It was the ants of times,

Tw’ants the worst of times.

Whence I found myself

An ant of fourteen stones

Serving in Her Royal service

Our queen Britanttiny.

I, Sir Mark Twant,

Humble narrator,

Was napping uponce a stone,

Dreaming of the queen mother,

Pinning me, a proud Read Ant Badge,

Whence suddenly a sound,

Did bring me to guard.

Twas a sneaky trail of the enemy!

Tw’ants were trying sneak into the camp!

“BLACK ANTS! BLACK ANTS!”

I did cry at the toppest of my larnyx.

And I, Mark Twant stood ready,

But having expected to awaken my brothers

I was, as it were, too late.

The black ants must have taken me,

For I am a prisoner still.

2

And within these dirt walls,

I do swear that they are bugging me.

For I forget even good antiquette,

For the black enemy do feed me

And allow even these meager

Transmissions to my queen mother.

But Oh blessed Britanttiny!

Do show mercy and free,

Your servant,

Sir Mark Twant,

From my abysmal state

Away from your service!

there’s no reason

to talk about it or even think about it

Certainly I SHOULD NOT be writing about it

You have your happiness

I chase my dragons…………..

(with broken pitchforks)

“Let’s save each other….”

you once said

now saved for what?

saved for our own brand of desolation?

I should have said;

“Keep your eyes on the road,

You demon, you temptress,

you future Medea!”

You would have surely poisoned any children we would have sired

what a poetic tragedy that would have been

(just as your mother diseased you with raging parasitic desperate leeches)

Your father said;

“You’ll have it good some day…..”

but it was his own wishful thinking

his plans drying up under the heat of the sun

the bleary wear out of time

the last orange embers of our life together

running down your cheeks

breaking into my chest

a heart-ache six year sized tumor.

Letters in a bottle

turn into LIES

on the electric highway.

It was my mother that informed me

of your marriage date

I turned my head

saw a city pass by

the same city

and felt like a lost sailor swam endless leagues away from an island

but NIGHTmares

of the ISland

we pushed each other

that haunts me

those silent car rides

I had often thought

of grabbing the wheel

of your Saturn

and ending us into

the crunch of oncoming traffic.

I never did that to us.

That fills me with moral ambivalence

To such an astronomical measure

As that of the American Space Program missions

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The non-military emphasis reveals its true status clearly

For the minute sputnik went up to the pentagons consternation

Imagining the horrors of the red threat beyond the stratosphere

Mind control lasers and communist magnetic pulse beams

So NASA is formed and the cowboy space race begins

The media awakens a national sci-fi nerds wet dream

Their excuse is scientific exploration, I consent! I consent!

Suddenly Joe public has a new billion dollar sport to watch

Tie those mid-western mythical heroes to a rocket and take off

While baby-faced Kennedy smiles and sets the clock

“By the end of this decade I decree the white man will moonwalk!”

Oh don’t you pretend it wasn’t a giant hydrogen filled gimic

A distraction from the civil rights movement and the bombing of the East

It was America’s epic last grasp at colonialism

Planting the red, white and blue on that giant piece of cheese

Lets all relive it, Buzz Aldrin channeling the soul of Colombus

Can you feel it, the disappointment hitting you in a wave

Realizing the moon was nothing but dust

No resources to exploit, no natives to enslave

But it was “One small step for Propagandists!

“And one giant leap for the military industrial complex!”

By a margin of six months they fulfill JFK’s promise

But does the achievement make the magic Dealy Plaza bullet hurt any less?

