from 1978-79 Salamanders by pd lyons

How many roads?

How many Mr. Bob? I’m sitting here writing nonsense while millions of people are dying. I wonder how many people think about how that is. I mean the clown knows, the artist who paints squares all day knows, the cartoon characters know – we all know how many are dying daily, starving, bleeding to death because one day they stood up and their bones ripped through their too tight skin. We know the U.S. U.K. U.S.S.R. Red China, Israelis. Dictatorships supporting other dictatorships throughout the world in order to exert their obsessions for oil, slavery, spy stations, territory on and off the earth. We know that constantly someone is beaten, burned, shot, gassed, raped to death and yet we joke, and we paint, and we write to keep you and ourselves from going mad. – to keep you from realising someday “they” will come for you… Death has no country, it might have a cunt but no country, no religion and so fuck you I’m spiting it out no more distractions and I don’t care anymore who the government butchers for gas oil or gold and I don’t care who is starving to death or any of that shit. If I could save your life? I might not – I wouldn’t. What is there to save anyway? The only people who are real are the ones who have faced death. The ones who live intimate with it every day – Not you Mr. America living in you immortal dream – jokes, paintings, novels – You are not real and when death comes knocking you’ll have the balls to attempt a deal. No one in America believes in death – it can’t happen to me, you gotta be joking, what kinda story is this, just a dream a painting a piece of sculpture and don’t believe everything in the headlines – In the land where material is god, death gets no respect. So not believing in death makes the American petrified of living, concerned only with the preservation, presentation, perpetuation of the illusion. So don’t give me that bull shit about the artist Mr soviet capitalist. We know what is happening, we are painfully aware that behind the guise of freedom, behind the tender mercies of the state lies only a commercial co-op working together for the maintenance  and furtherance of power for the few over the many – every good clown wears a face of sorrow, every painter paints squares, every writer use black ink, every good buy deserves fun – In the modern age the artists role in society is to provide diversion and distraction for the masses – and every Suzy homemaker is miserable because they are forced to exist in a cushioned little box where death is a stranger and life is bored to death.

So, I’m ready to go. Tonight, is stag tonight. A ten-dollar ticket for a friend who grew up with me and I’m gonna drink and be rude and dance a jig with death at my shoulder whispering to me constantly on the value of each moment. I’m gonna eat ’til it sickens me cause I don’t know when I’ll get my next meal and because I don’t care if I puke my guts. Maybe like Henry Miller let fate lead me where it will. Let me be a victim only to my own destiny. How far can you go on a full stomach and drink? Miles to go before I sleep, miles to go and hot shit son of a bitch I’m gonna enjoy my senses reeling.