(no subject)
There is a sad asphyxiation I share with you. You and the rest of these poor standing workmen saps.
I can smell you on my clothes.
Drudgingly in the grey of do-it-before-it’s-tomorrow we sit on the sidewalk. Every pair of shoes is one more defeated dreamer. One less astronaut. One less rockstar. One more flannel suit celebrity clutching a leather suitcase.
Growing up you think you’ll be the one bird who escapes the cage. But you’re every canary. You go to school, you work on your grades, you graduate, you become just another caged bird businessperson. You always windup hating your stupid job, day after day.
The birds we think of growing up as being cageless are the ones who barely have room to stretch their wings.
You never seemed to me to be the pretentious type but here you are with your guitar on the side of the road bitching in some moany song about how life has betrayed you.
Life has betrayed all of us.
We’re born into an atmosphere that promises so, so much and only gives us a limited amount of stale breaths before it kicks our beating hearts into some dark soil. So you sing, you sit on this sidewalk with me and you sing, and I sell my art out here on the pavement, and you make side comments to me about girls in their pretty city going clothes, and you talk about pretentiousness… and all I can look at are your cracking, worn hands, your “betrayed by the world” sunken eyes, the scars on your arms from sticking needles into your veins.
Holier than thou doesn’t always come wrapped in designer jeans.
You always tell me about how Suffering is what begets real art, how we have to suffer to be able to open our hearts. People of the world work in antagonistic pairs like our muscles. One of us has to get very big for the other to get very small. Antagonistic pairs. You go your way, I’ll go mine. It’s all the same. What it boils down to, you think the world has to make its incisions before you can bleed.
Nobody can help it that you like the feel of the blood escaping your veins except you, sugar.
I look at Ms. Everyday, Stacycindysarahvanessa, I look at her CHIC clothes and her STYLISH looks and I look at her miniskirt and her patent leather shoes and her lip gloss. Stacycindysarahvanessa has suffered just as much as you, Mr. Homeless.
The world betrays all of us but we soak it up differently.
You, for example, use it as an excuse to feel sorry for yourself. To drug out your frail body. To run away from home and live off of spare change and a slow job at a CD store that you hate in an apartment with your caring, understanding, equally suffered girlfriend.
I hate being equally suffered to you. Am I as pretentious as you are?
I’ve always appreciated your art, you say. You say you can tell so much about me just by looking at it, all of these things you thought you never knew.
Maybe I’m just a terrific liar.
Maybe I use my painting to spread bullshit through hipster apartments. What do you think of that?
The worst thing about this is that you think you’re so much better than everyone else. You wear your hemp organic clothing and your non-sweat-shop sneakers and you refuse to eat anything that isn’t organic which means you wind up barely eating at all and you scream at people for recycling and you scream at women for wearing fur coats and you mouth off with your bullshit about how they think they’re better than everyone else.
Sometimes I have to sit back and laugh. Do you even hear yourself when you speak?
You’re so convinced that you’re so much better than those women in their fur coats and diamonds. Because they practically slaughtered those animals for their own privileged rich women lives, right? And they practically murdered all of the African children who died to get her those diamonds. And I’ll bet she isn’t even vegetarian. She might as well rip into a cow with her bare hands and eat its heart, right? I bet she drinks milk like a fucking felon. She might as well rape those cows. She might as well rape the chickens she gets eggs from. She might as well, she might as well, she might as well… Go back to playing your fucking guitar, because your rants are so unattractive.
I loved you, once. Now you’re just the man in my apartment.
A piece of furniture.
The vermin that infests my room.
We aren’t in college anymore. You can quit feeling sorry for yourself. You can quit sitting on the streets. I have a job and you constantly have to remind me how sold out I am. How I’ve strung myself on this high-balling street because I have an office, and a resume. You say me making my pie-charts and keeping track of company funds is worse than how you stick shit up your nose.
Then you say, “I’ll pay the rent next month. I just need to catch up.”
You talk about these people who spoil their kids so much, but nobody was more spoiled than you. Nobody was as spoiled as you to be brought up in a nice clean neighborhood and go to a nice clean school with nice clean teachers and to be sent to a nice clean college, just to throw it away for the sake of sticking it to the man. Spoiled. These girls who have football player boyfriends and work as waitresses in small town restaurants and are probably going to be mothers someday and use fancy cell phones so they can check facebook every five seconds from anywhere in the world, they’re the spoiled ones.
But it’s not their fault that they haven’t stuck all their money in their arm.
Spoiled is the boy who could have had all that but was too much of a brat to hold on to it. Spoiled is the boy who thinks he’s so much better than those girls because he’s suffered.
A Masochist, that’s what you are. A pretentious masochist.
A man in an Armani suit throws a fifty dollar bill into your guitar case just when you hit the IV chord. And you stare up at him. And instead of saying thank you, you say “do you even know what the kids go through in the sweat shops while they’re making your suits?”
And Armani man, he doesn’t kick you in the face. He doesn’t tell you to bite the curb. He doesn’t take back his money. He doesn’t start screaming his face off about “doyouknowhowhardmyjobis?” No. He just makes this face of pity at you. And he shakes his head, and he walks away.
Which just gives you more fuel. Fuel to tell me how pretentious that man is.
That man that could have just made a dent in the some thousand dollars you owe me if you weren’t going to spend it all on coke. That man that gave a shit enough to give you some money, because he knows a little something about suffering.
