Beware those of faith. They are
the greatest of all disbelievers,
for they reject the dogma of man,
of life on Earth.
While their gospels promise salvation, they
smack of desperation,
nihilism;
are but guilt
for being part of
those woes they condemn.
If I’m not inspired
it’s because I’ve been living, have
no time for idle thoughts,
idle feelings.
Let the possessed ones
rule over their lonesome empires of hubris!
Give me chipped teeth and creased skin!
Open sores and mangled limbs!
Broken bones and battle scars!
For I am in a fierce contest,
not to win the hand of some fickle, illusory maiden
but with this life.
Let me crawl along the ground,
a frantic, scavenging beast
fighting to stay alive,
rather than spend another second in some
substratum of the mind.
Give me one minute with a real man!
rather than an eternity with a charlatan
whose subtle panhandling tries to
convince me of my inferiority.
Give me streets that stretch on and on!
Crossed with cursed bodies,
broken-down, rotted hulks of humanity,
deluded atavisms howling at the moon,
streets where widows scream and
bleary-eyed men stagger towards clarity, where
a lost soul is a known quantity
and a conviction is another campaign promise.
Let there be light!
From the haunts that mark man’s sad searches for pleasure:
Murky bars
Throbbing bawdyhouses
Bulging parlors
Oozing dancehalls
Bring forth darkness!
The shadows hide my shortcomings.
I am a man of Earth
who is neither proud nor ashamed.
Such ideas mean nothing to mortals.
There is only the wind in my face
The ground beneath my feet
The spoils of short-lived victories
strewn about me.
The barbarians are at the gate
and I find it assuring.
Those men
who think they need saving
are the loneliest souls of all,
heads craned upwards,
looking for a messiah to crash down amongst us,
meanwhile missing my hand
extended in brotherhood.
Men of Earth can always
look down,
scrape a friend off the pavement,
swing haymakers at those
cheap agents of ego
and connect often enough to resist
elitism posing as Belief.
The Bohemian Experiment 