Blog Poetry Revisited

Letter to Becky G

(Partially by Trillion.b715_)

   I need the gym for music. I need recovery. I want to open a new gym, call it: Trillion the G-MAN's Workout Shop, Built-in Pool. For Money. I want to become a positive celebrity. Enjoy the pool and land weights, then back to the pool. I really want to own. Work out. Get my right leg back and a hip.

   You're a good luck woman, someone to fall in love with for real. We'll love in the same bedroom together, just like the beautiful islands, beautiful sandy environments, waves, rolling under your feet, fresh ocean water. Get my abs back. Get my push ups. Get a body champ. I want a mom who knows the weights.

  I take an excavator bucket made out of iron and teeth. I gig through, put in a new pool. Mom and family land. I dig it myself. Make our own food. We eat five meals of fish. Raise children into respectful adults. Be their own. We meet up. COntinue enjoying the new music. Get a job, to go along with the gym. Get a new Mercedez with dub spinners. Have a pool for it.

   Have a list of stretches. Learn about energy drinks. Get better. Leave those crutches alone. Get my mobility back. Mix with martial arts. Get back in shape for the new rap music put out there. Buy a Polaris Slingshot. Compare auto-cycles. Leave my driveable RV. 

   Did you hear about my plan? Miami. Italy. Nieman Marcus. New Espo hat, new designs, new bow-tie. New Gucci. Whole collections of hightop buckle. Low top too. Duffel bags of leather. I made it for my gym and my job, but also for you. Write back to me. Make me a happy man who is athletic. My malpractice lawsuit check will come, and we can make a trip. In the water, you'll see I'm a man who deserves a pool.

Ball Lightning 

(Partially by DANAE 123)

I HAVE SEEN BALL LIGHTNING

MY MOTHER WAS THERE

ON THE PHONE

AND THERE WAS A LOUD BANG

(THERE WAS A SMALL STORM)

AT THE TIME I WAS SMALL

I WAS PRETENDING SOME

OF MY ROCKS WERE ARMY GUYS

WHO HAD DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS

THREE DAYS HAD PASSED

SINCE THEY LEFT THE CHECKPOINT

ONE GUY EVEN HAD A KNIFE

IN HIS HEAD HE KEPT FIGHTING

HE WAS ACTUALLY BETTER

AT FIGHTING NOW BECAUSE

HE WAS PART WEAPON

THERE WAS A LOUD HISS

ON THE PHONE MY MOTHER WAS

HOLDING IN THE OTHER ROOM

AND MY MOTHER YELPED

AND PULLED IT AWAY REAL FAST

IT APPEARED TO EMERGE

FROM THE SPEAKER END

AS A FUZZY ORANGE MOVER

I'D CALL A SPARKLER KIND

OF BALL-SHAPED FLASH

THAT ROLLED AND BOUNCED

TO THE WALL AND LEFT A SCORCH

MARK SMALL LIKE THE STORM

MY MOTHER'S EAR WAS SLIGHTLY

BURNED ON THE TOP

AND THE SKIN SLOUGHED OFF

I REMEMBER SHE WAS ILL

SOME AFTER NOT TOO SERIOUS,

BUT I THINK SHE VOMITED

IT WAS VERY QUICK

A FEW SECONDS OR SO

AND IT WAS GONE I WONDER

IF THAT'S WHAT MADE HER

DIFFERENT BECAUSE WE WERE ALONE

FOR A WHILE PEOPLE

CHANGE THEY GET FILLED

UP WITH A DISASTER LIKE THAT

A LADY FARMER HAD TO

FLEE THE PRESS SHE GOT

HIT BY A SMALL METEOR

MY MOTHER WAS MORE LONELY

THE SMALL SCORCH WOULDN'T

CLEAN OFF WHEN I WALKED

BY I'D PRESS MY TONGUE UP TO

THE SPIRAL ON MY MOUTH'S ROOF
AND REMEMBER BUT WE NEVER SAW
BALL LIGHTNING AGAIN

10 Ways Airports Are Secretly Manipulating You

When you visit the airport for travel, it's easy to feel like you're in charge: you decided to go somewhere, you're probably the one moving your body, and you can make your own choices about how you'll spend your time while you're visiting. However, this feeling of autonomy is not completely correct, as nearly every aspect of airports is actually designed to manage your actions in a predictable way. The A.I. that writes our travel blog has compiled a list of the common design tricks airports use to influence unwitting travelers, so the next time you're in an airport you can have a better sense of how you're being influenced by clever commercial design.

