TEARS OF SPADES IN AMERICAN BLUES
by Mettamodernist  

Julia Dream,
Dream of a key,
A key to unlock all your doors

I am your abyss, your good fix, your sanity, your hell.
Who can thrive when no love abides,
Who can thrive when no love abides,
Julia Dream, Dream of me,
We are as false as any notion could be.
Wide awake while fast asleep,
Wide awake while fast asleep.

Julia Dream,
Dream of me,
I’m letting you know, that I never plan on letting you go,
Dream until you have found us.
Dream until you have found us.

Let’s go beyond ourselves. Let’s say no to discipline.
Let’s afford acts of self-denial. Let’s count centuries like teeth.
Let imagination punish us so that the longing reconciles with itself,
So our myth stays fresh, and trauma forgives tradition.
Who can thrive when no love abides,
Who can thrive when no love abides,

Julia dream,
Dream of key,
I’m letting you know, that I never plan on letting you go,
Julia dream, dream of a key, a key to unlock all your doors.

Let’s meet our pasts, I have moved away from myself,
And I hardly recognize that nigga anymore.
I am your abyss, your good fix, your sanity, your hell.
Who can thrive when no love abides,
Who can thrive when no love abides,

Julia dream,
Dream of me,
We are as false as any notion could be.
Wide awake while fast asleep,
Wide awake while fast asleep.
Be the one I want to be. You’re the one I need to see.

I heard God praying to us. It was childlike caterwauling.
Every word weak-kneed and feral,
in sweet yellow dissipation and malaise,
The way man calls out when close to death.
She begged us for vulnerability, something short of empathy.

Julia dream,
dream, please don’t sleep,
Dream awake before day-break,
I am your abyss, your good fix, your sanity, your hell.

She said, “Why have you forsaken me? Either come like silence as
an empty church, or be my 3am booty call –
Otherwise, my sex is inconsolable and orphan.”
Later that night, there was a whole world hanging from our lips.

Julia dream,
Dream don’t fear,
I’m letting you know, that I’ll always be here,
Who can thrive when no love abides,
Who can thrive when no love abides.

“HANGOVERS IN YOUR MID-TWENTIES.” (Pink Floyd “Julia’s Dream”)

O Gott, Sophocles! O, Homer! Oedipus this and Oedipus that!
The time for art is over, it is the blackmail of survival.
The time is running out, going out, counting down,
fast and fast, fast fast and faster and faster.
the clock is running, the clock is burning.
Due to the unknowable and the unknown.
the clock is advancing, the hands are moving,
rotating, counting, counting, counting down.
act fast, act fast, time is running out.
We evade the panopticon plantation by not existing, 
or existing enough to incubate a future so far-fetched.
How is a pioneering genius supposed to make a living? 
I’m hungry, and I can’t eat, I conclude less and less of me
Today it might be, I was bored, a fragile flight of fancy.
Tomorrow it will be, I ruined my life for art.
Yesterday my Oedipal Complex was all the rage.
I’ve sinned, I’ve fallen, I’ve tumbled, but never told anyone.
Now God waits for me, daring me to beg forgiveness,
But, I don’t need absolution, I don’t need grace, I deserve a better savior.
Beneath the iris hidden in caruncles of madness,
I find a portrait of Dorian Gray, barely breathing. 
I don’t need absolution, I don’t need grace, I deserve a better savior.
I see your weeping mother praying for her child,
And I raise you one God who hears every scream,
Every cry, every plea for peace, every call for death,
And doesn’t give a fuck. Burn the flag, burn the Koran, burn the Bible.
Life over time = (U) unrecognizable.

“KILL YOUR IDOLS.”

