parasite

You can't sell your shit on the sidewalk dude. You're being impolite. This sidewalk is public, it belongs to each of us, people need to walk by. I just nearly tripped over the outdoor display from the shoe boutique as I squeezed between two sales racks on the corner of Forever 21 to get here and tell you that your wire-wrap jewelry cannot be sprawled all over the ground like some tweaker tomfoolery. It's bad for business and America Loves Small Business so get the fuck out. If you want to share art do it the legal way. Use a small loan from your parents to make a brand. Have you considered copy-writing the way you twist and knotted that gold chain locket? That's the American Dream, turn abstract concepts into concrete properties and then dis-assemble the process to disempower the workers so you can mass produce them in Bangladesh until it makes you enough for jewelry stores to display on their outside racks. Then you can afford to live here.

I did it, why is it so hard for everybody else? I came here in 1972 with a skateboard and backpack and earned every cent of my $300 college tuition, with enough left over to buy a mansion by waiting tables, serving fish and fried onions for three summers. And now I can't walk down the street without everybody asking for something even though it's become easier than ever to make your fortune. Just start a non-profit organization to use that as a tax haven, then hire a bunch of college kids to hit the streets asking for money. Not five dollars for a bottle of liquor, you amateur, thirty five dollars every month for the rest of their lives through membership fees. They can't stop you because it's freedom of speech. This is America, you have a right to spend money however you please. You can spend it on drugs, rent, debt, courts, just start making somebody else some fucking money or I'm calling the cops because I'm trained to feel sick in my gut at the sight of anyone with-holding from the parasites.

Pussy's on strike

"Pussy's on strike"

A friend told me, half in jest with partial self-awareness, he wasn't ignorant but he wasn't ignorant to his own ignorance.

He was blind but he knew there were things he couldn't see. He talked about male privilege ironically. He said these days you're committing sexual harassment just by giving a woman a compliment, and even he was probably guilty of being a misogynistic piece of shit.

But I feel like maybe you could change, I don't know, maybe I could explain.

You think pussy's on strike because you don't see what happens when you leave your friends in the shadows alone with that pussy.

She doesn't tell you because the last time it happened they didn't believe her, they told her it's not a big deal.

Just let it go, they told her. Try to co-exist with someone who moments ago tried to make you their meal.

You think pussy can't take a compliment because you didn't meet the guy that day that followed that pussy around for forty five minutes just trying to be nice to her. But I get it, why should you be blamed for that weirdo? After all, you aren't a threat to the pussy, at least not necessarily. You just haven't given the pussy any reason to think otherwise.

You're right though, you're not that weirdo, and this isn't about you.

You think the pussy is striking? No sweetie, the pussy is charging like a bull and it will trample right over that china-shop manhood, pissed you've been prodding it with a stick to watch it twitch.

Spent so long calling it an object you confused it for one, you forgot the pussy had a name, and the pussy had a voice, and the pussy is using it to roar and scream, and the matador is naked, red cape wind blown and flailing in the sun. Glass soldier, still standing proud for each of the knives it dug into pussy's backside, belt notches to remind the brittle boy he's better than the people he treats like cattle but he's too blind to notice the slaughterhouse is loose

The pussy's not on strike, the pussy's stampeding. They ain't at work, you asshole, they're fighting for their lives. This ain't a competition, this is justice. The pussy coming so run, now, little glass figurine. Run.

Blog name change incoming

The name of this blog will be changing since Kip is Dead. Reborn, the new name will be Krip2Knight.Blogspot.com. Yay.

Carry the Fire 1

Forty-thousand-year storms are hitting every weekend, the northwest is burning and dead trees mixed with rain makes mudslides and I don't know how I feel about the future right now. I wonder if I'm using the time I have left well enough. Am I living up to the privilege of breathing? Existing in the best possible place and time, queens and kings dancing on a playing-card ballroom? And I wonder if tomorrow I'll still have power, if I'll have food and water or if it'll be me on CNN filmed crossing rivers and borders with nothing to go back to.

I say please not California, please not my house, my family, my friends, my people. Please not me. I carry a lighter but I don't smoke cigarettes unless it's raining. I'm afraid to look into the future but I do, I look at it, and I say I don't know what's coming tomorrow but I'm going to survive you. I know people say humanity is a failed race that doesn't deserve to make it. We boiled our own pot time to fry in it, but I say human beings are portals to another dimension. We can dream of something different and then make it that way. Our species is a gift to this universe and we shouldn't surrender it. Our consciousness is a spiral and from it comes choices, feelings, love, attachment, loss, grief, touch, connection, trust.

So throw that away, go ahead, I don't give a shit, but I'm going to keep it, I'm going to look into the future and say God I will survive you because it's not too late. But the longer we wait the harder we gotta work. We ain't getting raptured but we can bring the party right here by dreaming of something different and then making it that way. That kingdom of love is waiting for us to build it. So why are we taking up air conditioning and every gift from our ancestors if we aren't going to carry that fire and dream of a better future?

I'm mother earth's child and I've pissed her off but she ain't kicked me out yet. And it's not too late. I'm still breathing so it's not too late. All we have to do is fulfill our purpose. All we have to do is survive. All we have to do is dream of something different. All we gotta do is make noise. I don't smoke cigarettes unless it's raining but if a flood comes, and we're on the boat together expect me to light one because we may need to make fire.