But the star spangled tragedy that still makes my heart sick

Is the seven brave souls turned to smoke wisps over Florida

One cold and morning of nineteen eighty-six

I was only a three year old bumpkin here in Manitoba

But two decades later, through the magic of Youtube

I too can join the students, family, building excitement

All the dream and purpose of the space-age take into the blue

Then seventy three seconds in, puff- and I’m Challenger verklempt

Cause only in America can the death of so few become disaster

CNN live international millions watching “Ah, obviously a major malfunction…”

And the sparkle and pizzazz of this dreamworld couldn’t disintegrate any faster

The brain of the anchorman screaming- “Say something, say something, say something…”

But all he could utter as the camera pans the fluttering debris

Is “pieces falling out of the sky” while the whole sphincter of the globalist elite goes “oh shit…”

The recovery team better salvage something from this please

And as I personally watch the footage, the context slams me like a fist

Cause this wasn’t just your typical phallus obsessed NASA tax expenditure

Scotch taping cowboys in a shuttle to a hydrogen filled detonator

No because the late Christa McAuliffe, schoolteacher, was crew on the doomed Challenger

Yes, on that fateful day, the final frontier dared to claim the life f an educator!

So you can youtube any moment you choose, at your fingertips

The dismantling of the Berlin wall or the fall of WTC seven

And call it footage as the forward momentum of the Empire slips

But for me it will always be the child looking up to the heavens

Go home and google ‘Challenger disaster spectators’

You’ll see a group of young students, NASA hats, American flags

Mouths a gap with the wonder of modern man and post-industrial reverence

Staring at a trail of smoke, barely realizing their teacher was never coming back.

Slave labour in my coffee

And this is how I start my day

Knowing that every step I take is fourteen children

Dying in Africa and Latin America

While I go impose this capitalist reality

On the impressionable minds of the young

I’ve never felt so much like the man

Working as a teacher and a security guard

What happened to me?

I used to be so anti-establishment

Now I corrupted by my paycheck

And credit card debt

Shaking my head at beggars

Ignoring the sick, poor and lonely

With my headphones in

Oh ignorance is bliss!

And the white man’s burden

Is the guilt trip virus

I pass onto others with snide remarks

And a vaudevillian grin

My nights sucked away in torture films

And amateur porn

Rubbing the sin into my eyes

With Dexedrine and lubricant

Horny for the crash

A hard-on for the energy crisis

The forever foreplay of the recession

And boom and fake bubbles

A true player of the ponzi scheme

With full knowledge of the fact that I’ll never collect

An old pension or retire happy on some beach

All the beaches are filled with helpless turtles

Covered in oil

All the white picket fences have W.S.

Spray painted in black

West Side! Death to the Police!

Fuck the System!

And beyond the fences people walk their two point five mistakes

With their screaming little eyeballs too stupid to know

Their doom crawls forward a pile of electronic waste

Heaped onto soil rich with uranium yellowcake

And cancer

Babies lucky enough to not be born

With tumors the size of siblings

Under a sun that used to be our center of the universe

But now all of human consciousness

Is an accident of survival

Thanks for the paradigm shift Darwin

And thank you Queen Victoria

For filling the diamond mines

With the decadence of your royal vaginal juices

And god bless George W. Bush

And all the Wall Street cronies

For filling my every waking hour

With the pain of greed’s vice tightening my testicles

Nothing feels worse than self righteousness

If some wise fool tried to explain humility

To me or my people

We would most likely piss in their mouth

While humming the national anthem

Luckily nobody ever tries to explain anything

Talking heads read off the teleprompters

Chalk full of politician sex scandals

Mixed in with a healthy dose of sports statistics

And a sprinkling of the glory

Of our nihilistic ideologies

And look now and the ravishing glow of our brave

Men and women in uniform- speaking of which;

A faint memory of the cold war ending

Creeps into my daydreams

Like the repressed nightmare

Of a UFO abductee

Thank the Queen for the endless streaming

Of BBC documentaries reminding me

Of how lucky I am to live in the Great Northern Hemisphere!

Close enough to Santa’s workshop

That Christmas spirit actually blocks out

The smoke and death smell of our scorched earth policy

And I think, if only it could take the taste of sweat

And broken dreams out of my coffee

Yet today I have just the right amount

Of cynicism and spite to write real poetry

To be presented to the only people I never lie to-

Can’t lie to in fact!

My artsy drunk hipster audience of pretentious heathens

The last poet to be caught lying

Was either thoroughly ignored

Or ripped to shreds by the harpy gorgon claws

Of you Bacchanites!