I’ve had enough of you.
I can smell you on my clothes.
Drudgingly in the grey of do-it-before-it’s-tomorrow we sit on the sidewalk. Every pair of shoes is one more defeated dreamer. One less astronaut. One less rockstar. One more flannel suit celebrity clutching a leather suitcase.
Growing up you think you’ll be the one bird who escapes the cage. But you’re every canary. You go to school, you work on your grades, you graduate, you become just another caged bird businessperson. You always windup hating your stupid job, day after day.
The birds we think of growing up as being cageless are the ones who barely have room to stretch their wings.
You never seemed to me to be the pretentious type but here you are with your guitar on the side of the road bitching in some moany song about how life has betrayed you.
Life has betrayed all of us.
We’re born into an atmosphere that promises so, so much and only gives us a limited amount of stale breaths before it kicks our beating hearts into some dark soil. So you sing, you sit on this sidewalk with me and you sing, and I sell my art out here on the pavement, and you make side comments to me about girls in their pretty city going clothes, and you talk about pretentiousness… and all I can look at are your cracking, worn hands, your “betrayed by the world” sunken eyes, the scars on your arms from sticking needles into your veins.
Holier than thou doesn’t always come wrapped in designer jeans.
You always tell me about how Suffering is what begets real art, how we have to suffer to be able to open our hearts. People of the world work in antagonistic pairs like our muscles. One of us has to get very big for the other to get very small. Antagonistic pairs. You go your way, I’ll go mine. It’s all the same. What it boils down to, you think the world has to make its incisions before you can bleed.
Nobody can help it that you like the feel of the blood escaping your veins except you, sugar.
I look at Ms. Everyday, Stacycindysarahvanessa, I look at her CHIC clothes and her STYLISH looks and I look at her miniskirt and her patent leather shoes and her lip gloss. Stacycindysarahvanessa has suffered just as much as you, Mr. Homeless.
The world betrays all of us but we soak it up differently.
You, for example, use it as an excuse to feel sorry for yourself. To drug out your frail body. To run away from home and live off of spare change and a slow job at a CD store that you hate in an apartment with your caring, understanding, equally suffered girlfriend.
I hate being equally suffered to you. Am I as pretentious as you are?
I’ve always appreciated your art, you say. You say you can tell so much about me just by looking at it, all of these things you thought you never knew.
Maybe I’m just a terrific liar.
Maybe I use my painting to spread bullshit through hipster apartments. What do you think of that?
The worst thing about this is that you think you’re so much better than everyone else. You wear your hemp organic clothing and your non-sweat-shop sneakers and you refuse to eat anything that isn’t organic which means you wind up barely eating at all and you scream at people for recycling and you scream at women for wearing fur coats and you mouth off with your bullshit about how they think they’re better than everyone else.
Sometimes I have to sit back and laugh. Do you even hear yourself when you speak?
You’re so convinced that you’re so much better than those women in their fur coats and diamonds. Because they practically slaughtered those animals for their own privileged rich women lives, right? And they practically murdered all of the African children who died to get her those diamonds. And I’ll bet she isn’t even vegetarian. She might as well rip into a cow with her bare hands and eat its heart, right? I bet she drinks milk like a fucking felon. She might as well rape those cows. She might as well rape the chickens she gets eggs from. She might as well, she might as well, she might as well… Go back to playing your fucking guitar, because your rants are so unattractive.
I loved you, once. Now you’re just the man in my apartment.
A piece of furniture.
The vermin that infests my room.
We aren’t in college anymore. You can quit feeling sorry for yourself. You can quit sitting on the streets. I have a job and you constantly have to remind me how sold out I am. How I’ve strung myself on this high-balling street because I have an office, and a resume. You say me making my pie-charts and keeping track of company funds is worse than how you stick shit up your nose.
Then you say, “I’ll pay the rent next month. I just need to catch up.”
You talk about these people who spoil their kids so much, but nobody was more spoiled than you. Nobody was as spoiled as you to be brought up in a nice clean neighborhood and go to a nice clean school with nice clean teachers and to be sent to a nice clean college, just to throw it away for the sake of sticking it to the man. Spoiled. These girls who have football player boyfriends and work as waitresses in small town restaurants and are probably going to be mothers someday and use fancy cell phones so they can check facebook every five seconds from anywhere in the world, they’re the spoiled ones.
But it’s not their fault that they haven’t stuck all their money in their arm.
Spoiled is the boy who could have had all that but was too much of a brat to hold on to it. Spoiled is the boy who thinks he’s so much better than those girls because he’s suffered.
A Masochist, that’s what you are. A pretentious masochist.
A man in an Armani suit throws a fifty dollar bill into your guitar case just when you hit the IV chord. And you stare up at him. And instead of saying thank you, you say “do you even know what the kids go through in the sweat shops while they’re making your suits?”
And Armani man, he doesn’t kick you in the face. He doesn’t tell you to bite the curb. He doesn’t take back his money. He doesn’t start screaming his face off about “doyouknowhowhardmyjobis?” No. He just makes this face of pity at you. And he shakes his head, and he walks away.
Which just gives you more fuel. Fuel to tell me how pretentious that man is.
That man that could have just made a dent in the some thousand dollars you owe me if you weren’t going to spend it all on coke. That man that gave a shit enough to give you some money, because he knows a little something about suffering.
I’ve had enough of you.