pop a hip and dance
As the path is layed for you
Feel the dark irony swirl
And spill your coveted secrets
In vague half-meanings
Talk about the unironic pills
And the unironic problems
And smoke your unironic drugs
And drink your unironic liquor
Watch the unironic ironic movies
And talk about it afterwards
I'm your unironic little circles
And smile
unironically
That you were nothing but original

The First World War destroyed anything beautiful that existed within the human spirit
You cannot simply walk away from industrial mass slaughter unaltered
You cannot hide it behind decades later mass slaughters of equal importance
You cannot hide behind getting excited for next mass slaughter
WW1 may have been the force that killed anyone’s feelings of honor or bravery in war
And that’s almost as great a tragedy as all the bloodlines severed
War and violence and conflict will always be with us
It is deep within all animal DNA and no matter how many daisies are put into the barrels of rifles you will never escape it
There is a great tragedy to violence but at times there is a beauty and there is a necessity
When the Soviet forces finally breached the walls of the Führerbunker
Don’t you think they were smiling?
Reality is never black and white
It is shades of tragedy, shame, beauty, and glory

It may be seen as “Eurocentric” of me, among other things, to carry WW1 with this weight
It was not a purely European conflict of course, but the main theater was
Besides, I am descended from Europeans, and some nights when all is silent I wonder if I can hear my ancestors weeping
Or are they screaming?
We as a species have allowed our greatest inheritance to be squandered
Pure wild nature
We have sold it for same Starbucks coffee shop in every college town, Kroger, and corner of New York City
We sold the forests for New York City
Are some sins unforgivable?
In the place of the old growths we build buildings of subjective beauty
Subjective beauty always bows to objective beauty
Yes, there is objective beauty
Buildings that are built in the Brutalist style are subjectively beautiful
Forests, undeveloped fields of flowers, the rushing flow of a river
THESE ARE THINGS OF OBJECTIVE BEAUTY
To argue otherwise makes you a liar or a coward

Unironic nihilists have none of my respect
They simply do not deserve it
If you want to be taken seriously find something greater than yourself
Something outside yourself
Something that came before you, exists above you, and will be there long after you are not
That’s why I chose God and Nature
Some see these as interchangeable
I do not but I’m not here to split hairs
The problem with modern society is we have become ironic nihilists, which is almost as bad
Everything becomes chalked up to subjectivity
We crack jokes about how it’s all meaningless and eventually down the line we believe it
This is a pathetic cope
The meaning of our lives, like the objectively beauty of nature, has been bought or stolen
You were not born to consume product
You were not born to work and make things of cheap plastic
You were not born to enjoy next superhero movie, twice a year, every year, until you die
To our ancestors our lives now must seem like decades long suicide pacts
I want out of this state of unliving
We were born to be physically strong
We were born to create things of beauty
We were born to meet hardships, embrace conflict, overcome them, conquer them become something superior to what you once were
YOU WERE BORN TO BE ALIVE
CREATE THE MEANING IN YOUR LIFE IF YOU HAVE TO
Just please
Don’t be a nihilist

I try to take my multivitamin and multi mineral vitamin every single morning
Maybe a fish oil pill or two throughout the day
I have become consumed with the idea of getting more sun on my skin
I have been consumed with the idea of improving my gut bacteria
I want to talk about these things without sounding like Patrick Bateman
To improve your inner flora it is recommended you replace processed and fried foods with sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt, kefir, or something along those lines
I know sunshine and sauerkraut aren’t going to fix your depression or rid you of your years of trauma
But there’s no shame in trying
On Friday I bought a full 16oz jar of kimchi and proceeded to eat the entire thing in less than 24 hours
I will never apologize
I will never feel shame

I scream all of these things into a bathroom mirror when I am alone
I wrote this poem for myself
I wrote it for all of you
I want out of this soul crushing alienating techno industrial hellscape
I want the nightmare to end but I’m in too deep
If I melt down my cell phone, crash my car into an empty Wendy’s, and make it my moral and ethical duty to take down the power grid, I may get expelled from grad school
I might get arrested
I might just be forgotten
So for sake of legality I cannot endorse looking up how a cheap bandsaw can cut down a cell tower
I do no endorse bringing the technological nightmare to its knees for the good of all living things
I do not endorse arson, even when no one gets hurt
It’s a mean world out there
I only endorse breaking free
Any way you can

Everybody sits in quiet contemplation
Breathing like they want no one else there
If they were a thousand tiny films
Their songs are syncopations.

Long before the scene fades out
You left the cinema, you gave no credit
To roll, nor any role to set it as you said
With that unironic smile,
It wouldn’t matter if you were dead.

You said, you’d rather be unkind
Than to say what’s on your mind
Sizing up the mountain in the room
With that cord wound up
And that knife in your mouth
I know I said I wouldn’t call you out

On it, but you’re a thief
So don’t steal, I can see it in your eyes
You’re a pro
At moving right between lines.

So where was I in your big production?
Just the money shot in all seduction?
Thumbs down and out moving out
We’re all our worst critic, but don’t walk out on the show
I’m unconvinced; this is first of many episodes

Take a good hard look at the million frames
Think of all the things you cast in my name
But in the dream of mine, timeless in birth
It would break your heart like up there in the scene
If you could bear to see it up on screen:
The script isn’t how it was meant to be.

She called me over when her parents left, and invited me over for a date.
Before I was in her room
It was advised to bring some protection.
Latex?

All for her to be done?
————

Latex Gloves.
I pulled out and began scanning my fingers across her room.

At the end of the room :vines.

Vines from trees, flowers emerging through and from. An allergenic smell emitted—carving out the thick toxins as they fell onto the floor like a staircase of crumbling debris.
Like pages of books falling flat onto the floor ill by the plague and far from recovery.

The smell of lavendery-daffodils. Like new laundry, everything was scented in this room, by color and by smell.

No visualization decoded by my eyes all because they were fried.
Red and puffed.

The frequency in the room, making zap-roided sounds.
Electric like all the different shades of blue, a savory sound and a unironic taste.
I would not want to explain because I kept it all to myself.

I marveled at it all and not whatever was in front of me.

I viewed her emotions as inferior to this delight of a room.

Far better than anything sensory she could of course do.

A distraction these walls became
Overwhelming to me was not the best of both worlds.

The only distractions were nothing but this interior design…

We are the light everlasting,
But inside us all are darknesses,
Swirling and festering,
Until released and sprung forth,
With teeth that gnash and bite.

Delicious souls of prosperous brotherhood,
Life and decimated breath
Left bereft the seeds of our creation,
Blood rituals and desperate hope,
Do cling to our lives as faith to the blind.

Unironic apathy led to qualitative disarray,
And into it's kingdom I fell,
Such sweet demise of youthful detachment,
Our laughter just falls away.

Always the Long Hall
Always the thousand pretty and ugly words
               That all just amount to desperation.

On moment you’re young and beautiful and desired and filled with genuine, unironic, honest to God love.

The next you are standing alone,
               bathed in the pale fluorescent light
      
And you are tired.

If there's fifty ways to leave your lover
How come you only mention five or six?
Is that because a magician
Never reveals all of his tricks?

And if we live in the land of a thousand dances
What's with the paucity of description?
I'm starting to think these people
Just forge and deal in fiction

Or at least vast overstatement
Followed by unironic litotes
The limits of the form laid bare
Soon covered by the vagaries

Of broken hearts
George Throughgood
Projected a final score of
Two thousand
I'd like to see him
Name a tenth of them
The mans all mouth and trousers.