FACE OF THE AUGHTIES
I
So many faces to choose from;
the face of your automated robot confessor
the face on your tri-hex computer card
the face tucked under apocalyptic headlines
the allergic face streaming with pollen tears.
To whom does the new face apply?
The shotgun whisperer?
The hero playing the automatic weapon solo?
The hero who can’t come back without a lobotomy?
The hero with his killer instinct intact?
The background smolders in the afterglow of demolition.
There is widespread belief in violent angels
who appear as finely pixilated video gods
in an abstract blizzard of compressed sound
coming from commonplace fantasy machines.
Welcome, nice of you to enter hero land,
but you would not enjoy being the real thing.
This exclusive clubhouse cannot be found
on the avenues of normal society. All who belong
maintain a veiled existence, clinging to the shadows.
The arcade drums are your people, vid shooter,
Through them we see your true heart, the flower
that remains while the angry season withers.
Each vapor huffing god has his wintry truth
and every beach eroding Venus has her warmth.
Game piece face, participating looks,
willing contestant, your breath is shallow.
You live only partially, speak only the language
of fate and weirdness with a special link to life
which only you can live fully, which makes
your doom all the more certain. You move forward
with an urge as pure as your itch, like an old tulip
slightly hunched, one petal ready to drift, like
someone you love, but can only hope to find.
II
Zero age face, you go through the painful process
of learning only what you need, leaving the rest
to pure chance reckoning and god-whacked belief.
What face do you put on your stainless chronology?
What blurred face emerges with large dark eyes?
Can we see the injury of ripped away conventions,
your wounded civility readjusted to neon street-life?
Do we know your instant pawnshop decisions,
the legend of Laundromat loyalties, phone booth
arrangements, cafe casual consent, dead click
eyeholes of perilous partners masking radar?
You want the water cooler of eternal pilsner,
that happily ever after-shave, milk and honey-buns.
You will clone new eyes, speak new voices,
invent new logic from a logic no one understands.
You will sit with Death and The Dark like old friends
discussing which virtual program best relieves
pangs of treacherous willpower and desire.
If you’re going to be quasi-human, you must be
transparent, so machines can read you,
feed on your pizza dreams and all that dark musical
cyber neurosis that no one wants to hear but you.
Take these New age beast-cloned neurons,
fifth cow revealed, neither lean nor fat,
and join the aughties in hamburger-speak,
run with vocative dudes like, you know, vocative dudes,
the nightmare arcade of digits is coming for you,
needing your impulsive input signals
wanting all your buying power, fingering
your interpersonal wallet silk, your eye scans,
voice prints and thumbprint swirls heaving
in a tempest of needs, tsunami of desire
lightning bolts of momentous down-payment.
Thought-rebels exist, dare to exert underground
pressure on major beliefs, major credit orgs
major medical plans, majordomos in doorways,
take major pains instead of credit, script or gratuity.
Sometimes the minor mode of being is better
than being like all the others fearing the free-zone.
III
The dead calm abandoned hood has its perks,
its psycho-Mediterranean inspired activities,
obsessed with pain, oblivion, sex and spirituality.
Temporary exit doors line this kind of hell,
reek with opiate fumes and stale fermentation.
For a price you can have your brain removed
in order to cure a soul paralyzed by sadness.
Proudly display your glowing pestilent sores,
piercing holes revealing the lethal effects of peonage,
everything you let the replicating machines
do for you, substitute in your name, Xerox monkeys,
facing an age that lives to see its age reversed.
ŠJimmy Warner Design, 2001