plateau_connector
Greenlighter
- Joined
- Jun 19, 2010
- Messages
- 19
I grew up in the American heartland full of stupid hate for what I saw around me. The hypocrisy, the insincerity and self-destruction was so obvious. I could talk about all of the things I loved then, but I can't think of anything more dishonest. There is nothing I want to read less, than positivism, learned in the homogenous American suburbs, when 87% of the rest of the population of the planet is starving to death buried waste deep in our exported garbage. That may be an exaggeration but through the eye of a pissed off, alienated, teenager the whole world is sometimes reduced to a caricature. During a time in American history when materialism was idealized more than any other before or since, a caricature sufficed to capture every crooked brush stroke.
The U.S .Hardcore movement was honest in the barest sense. Within, the scene welling up from the fringes, came fleeting nights of autonomy where the elbow of a complete stranger caught in the face resulted in tight friendships not despite, but because. It was the reactionary, artistic, reply to the worming corruption of the establishment capitalist shits; parents, police, politician, Nazis in braces, Nazi in suits, hair metal douche bags, Tipper Gore, jocks in GIANT pickup trucks, sexism, racism, corporations pissing dioxin into water tables, CIA selling crack while the DEA rounded up the dark skinned competition to populate prisons like people farms, Ollie North, Honduras, sending arms to Afghanistan with a wink and nudge implying the favor owed and years later no jaw attached to any cranium that contained a functioning brain hung agape as that favor was repaid. The least of the rotten shit that comprised the 1980's would have sufficed to raise a proper counter culture but Reagan raised an army against himself.
I grew up in the American heartland and realized at a young age human worth was measured on football fields and represented by credit scores, but I could stand in the middle of my street with closed eyes and visualize all points of connection. From street to street these grids of angular geometries fanning out from synthetic suburban constructions, pin-balling through mysterious cities whose molecules were lit with hidden dangers, winding eventually to meet each possibility and each dwindling road ends where an ocean begins, offering yet another infinite possibility.
So I left, as soon as I could to make some of those imagined threads a reality and each time I arrived I didn't mind. I didn't mind that three generations had all pissed in the same dark street corner that for seven years no one had bothered to spray down, I didn't mind the discarded needles, the littered religious tracts, rip off artist transvestite junkie prostitutes, the looted remnants of sixties riots, the high school jock turned fascist cop, the overpowering stench of two hundred bodies crammed into one train car or the sex freaks riding along just to be jostled against them. I didn't mind and I wasn't possessed by a need to fix any of it because it was perfect. It was my America, the one I half imagined back on Bell Avenue, Sandusky, Ohio, 1989.
I have spent years tromping around in this America, observing, reading, writing, growing into something that American needs more of, something that it cannot buy or sell, snort or shoot, double down on, or fuck until it shoots hundred dollar bills on its red white and blue bed sheet. I grew into something it does not want and cannot easily be rid of. I am a son of the great American Heartland and I am waiting like a clot in the current for my moment to dislodge.
This is that moment and these are my poems. My patriotic embolism poems.
The U.S .Hardcore movement was honest in the barest sense. Within, the scene welling up from the fringes, came fleeting nights of autonomy where the elbow of a complete stranger caught in the face resulted in tight friendships not despite, but because. It was the reactionary, artistic, reply to the worming corruption of the establishment capitalist shits; parents, police, politician, Nazis in braces, Nazi in suits, hair metal douche bags, Tipper Gore, jocks in GIANT pickup trucks, sexism, racism, corporations pissing dioxin into water tables, CIA selling crack while the DEA rounded up the dark skinned competition to populate prisons like people farms, Ollie North, Honduras, sending arms to Afghanistan with a wink and nudge implying the favor owed and years later no jaw attached to any cranium that contained a functioning brain hung agape as that favor was repaid. The least of the rotten shit that comprised the 1980's would have sufficed to raise a proper counter culture but Reagan raised an army against himself.
I grew up in the American heartland and realized at a young age human worth was measured on football fields and represented by credit scores, but I could stand in the middle of my street with closed eyes and visualize all points of connection. From street to street these grids of angular geometries fanning out from synthetic suburban constructions, pin-balling through mysterious cities whose molecules were lit with hidden dangers, winding eventually to meet each possibility and each dwindling road ends where an ocean begins, offering yet another infinite possibility.
So I left, as soon as I could to make some of those imagined threads a reality and each time I arrived I didn't mind. I didn't mind that three generations had all pissed in the same dark street corner that for seven years no one had bothered to spray down, I didn't mind the discarded needles, the littered religious tracts, rip off artist transvestite junkie prostitutes, the looted remnants of sixties riots, the high school jock turned fascist cop, the overpowering stench of two hundred bodies crammed into one train car or the sex freaks riding along just to be jostled against them. I didn't mind and I wasn't possessed by a need to fix any of it because it was perfect. It was my America, the one I half imagined back on Bell Avenue, Sandusky, Ohio, 1989.
I have spent years tromping around in this America, observing, reading, writing, growing into something that American needs more of, something that it cannot buy or sell, snort or shoot, double down on, or fuck until it shoots hundred dollar bills on its red white and blue bed sheet. I grew into something it does not want and cannot easily be rid of. I am a son of the great American Heartland and I am waiting like a clot in the current for my moment to dislodge.
This is that moment and these are my poems. My patriotic embolism poems.
