Brian Eckert

The Globalist puts arsenic in your tea and lead in your pencil.

The Globalist rounds up infants at night and returns them with chips in their heads.

The Globalist has always been at war with you.

The Globalist tells you no; you may not have your steel belted radials, now either go off and die or lend a hand with this circus tent.

The Globalist knows you will come to love him, as he once did.

God damn the Globalist for not making me an offer.

In the Pacific Northwest

you can get quite depressed

in winter, with its clouds and its rain.

Sure, the plants are all green

but what does that mean

when you’re slowly going insane?

The locals don’t mind

the lack of sunshine

it sure beats the snow, they insist.

But at least when its cold

there’s not all this mold

growing up out of the mist.

A queer little breed,

these Northwesterners, indeed

between them and the world, a cloud buffer.

They say they don’t mind it

but most folks, I’m reminded

find it harder to change than to suffer.

The rain does bring flowers

and sometimes, mid-shower

I venture out into the fray.

Be still, cabin fever!

Soon enough, I will leave here.

Let me make what damp joy I may.

Splitter splat

on my PVC hat,

the rain seeping through to my shirt.

Quack,

says a duck, a most unfortunate fuck

who makes his home in the dirt.

Dribble drabble plop

the rain it won’t stop.

It’s turning the folks into shrooms.

But oh, they don’t care,

with their recirculated air,

pleasuring themselves in their rooms.

Later on in the year, just like that

clouds will clear.

By then, I should be on my way.

Sentimental and sad, I’ll swear,

winter wasn’t so bad.

Perhaps for a bit longer I’ll stay.

Night passes much quicker than you think it does.

Fall asleep and you might miss it.

Day, in its dawn to dusk tyranny,

oppresses the Darkness,

keeping moon and stars

under lock and key.

Suppressed night-knowledge

hidden from children who gaze, like Narcissus, into lighted pools

blinded by the glare of their own setting sun.

I wake in the middle of the night of a full moon,

see the world bathed in incandescent light,

and understand there is an entire life I have never experienced.

The night is full of strange creatures

who’ve crawled out from under their shadows

longing for the light they will drown in.

I breathe damp, mushroom air outside my window, look up at the stars and wonder

how it can all be like this.

The world could be anything, but instead it’s like this.

I.

Remember yourself on this day;

The way you looked, the way you talked, the way the sun shone on you;

The way you wanted so badly for something to happen.

II.

A friend suffered a nervous breakdown the other day and I thought,

“Oh, good for him!”

as if it were a wedding announcement, a

pronouncement of man and grief,

Together forever

til death do them part.

III.

Remember yourself on this day;

The way you thought, the way you moved, the color of your face, the color of your teeth.

IV.

Visiting my friend, he told me it was a constant effort to disavow the world and

the unpleasant thoughts that plagued him.

“Thoughts of this earth, that

live and die like us,

live when they’re fed and die when they’re not,

like us.”

V.

Remember the way he looks today;

The way he moves, the way the light shines off of his mother-of-pearl eyes

into rearranging depths.

VI.

“I am so

full of information,

overstuffed with book things,

I could explode;

something must come out.

There must be a bloodletting.

I understand why some people cut themselves, for

the warmth of the blood and the immediacy of its presence;

the feeling of something happening.”

VII.

We offer ourselves up for sacrifice

daily and rise from the promise of our life given.

The ritual of happiness, the ritual of work, the ritual of love.

Never real happiness or real work or real love.

Always a blood sacrifice,

Never a sacrificial God.

VIII.

Til Death do us part, let us Pray:

The Truth will not make you happy;

The truth is a mouth full of sand.

The Truth will not set you free;

The truth is a 3-legged dog.

IX.

“I so often feel a ghost.

I yearn to have my blood back. I miss the weight of it in my veins, a great tide rising and falling with the moon cycles.”

I would see the whole world destroyed, just to feel something.”

Summer lies sleeping and I’m another year

Older, tireder, dumber, obsoleter.

Greenery.
Brownery.
Clownery.

Horton hears a who and I don’t care.

Duck wings like wind chimes.

Young girls riding their bicycles for the last time.

So many problems in the world;

I’m supposed to pick one and make it my own, while

Daylight scares the daylights out of me.

Fall is the feeling of comfortably sliding into death.

Come winter, nothing matters anymore.