TEARS OF SPADES IN AMERICAN BLUES

“If you want a nigger for a neighbor, vote Labour.”
This was the 1964 slogan of Tory candidate Peter Griffiths.
Griffiths won his election by a 7.2% margin.
The British National Party later used it themselves.
America doesn’t know what the negro wants
You can have their women, but not the ego
Maybe tomorrow, but that’s academic
Our perpetual Orwellian plight has been
white-washed by the Bible and the gun
by border control and tiki torches
The auction block, the middle road,
the whip, the knife, cotton as king, Americas first algorithm
the fable of the extermination of the straight white male
America invented the nigger but can’t kill him
Therefore the negro Faulkner wrote about did not exist for him
because a black whose brain … is used to …  ” ELEVATE “
is one who will be … ” Labelled ” … as…….. ” Unstable ” ……..
But I’m so America, I’m so America, 3D  printed  guns;
prescription pills n weed pissed with pesticides
corporate porn, Instapoet selfies; Neo-Nazis & Putin
Playboy, the Beats, Strip clubs, Transcendentalism,
pulp fiction, Hollywood, all rolled up in a blunt
message of perverts & pedophiles posing as pious people
In their best tactical negro impersonations & naked women; 
                            lots & lots of naked women
America is a persistent optical illusion, retinal persistence
persistence of impressions, occurring when visual
perception of an object (us) does not cease after
the light rays proceeding from it have ceased to enter the physical eye
Gold and ambrosia spill out of my grandmother’s mouth
If she strains her wheat-dry hands long enough, you can hear her speak
“America is an antifascist inside a fascist state. A dys·to·pi·an paradise.”

Mama raised me a vagabond. My only home was Purple Rain
on repeat as we cleaned our four quarters of Brooklyn every Saturday morning.
Within me, condensed in bone, diaphragm-deep, buried within the
unfinished business of my childhood, inside the intention to be a voice,
are the inimitable ruins of heritage. It always feels like I’m collecting pieces of you,
as a child I’ve watched you eat your tears, sympathy. empathy. codependency.
I’ve heard the puddles in your throat demand to be rivers.
I’ve seen you perform alchemy with wood, blood, and melancholy to make a home.
Not a house, we never had a house, we had a hollow muscular organ pumping
blood through four sons by rhythmic contraction and dilation.
My mother worries for her children daily,
calls with frogs in her throat, each representing a different phobia.
Her biggest fear are coffins too early, or too small, or too big.
My mother carved us out from the slender, canal of her throat,
and spoke life, and life abundantly, signing the names of her sons
in the blood of our enemies. My mother is a warrior of one for many,
sometimes that meant she carried the world on her back,
too heavy to latch on the sorrows of her sons.
On some summer nights we can hear her crying loudly into her pillow,
biting on her tongue, and offering communion for her sons ahead of the sabbath.
I could never accurately string words together about my mom,
even on a purely linguistic level. Once, there was nothing I wouldn’t say to you.
Now, I lean away from words, the only things I have to let fly.
I am careful. The space between us has always varied in size and volume,
ever-changing, bending and expanding. She never had much use for bullshitting or pussyfooting,
maybe that’s what makes this so hard, it’s as simple as saying, I love you,
but I struggle to find her Horatian ode in any of these naked muses.
Mama raised me a vagabond.

“I DON’T BELIEVE IN GOD, BUT I BELIEVE IN MOMMY.”

my prolonged silence is not an unwillingness to answer,
but a refusal to war while wandering as a patchwork of bruised knees.
It isn’t consonance or assonance, but a refusal to let desire become theory.
I am burning in this life, bursting from between the cog and clockwork,
from things known yet unnamed.
it is important to detach and not alienate, alienation is not detachment,
silent and still one begins to notice, silent and still one begins to notice.
Silent and still one begins to notice how much of what I once thought was apropos of nothing.
Silent and still one begins to notice the interstices and subtleties of being,
observe what doesn’t move in you.
Silent and still one begins to regard what settle’s within,
discovering new surfaces on skin without subterfuge.
I desire secret indentations imprinting on skin, sinking inward.
I desire to exist when not required, like the words of this poem,
I want the truth, naked, uncoping, devastatingly unlovely, self-perjuring.
I want to be an echo touching every neglected corner of your borrowed body.
I want to show you in spite of ourselves, we become things we never expected.
Where are all our heroes? What delicacy of jingoism has white Jesus left us?
How dishonest love has become? We are trying in a world that is full of trying.
My mother taught me early from an early age,
that it was up to me to make myself a worthy member of society,
either as roach spray or air conditioning, I chose the former.
We are not what we thought we would be, but we are trying.
We are not what we thought we would be, but we are trying.
We are not what we thought we would be, but we are trying.

“THE BLANK STRAIN OF MANIA.”

About the Author:

Mettamodernist is a Canadian artist, designer, and writer. His artwork, published through the art collective, The Creatrix Haus & co., has exhibited and been published internationally. He is the author of the poetry collection I’M A THUG, BUT I SWEAR FOR THREE DAYS I CRIED and the novel THNKGODFRDRGS RMX. His project, YOUTH KILLS TIME, releases June2020.