welcome to the tender embrace of a broken-hearted sex doll

welcome to the siren song playing from an elevator speaker in the rubble of a temple to 20th-century vice

welcome to the smashed eyes on the doorway of the poets’ whorehouse

welcome to the jukebox of a thousand failed contracts

welcome to the killing floor where all the livestock are frantically dipping their doomed cloven hooves in black ink

to the lovers who’s tattoos don’t suit them

to a million corks from the same wine bottle and their ill-fated filters and the same lines written over and over and the ritualistic dance of new movements that’ll go on long after our nephews have died in foreign war

to the crazed inmates of a religious revival camp

to a world that looks like a simulation and a simulation that looks like the world

to people who dance capoeira in hell without flames

to hastily written futures on the stamp page of a passport

i doubleturned my lucky cigarette and now Lady Fortuna is hiding from me and i can’t seem to goad her out. but maybe she’ll be there, in the loose bits of tobacco, when the pack’s empty and out to the landfill

we come not to save the desolated body of the world but to writhe rapturously as a gaggle of maggots sufficient for the blood-dimmed tide of modernity

these are the mad ravings of neil cassady’s orphaned grandchildren

this is a broken-down convertible careening at a hundred miles an hour toward the sun

this is the dirt in the pots that will hold up our deathbeds in foreign lands

this is a pack of snarling salivating dogs who in the reflection of a polluted lake mistook themselves for wolves

this is a tide of drowning revolutionaries in the middle of the gulf of mexico who couldn’t find a vessel to mutiny

this is a group of colorblind traffic specialists frantically waving the wrong flags

this is a pretty girl ashing a heart-shaped burn into your only left arm

this is a group of young mastodons somewhere between poets and writers who find it very hard to name things

welcome to The *screaming, lucid, vivid, old-and-new-and-no-wave,

beatific, helplessly quixotic, aortic, disillusioned, impartial,

surreal, not-real-enough, bleeding and beating (as in a heart),

abject, wandering, belligerently well-mannered,

plastically macrocosmic, subliminal, irreverent, irrelevant,

anachronistic, unevenly tempered (as in a blade),

inexorable, palpitating, wounded, remembered and drawn in halves and quarters,

forgotten, flailing, martyred, black and white oceanic Burlesque.