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happy to glad to dying to
Happytogladtodyingto
Get me up in the morning to
wash dishes brush teeth feed cat
scratch ass stare out the window
wonder why and what
At least I wonder don't I
happytogladtodyingto
Get on the phone with hungry ghosts
asking for money calling me sir
India outsourced peasant fool robot
stealing lives for corporate America
Stare at the tube and write things
Go fly a kite things slight things
email eat a snail step on a nail
stomach burns world turns
happytogladtodyingto
Starbucks
culture mucks
might as well
be quacking ducks
Out on the street meetin cretin
nearly run over by el spunky
surrounded by savages yelling scared bitch!
sunshine superman yacks about script into unseen cellphone
isn't he impressive makes me manic-depressive
happytogladtodyingto
Wait in line with 80 stunned people mailing
gifties weight shifties while amorphous postal clerks take breaks
giggle and make very small talk stealing time ain’t it fine
just makes me pine for
better days other ways Shakespeare plays forgotten lays
happytogladtodyingto
Drown in ego suffocate with self
hide from horror might as well turn off the sun
Betelgeuse screaming jokes from the cosmic topsy-turvy
Humans never get the punchlines
Too busy fighting terror speechifying leechafying preachafying chicken frying
Death defying
happytogladtodyingto
Facebook, book my face out of here
A face can be a book but a computer screen is no face
And I can’t face most books
They are designed to screed, not read
They are bankbooks
Making fins for hucksters, not Huck Finns
The last book I read was the last book I will read
Kindle is a swindle
Twitter makes me want gin and bitters
Happytogladtodyingto
And someone told me he was tired of all the whining
About how this has been the worst decade of our lives
And how he’d been hearing this same moan since 1970
Get over it, people, he said, well
I’d like this guy to tell the people who lost people in the desert follies
In Iraq and Afghanistan that they are whining
I’d like this guy to tell broken people who lost their jobs to automatons in Sri Lanka and the Phillipines to get over it
I’d like him to tell the people whose people died because
They could not afford health insurance to get over it
Wounds don’t heal, they scar, but then,
as George Harrison said, with antidote pen
time wounds all heels
Happytogladtodyingto
It’s a time of ephemera, chimera, and etcetera
Everything is a substitute for substance
Demographers are the cartographers
antacid is the new acid
Pop a few and it’s way cool consuming fool office pool
Drop a stool think its jewel you’re just a ghoul out of fuel
Happytogladtodyingto
Sloganeering domineering my eyes are tearing
Reality shows, reality slows
Social network since you can’t get work
Media mavens are terrorist havens
Mexican mafia al qaeda being paraded everyone jaded
How’s it rated are you sated hell’s not gated don’t you hate it?
happytogladtodyingto
Salute the stars and bucks
Stars and bucks forever
May I help the next guest?
My mind is the fresh daily grind
Decaf short two percent Americano
Senior citizen barista tip jar bank account
Fatass cheap suit laptop cell-phone short-sell frappuccino freelancer
Oh say can you see
the dying of the light
happytogladtodyingto
Political correctness porno erectness
Mayors and presidents blowing smoke
Makes me choke kills all hope
Say okeydoke have a diet Coke take a toke
you’re getting soaked
It’s all set-up for same old joke
Happytogladtodyingto
Internet has privatized everybody’s ears and eyes
Everyone’s a hustler, a corporation, institute
Everyone is a singer-songwriter-dancer-director-artist-filmmaker-writer-author-mobile pet groomer
Every man is an island
I post, therefore I am
microcircuit circus
none can flee
Friends in Alabama Antarctica Alaska Anoka
And Bismark, Nice, and Raton Boca
You’ve never met them and never will
Nostalgia youtube is your pill
happytogladtodyingto
Beware the nice police
They will come in the night and
Steal your irony and kidnap your sarcasm
And hold your truth for ransom
And they will torture your reason with
Euphemisms and smiles and platitudes and clichés
And waterboard your psyche until you speak
Like Larry King and Oprah and Tavis Smiley combiney
happytogladtodyingto
Sometimes I find poetry in cigarette butts that will soon
Go down storm drains and stop up dolphin blowholes
And sometimes I find poetry in blue skies
And the other day I found it in a goddamn computer
Dialogue bubble when I went to erase some websurfing
And it said “All history will be cleared. This action cannot be undone.”
And I thought it sounded like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer
And should have been read aloud by Rutger Hauer
As he gave that astounding speech in Blade Runner
All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain
happytogladtodyingto
child species walks and flops and sings and drops dead
full of curious eyes and larcenous lies
Upright two-legged tool using fool bluesing
usurping and burping
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time greenhouse gassing
Humans are on the way out and winds on the way in
Winds that will whistle through ancient rock and petrified log
For no one to hear and no one to fear
Winds that no one will hustle or paint of sing or ride
or rhapsodize with ecstatic soliloquies
Oh, tiger lily please
don’t go
happytogladtodyingto
---Charles Bogle

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