But don’t worry, I will save all my fake smiles

For the uneducated vermin

Wouldn’t you agree that they are all

On their somber way to their own mothers funeral

Pulling down cuffs to hide the shackles

Spitting on hippies, kicking puppies

And pepper-spraying protestors

Then finally laying in her tomb such a relic as

The scientologist dildo

A synthetic replica of Tom Cruise’s member

With the inscription:

“For Ever And Always The Cockmaster!”

This of course is the same world where

Korean filmmakers animate crying doggy poo

To stink pull your heartstrings

Its (da-da-dada!) Planet Earth!

And you all hate being here just as much as I do

But where else can you go?

A quarter-million dollar condo in Vancouver

That is hopefully high enough to dodge the sewer tsunami?

Or would you blanket you mind in some banal university

Learning the math that destroyed eighty-thousand native languages?

A lucky few of you might gain access to some

Air-conditioned apocalypse bunker

Long enough for Charlton Heston to remind you that

“It’s PEOPLE! Monsanto Green is PEOPLE!!!”

Well run if you must, you cowards!

But I’m staying right here

Right smack dab in downtown

Grimy slushy siren-wailing Winnipeg

Eating cheap American style breakfast

At a Chinese restaurant trying to decipher

Whats left of my future by correlating

My Coffee News horoscope with

The stains at the bottom of my cup!

their propaganda malls and armies of manikins

build swords out of the melted down plow

herd the cattle and pigs into the pens

thousands of suburbanites in their cages

chug all the dead oil gases and choke

not enough hate filled poetry could fill pages

but I write amidst the suicide smoke

I’d fill my garage if I had one

with the exhaust of my audi

my hood up, the prodigal mad son

a bathrobe over my neglected body

die you Sodom citizens and serfs

credit card hedonistic glow rods

children of the atom and pill first

nephews of nuclear demons not gods

ring in the new year with twenty thousand swallows

your poison has its own cabinet

oh how I will engineer new guillotines and gallows

for the revolution to happen yet

you pretend to have been reluctant to fight

but every war fits your golden plot

between your legs you tuck in your might

and then rape the poor and doll out rot

all my progeny will have to look at is rubble

thank you middle-class for this

so I blow up my wallet like all other bubbles

sweet ignorance! sweet bliss!

just wiggle your feet arm head whatever limp or appendage

and fit it into my mischievious motives and harsh contentions

and then every last one of you will understand the depravity!!!

but i strive to be a prototype

they don’t make them like they made them

mad at nothing but sly all the same

ready to wait but at the same time play

while they think i’m still waiting

i go behind them all and win the game

from red to black

the ink looks sacred

two tones like DMT

tripped to pieces

spread wide like PCP

slow drag down and climb around this century

one-hundred

magically uncontainable

spooning old toys

old stuffy animals

like smell like when masturbation

used to smell like adventure

in a danky closet

pretending to be abducted by aliens

really

it’s just your sister and her friends

cause its her birthday party

and they played spin the bottle

without any boys

so you hide

with his button eyes rubbing your penis

poor teddy

teddy with an eye

and Madonna songs

and bra straps

and the film “Pretty in Pink”

poking a suckling

my brother is a troll doll

I make a loincloth out of your security blanket

I jingle rim job your coin collection

you’re missing a 1975 nickle by the way

(also I always wondered about that toy boat

we played with when we took baths together

because we were poor)

smoking

leaning on an old building

the way old buildings lean on new ones

wondering if they can be friends

jagged keys

let me inside

or don’t let me inside

jokers in the night

changing every lock

and the city wakes up waiting for an answer

car sounds

float in through windows

lovers lay together

on worn mattresses

old star wars sheets

old ideologies

empire versus rebels

humans versus aliens

whispers into a beercan

symbols for new times

metaphors for euphamisms

nobody say what you mean

nobody say anything

pick up a discarded cigarette

his fingers fumble

he looks for a place to stash it

in his dirty clothes

long dirty white beard

he sits on the mall bench

black toque low

over his bushy eyebrows

he moves slow