Baudelaire's Bunions

A Redefinition of Hell

I draw on whatever aspects of my soul are required to accomplish any task that calls to me.  Once that task has stopped calling, i turn to other tasks that call, drawing on whatever aspects of my soul that are required to accomplish those tasks.  If you get confused—if you expect me to have a heavy soul:  unalterable, fixed, dumb, knowable—whose issue is that?  Isn’t this what you do anyway but slower?  You who change your mind once a decade and view it as a fault!  You who praise diversity in your mouth and shit on it with your other!  You celebrate olympic golds, you paw at the maserati, then accuse me of speed?  You stand-ovate Hamlet then accuse me of wit?  You object to the creationists and assume darwin, then accuse me of adaptability?  You celebrate madonna, then accuse me of … of? … of! … anonymity and poverty?  You practice your yoga, then accuse me of aum?  You blab classlessness then take classes!  Oh you lukewarm camels.  You who are crucified on time.  You who require a stage for intimacy.  Have you not heard of the dance?  Would you go to the hell mister wilde created for you?  Ah, dear wombats, you are already there.

No

I’m not taking the burden of 40 years of bad management.  I’m not taking the burden of three millennia of stupid men or the women who throw that burden at me to suit their own stupidities.  I’m not taking the burden of christianity’s puerility or leslie who in kindergarten called me toothpick.  I’m not taking the burden of all those who are too scared to adapt, who have ossified psyches, who talk about god or peace or knowledge or anything as if they haven’t almost died from it, who call fear love, who haven’t sweat entire nothingnesses over a misplaced elastic, who cover their lust for money and comfort—what spiritual insecurity!—with rhetorics of virtue paid for by others by their tongues and their brains and the very pit of their love and their lives … you know … their lives.  I’m not taking the burden of your lack of voice and the burden of whoever and everyone who gave it to you, including me, i’m not taking the burden of myself.  The 51 years of bad management and whoever wrote the training manual for me or you or the dna we’re all happily mapping&living (what’s the difference?), like michelin or nat’lgeog or google-in-your-bedroom.  Easy blood, i call it.  What we do in our cloudy cage.  Living in the womb of something else.  That whipping destiny.  The face that’s waiting in the mirror.  Freedom.  Sing it, liar.  Sing it to the end.