Speak then Think

I think before I speak I can't surprise myself. I speak before I think, it may make you hate me but at least that way my speech is even freer than my mind, which is tainted by... shit I can't think of how to put it. Some really eloquent, profound, visceral, overly detailed, decorative to the point of redundancy, tautological repetition, bells and whistles, this description of... shit like a mind-cage-thing where you have to be careful how you put shit or else people will hate you forever. There's 7 billion people, no one has time to give second chances so think before you speak, think enough to paralyze you, that way you won't fuck up and do something you regret. That's the best lesson I've never learned.

Stuck

I get stuck on things. Hypnotized. Captivated by change when I can notice it happening. Rippling fires take my attention and pin it on the shift from a log to a coal to a pile of ash. I get stuck on that, I get stuck on river currents, tumbling tension pockets weaving in and out as obstacles force the water to adapt this meandering wiggle-walk to most effectively reach each drop's destination and yeah, the molecule will meet the ocean and then evaporate and come back and it may take the same downhill slide next time, or pick a different path, and it will participate in that wiggling dance for eternity, trapped by its own nature, but it will never dance the same way twice because originality is as important to the water molecule as the poet. It gets bored doing the same thing all the time, and it's just as ashamed as I am to paraphrase Alan Watts rather than concoct its own wisdom but we both avoided plagiarism and that's what counts. You find a rhyme scheme, you stick to a rhythm, then break it for a tangent and remember that not every word has to rhyme at the end of the sphelecum.

I get stuck on this. I get stuck on the way the ocean waves keep track of the world's pulse. Earth's heart monitor is the captured attention spans of a hundred million beach bums listening to a slow rock rhythm. Somehow we all know what's going to happen next even though we missed the ocean's beginning and the first season isn't even streaming on netflix. We fill in the missing pieces. It probably went something like “Ghhhhhrrrrrrrrr..... Ghhhhrrrrrrrrr”

 I get stuck on that. I get stuck on songs I've never heard before that sound so familiar I swear my parents must have played them in my crib, shit that came out in 2010. I get stuck wishing I already knew the words and simultaneously finding out I've been singing them wrong. It's not like anybody making that music knew what they were doing, it's not like the lyrics they wrote are more correct than the ones I made up. Every pair of ears is a remix. I'm sorry if I didn't understand your message, dead artist. But if it helps, no one understands me either, and I feel like I understand a part of you that you didn't even acknowledge. A part of you I likely projected to delude myself into thinking a stranger shared my experience because it just so happens to make life easier, just like it makes life easier for me to tell myself I'm a good person. What even is that? It's so abstract but god dammit my cognition glued to the concept.

I get stuck on that. I get stuck on the way your face looked that night when I told you how I felt about you. I get stuck knowing it doesn't matter if we get married and grow to hate each other or merely stalk one another on Facebook and secretly wonder what might have been, nothing can bring back the particular shade of moonlight that danced upon your skin. It's not the way your body ages and accumulates wrinkle, or how our feelings went from butterflies in our bellies to cocoon shields and caterpillar poison, it's just the way I can never tell you how I feel for the first time again. You can never hear one of my poems again yet the last time I tried it was ruined, I made a mistake.

I get stuck on that. I get stuck on novelty. I get stuck on tasting the moment and finding the flavor that fools me best into thinking I'm really alive. Turns out you can't get it from a cup, through a straw, you have to stick your mouth straight under the slurpee machine and pull the lever. Turns out feeling alive is fucking messy and against company policy and you'll piss of the people that work here because they secretly wish they could do the same. And then they get mad at themselves but because we're all one, they confuse who they're pissed at and take it out on the "crazy person." Well fuck your cardboard cup full of lies, I'm sick of tasting plastic every time I drink from the chalice of life. You'll have to grab me by the feet and drag me away from the authenticity excreting from life's teet, I'm here to feel alive. I will not be stuck, hypnotized. I will not make all my words harmonize. Rivers would be boring if they were all straight lines. People would be boring if they accomplished all their dreams. I want to see that coal ignite. I want to see how it glows. The weather's cold tonight and I don't draw an ounce of warmth or comfort from either untouched logs, or their perfect finished products. To me, perfection is an ash-clump. Give me process. Give me practice. This time I promise not to give up halfway through under the weight of my mistakes.

Rejection

Rejection is hard, but do you know what really sucks? To be haunted by flashes of a life you could have had with someone you never even made a move on. I'd rather be a mistake maker than a doubt prisoner. Give me the kind of burn that hurts but stops when its over, I've spent too long dealing with the other; the kind that makes you numb, digs under your skin and goes after your lymphatic system. Gangrene vaining its way up your psyche, parasites made out of "what if," the virus proliferating as you continue to ignore the problem. You're fine. Everything is fine. It's just regular, old, existential dread. Everybody gets it, we all just ignore it. No one got to be the perfect version they imagined when they were kids. It's okay if you're not enough.

Fuck that, drop the china, make it shatter. Flood the aisles, craft disaster. At least if you're the one making the chaos then they can't take it from you.