Salesforce Place or Uberway and no one walks on it it's only traversed by autonomous vehicles delivering organic avocado toast to phallic high-rises and though avocado toast is delicious my wish is it won't block your memory or chase me away from you I still have things to do clip, clop when a horse goes down the path it goes clip, clop clip, clop, clip so therefore when it goes backwards I guess it has to go bulk, bulk, bulk, bulk because that's how you spell it when you go backwards Frack you and the horse you rode in on all I can say is it's okay if you don't like me but let's leave the horse out of this okay? he may not be the best horse but he's still my horse and that's cold that's just so cold it reminds me of rule number one always wear a warm coat because the world is cold it might be summer but bummer the world is still cold rule number two don't rock around with a gun because you'll shoot someone but probably yourself and you'll think they deserve it but odds are they don't unless you shoot yourself then of course they do rule number three watch your mouth in truth only bad people or horses say what they think good people or horses say what they have to say I say what I think my horse you'd have to ask him bad people also make lists of things other people should do so don't do that if you're counting that's rule number four I ride a horse called hypocrisy it beats all my wild oats and I've thought through every possible scenario and I'm here to say we're screwed I want to take a moment of your time a moment more than the one I took before I carry a garbage can around for that purpose and I've filled it with so many moments I can live seven more lives as long as I spend them in that can part of me smiles manically at other people the other part of me is embarrassed by my face part of me might be brave but generally I listen to the other part part of me talks about myself like somehow that's relevant or important the better part of me talks about my horse my horse hypocrisy likes to drink and gets mad at drunks especially when he's drunk and damn he's drunk a lot my horse thinks he's pretty smart he does everything wrong every time in exquisite epic social failure but yeah, he's smart, ish, I guess my horse learned to walk backwards so now that's pretty much his only direction poke, pilk poke, pilk poke, pilk always back against the traffic and people blow their horns at him but you don't need blinders not to see he just leads with his ass you think that might be awkward or rare you should know it is awkward my other horse is obsessed oppressed paranoid and he's not all that special we've all got one of those but he's even more difficult to ride because he's both oppressed and paranoid he's got two asses pointed out at either end and he tends to kick at everything he's shit all over hypocrisy when is it me hey charlie says he lets back through everything blissfully and I put on my stretchy pants and crazy shiny silk vest and little black helmet and climb aboard as we back through the world poke, pilk, poke and it really feels like we're getting somewhere should I do one more? hi everybody, my name is charlie I'm gonna do one more this is the one I was gonna do later in a leather vest and some leather pants I'm safer too full-sleeved tattoo as the something wet heating mask turns in the mud before him his thick gray beard and his white dude white afro swirl in the wind he raises both arms over his head rolls into the mic and a billion decibels proclaim I reject the offensive and any association with any association that would associate with the likes of me and the thunder clap like a rimshot from heaven how do you see yourself? the question advertising asks is where do you see yourself in X number of years in play with a little playing and some saving yes, your dreams are available are attainable so long as they can be secured with a modest annuity while an annuity modest or no wouldn't hurt dreams often defy spreadsheet calculations align those out the door of people trying to win a billion and a half dollars and I would feel morally superior if I had not just spent two bucks on this table where do you want to be? there's a sport it shows pictures of fans in an arena at that one point in the game when the game is lost they stand with their hands on their head their elbows extended pose the surrender coat and once you know about the surrender coat you can't look at another sporting event and not see it and I'd love to knock it it's kind of easy to mock people who care about something that means nothing but the truth is anyone who cares about anything beyond what they see in the mirror or bank account or what can be considered their parochial realm even if it's just their city their hometown, their childhood or you know, a blue shirt should be beyond mocking if it can only be some I can see old Karl Marx somewhere maybe London at the end of 1848 after all the revolutions he'd prophesized the previous winter were ground wintery nothing he stands in the window of a chiefly rented room looking out at the street his hands on his head his elbows poking out makes you think of a crowd of disciples on what I guess was a terrible Friday standing under a cross on old Gotham baking in the Judean sun we're better sure that at least one of those dudes was rocking a surrender cobra what now Peter Peter is asked whilst Peter tries to figure out how to get his fishing boat back Peter, where do you see yourself in 10 years in 20 it's not that we all go gentle into that midnight I read that the greatest of Napoleon's generals the Field Marshal Ney had such bearing and was so fearless he commanded his own firing squad that said it's possible when that last battle was lost on that field in Belgium made famous by the Abbasar even on his horse even with a sailor in his hand he might have rested his clenched fists upon a flued element I don't know if it wasn't there and whether you believe Jesus personally had a comeback or not you can say definitively his disciples surely did found it a giant world religion and though it ended badly for more than a few of them they crucified Peter upside down Old Karl Marx got to see another round of revolutions fail before he died his resurrection coming at the hands of autocrats who put his face on their terror and though he's probably blameless for the massacres perpetuated in his name he was naive enough to advocate for a dictatorship which surely enabled intellectually at least their execution but in Karl's defense humans don't generally need intellectual cover to oppress other humans there was never a praise in the servant on the mountain Jesus said he's for if they should marry that would somehow gain up the world which would be a bad thing in a Christian sense he advocated for the opposite for who are the meek if not those cows and submission by the strong it's said that every dog has its day and the meek shall inherit the earth and workers you have nothing to lose but your chains you have a world to win let the rain swirl let the lightning crash let the sun and the earth to try try again maybe our books our manifestos our Bible were written hundreds or thousands of years ago maybe they are yet to be written down they swirl the world around us and you can't see them yet but their hair and though we stand today under this sun under these stars with these heart bending disbelief let that searing pain or in the ether it's in the future someone much smarter than me is breathing whose ideas become words that stitch the world together and they may not emerge in my lifetime and they might fail in theirs but everyone who would feel marginalized marginalized from those long disappeared Samaritans through the lottery ticket buying neoproliterians and blue shirts to all those green skin quintu-sexuals oh I know they don't exist yet we're all playing the same game and Darwin and nor God or both has yet to show their hand so all those green skin quintu-sexuals they will all find they all will fit in a world getting warmer as its annual mean temperature goes down and all those generations to come will have to figure out how to solve their own problems because we found a way to sell it now