No Waking From This

9/11 was the endpoint. The rest is just the fading consciousness of civilization trying like Ambrose Bierce to imagine a different outcome in the instant of final inevitability. Perhaps the dream sparks somewhere in a quasar far far away as everything continues to move further and faster away from everything else.


 The Hubble telescope photos of quasars that quadruple their image because of their gravity look remarkably like Vincent Van Gogh's stars, which never really looked like stars, but something else; at least, than the stars we can see.
The visionary experience can be transmitted in ways we barely comprehend. Our political/cult(ural) fissures are myriad canyons and crevaces that demonstrate the distances between what we know, what we fear, what we suspect, what we can prove, and what, if anything, the pulsating zombietron of humanity cares about it.
For example, when Patti Smith sang "Lenny Bruce was a nigger" one might have understood for the first time the invisible dimension that so many inhabit outside of society.
A little basket of ashes by the fake waterfall, just at the end of the blanket where a nude woman glows in the cool september sun. From her rooftop she felt one of the planes as if it flew through her body, her mind, her soul. She married into this, but was born into what she escaped, and as she watched the flaming black rose of the first impact with an almost orgasmic shudder she wondered, what world was this, what reality?
At the same instant she realized she would never see her husband again she remembered watching Hiroshima Mon Amor sitting next to him at MOMA when he slithered his fingers down her skirt. She dropped the towel over the edge of the building. She remembered her father had said the only ones dreaming are those who escape the horror. He said this in response to her question of what it meant, crater analysis, when he was in Viet Nam. What was crater analysis? What happened to him? What did he do to those people?
She held her grandmother in her arms and felt her spirit pass through her in the last death rattling escape of her breath. Infant's curd of green shit.
There is no waking from this, she whispered, and went back into the building.
Before she got off drugs and met Victor, her favorite dealer often used a phrase she never forgot. "Who's the nigger now?"
A slave can't imagine what is happening to him. A Cambodian goes blind from horror.
Democracy can no longer hide the violence of empire. Western Civilization is coming to an end.
And if there is a next one, perhaps someone will write a song about how fish do have feelings.

The great potential of civilization is largely quashed by regressive power structures. Yes, Nazs built stone circular cells where one man could only stand and then stuffed it with three naked men and watched them go mad. But, on the other hand, the young wermacht soldier at Kalavrita ran and freed a...