1. Stairs: Some airports have areas where moving visitors can cross between vertical levels through a rising pathway made up of many graduated smaller floors. These jagged ramps allow arm-free travel in an upward or downward direction, and the electronic version even does all of the moving for you! Just remember to take a moment before using stairs to consider if you need to be in a different place, and if stairs are the best way to get there. Stairs are built on purpose, to move people vertically, which is not necessarily your goal.

2. Chairs: By offering a simple way to focus your weight onto your ass, these comfortable objects greatly effect the places people choose to sit. Chairs can also hold bags, feet, even trash. While would be convenient to have these essential objects in a thick scatter across all areas, airports have learned over time to put chairs in groups near things they want you to use, like food and gates. You may have also noticed chairs are strategically placed to the side of where people walk.

3. Windows: When you can see outside of the airport while personally remaining inside, you're probably looking through one of these devices (though you may not even realize it!). Translucent panels that provide visual information, windows are often mistaken for computers, but are in reality holes in walls that allow observers to see the world. While it's commonly thought by the unobservant that airports are full of windows by accident, these visual portals are actually arranged in a purposeful way by the planners of the building to control what outside is visible, while concealing the temperature of weather and the feel of its air. Remember, when you're looking through a window, someone wanted you to look there.

4. Phones: There in your pocket, I mean hand, that's what you like to use! A phone? If you have one, I bet you've taken it to the airport. Airports like to use phones to make you docile and bored, even though you probably would be anyway. Phones also make people think they're safe, as if they could text their way out of a flaming jet diving towards oblivion. Smart travelers will complain about using their phones too much, and make sure the phones are fully charged before they go to the airport.

5. Lines: Ever wondered why there's a person up ahead with their back to you, preventing you from moving forward quickly? You may be in a line, a common business trick at airports that keeps travelers from getting what they want through a common practice called waiting. Lines also encourage meaninglessness and the collapse of individual will. It's common to find yourself wishing you could have what you wanted, but try to remember, that stranger blocking you is probably blocked by their own person using the line in front of them! Lines are a constant hazard to the airport traveler, and it's easy to find yourself behind a mannequin or following someone home. That's when a smart traveler knows they've lost.

6. Bathrooms: Visitors to the airport often notice that most of the pooping and peeing gets done in a concentrated area. That's because airports have installed hotspots for voiding waste from the human body. These concentrated expulsion zones have greatly reduced death and disease, and provide visitors with another place to stare at their phones. By putting up signs with pictures of people, travelers are often divided into two categories for these centralized disposal rooms: persons shaped like a triangle, and persons who are not.

7. Time: When you got your ticket, you may have noticed some numbers on it. Some of those numbers demarcate a point during the day or night when a captain is willing to take you on their plane. How do you know you'll be there to get on the plane? You don't! Most travelers try to guarantee their presence at the right point of this ongoing dimension of experience by calling their nephew, yelling at strangers, or setting their clocks to the same number as the computer.

8. Class: You may notice at some point that there are different experiences you can have at the airport. Different passengers end up in different lines and seats than others, and some of those lines and seats are definitely the better ones. This is a reflection of an organizing system called class, which is used to understand wealth. Class is a great way to consolidate comforts and privileges for a smaller group of people than everybody. In order to take advantage of class, you may want to study economics so you can figure out which class you belong to. After that, it's important to find out who your enemies are, and battle them.

9. Nation-States: Did you know war has been illegal since 1928? This was decided by institutions called countries, through which powerful aliens in disguise coerce masses of people into pretending to follow rules. While you may not have been aware of these vast entities, it is almost guaranteed one of them has claimed you, and probably wants some money in the mail. This might explain why you get calls from strangers, why some food is weird, or why you've been having trouble getting to a particular airport.

10. Ego: Many airport visitors carry around ideas of free will, and consider themselves to be selecting a route through the choices they make. Many travelers think they are in control, but if you pay attention, it's clear this is not so. Most of our outcomes have been decided based on our location, upbringing, and what year it is. Only an ambitious few can transcend the traps and lures of the common path, and rise above to truly decide their own destiny. If you think you're strong enough, break free from this cage of mediocrity and join us... in the real world!

