An Ode to "Cool"

When I was a kid
where I was a kid
the cold, cold wind would blow
relentless
like an airy school or pirahnas...
and I guess I never really
learned to swim

Sometimes were better than others
and the funny thing
is that when you're learning
the world anew:
one can't always discern
the best from the worst of times
I remember a time
when I wrote off immature games for a while...

and would jog on the lonely mountain
studied Picasso and Van Gogh
studied a great horned owl turning his head again and again
set a against a flaming, melancholy sunset...
and had my own world
of abstract, monstrous eyes peering out
from sketch-pads and canvas

But, good... bad... ya know
we don't give a fuck about long ago:
in the city of my spirit
youth and the youth many still remember
is just a quiet, dead museum:
even the color pictures
are black and white to me
(sometimes my old friends seem like cadavears
even when they're speaking to me)

Fuck, they
(pious Christians, factory worshippers,
cookie-cutter modernites who could have been flower children,
and stone-casting materialists)
say it could turn out to be
a lasting recession
(while they junkie lepers and innovators shun)

And again they beatify the primitive's laser-bead gun:
man, they finally see
capitalism and the GOP in its insane monstrosity
but instead of turning to the thinkers
and revolutionaries who again and again
told them so,
they're inanely looking for a new God
new mantras from the lips of new liars:

the most revered being Obama
but like his much talked-of predecessor
he individually means nothing
(and he represents nothing
god-fucking nothing... important to me,
but then this is truly the insane age you see)

see this psychotic neon-light society
surpasses belief:
even dwelling in the dregs of it
is some relief:
this mainstream press choir
of orchestrated mindlesness
sings on,
sings on:
from every channel on American TV,
from the newspapers,
from their "Updike" and "Pahlniuk" literati,
echoing even from the fucking BBC;
I clearly see
it's even gotten into me.

But
it's like the thousandth time they thought
they had a bead on me:
what straight-up keeps me free
is I'm not looking for a shrine on their punk-ass MTV,
never really been for sale for any stake
in this capitalist society
(it's like drowning in the sea
trying to embrace the moon, you know,
even if you get the big house on the hill
it's all on a pretentious plane headed for hell, soon)

You know, I know it seems simplistic
(but it's not so damn simple
when I'm working magic)
but among my highest artistic principles,
and I don't mean it in sense of any
trendy, capitalistic fools,
(but in the black McKay, Kerouacian beat lunatic sense,
the R.A.T.M. fucking side of the barb-wire fence sense)
has always simply been "COOL"