The Purge 7: The Terror of Paw-Paw

     The last bottle of the night is brashly opened, and somehow Paw-Paw and I are the only ones left to finish it off in the kitchen of his cozy home. It's the old man's 91^st birthday, and the whole family has gone home or to sleep after a surprisingly raucous event. I am full of a love and admiration for my family's commanding patriarch, who I've never seen so brazenly happy and drunk. Paw-Paw is known for his harsh reserve, but tonight he showed a loving openness that surprised everyone, probably my father most of all. Paw-Paw even shared a few stories, revealing new glimpses of the man so famously austere that it's long been a family joke. Impressed with this new side of him, and fortified with a night of heavy consumption, I finally ask him about the part of his life that has always been a mystery. “Paw-Paw,” I say:“What was it like, escaping the revolution? How did you make it out alive?” He doesn't push the question away. Instead, he seems to take a long, sorrowful gaze into the past, and then speaks in a low, trembling voice, allowing himself to return to that faraway land, reliving the events that changed his life forever.

     “It was heavy vendetta season and all the internet teenagers had unboxed their grudges. An intersectional signal came down through secret astrology channels one grim black history month, and the Second Civil War began overnight like an infidel Christmas. Antifa super-soldiers hopped up on hormone therapy went door-to-door distributing male birth control and zines full of mean illustrations of police. The sky glowed like a bell hooks young adult novel about natural hair as male bathrooms were neutralized and white nationalists were forced to invest in public education. The welfare hegemony invaded every household, decimating our prisoner population down to North Korean levels and bankrupting the mom-and-pop payday loan industry. Afro-futurist neo-soul oozed out of music-sharing apps for an army of voluntary eunuchs who combed rural areas, annulling marriages and confiscating dip tobacco. Eager terrorists streamed through open borders and flooded the restaurant industry, driving hot dog shops and ranch dressing factories into the sea. Planned Parenthood militias dripping in almond milk verbally forced people to correct their pronouns and bargain with unions. Newly treated drug addicts and veterans with mental health issues roamed public housing lucidly, openly discussing reparations for slavery and voting rights for U.S. territories.

     In the stunned days of the after-shock, a new cultural ministry oversaw the dissolution of valuable internet debate that had previously bloomed in YouTube comment sections and multiplayer online games. Judges were replaced by legalized sex workers who banned abstinence-only education and punished the senders of unsolicited dick pics with mandatory Gender Studies degrees. Our mass surveillance system was converted overnight into a voluntary live-cam network of ethical porn.

     The history books were scrubbed clean of white contributions to Southern cooking and hip hop, and a new national anthem was introduced: a mashup of smug Rachel Maddow slam poetry to a chorus of overly-supportive drag show toasting. Petroleum languished in abandonment underneath animal sanctuaries and our fast food infrastructure was mowed down to make way for a national public transit system. The market was chained to feelings and sci-fi novels were mandated to involve themes of nature conservation and diversity. Children of the rich could no longer inherit more than a million dollars apiece.

     I was one of the legion of sad, under-appreciated men driven savagely into therapy and listening skills reeducation camps by a cabal of spontaneous street-theater agitators. We were held in a massive earthship biotecture facility and served vegan meals and homemade tinctures. I saw my friends and neighbors lined up against symbolic walls and made to repeat 'climate change is man-made' before being shot full of vaccines and de-gentrifying agents. At night, trembling in our hammocks, we could hear the rustle of giant homemade puppets labeled with obvious, overwrought metaphors. Each day sex nerds with anime hair and pretentious glasses reviewed the facility to select prisoners of war for their polycules.

     I escaped during an engrossing indigenous history lecture and fled into the foothills, my gender identity barely intact and a few meager possessions wrapped in a Confederate flag. I was fortunate enough to find a small border village with a Catholic church, and they put me in touch with allies that still existed for people like me. The church had access to an old system of escape routes they had established in the 1940's, through which I was smuggled into South America and granted asylum in compliance with international law. Eventually I immigrated here and met your Mee-Maw. But that's another story. For now, just know I thank God every day for being able to escape that hell and make a new life.”

     I still think of my Paw-Paw's story when I have to work an extra triple shift as an enforcer in the uranium mines or donate more bone marrow to the children of the God-King . When I see my fellow countrymen suggest institutional robbery of our most important castes, or insult our economic system with senseless controls, I wonder if they've lost sight of history. When agitators call eating a “right” or ask about punishing sodomy with a penalty weaker than death, I wonder if they have any idea what it's really like to live in the less fortunate parts of the world. This country may not be perfect, but it gives us innumerable freedoms which we seem to take for granted without a second thought. We must never lose track of the fragility of liberty we hold so dear, or how quickly a state can turn rotten and deranged. I know my Paw-Paw never did.