Fred Aiken Writing

I can’t keep up,

I can’t keep up,

I have no clue as to who you are,

what the fuck do you want,

I don’t follow, I shall not subscribe, unless I know you

        stand for non-GMO content with ethically sourced thoughts

meant to create, bend, and destroy the normal,

monetized high fever pitches wallowing in the sunken

quagmire known as fee, foe, fem-fatale capitalistic free standing

algorithmic absurdities marketed to the impressionable,

young, indebted, and broke,

flat out,

I can’t keep up,

I don’t know what the next trend is, where it came from,

where it will lead, in a sea of a trillion voices masquerading as truth,

power, struggle, masses, populating at the speed of light,

and then some,

how the fuck should I know,

but I was hoping that you might be able to leave me alone,

all ye that markets,

please scrape my sanity from the jar on your way out,

you know, so long as it’s not too much trouble

the contours of consciousness

         look fuzzy when looking outside

           a drive-thru window,

staring out into the strip mall abyss, 

serving the nth customer their

quad, 

nonfat,

⅓ decaf,

six splenda,

no foam,

no hugs,

no kisses,

with a small dot that represents nirvana,

while standing on one leg,

praying to the Dalai Lama

         to bring forth all the sins

         of mankind,

to sit around the fireplace,

wonder who’s up next,

while several thousand

         comets shoot past,

            whiz,

         through the milk,

splatter on the counter, 

sanitized by brand recognition,

coughed into a paper cup that’s been beaten,

with fingerprints smeared all along its side,

for a high that might be worth it,

         I mean,

         I certainly wouldn’t know,

but I hope you have a great day.

could you spare a dime of consciousness?

I keep losing mine in the middle of my id and ego,

which I kept in my wallet in my back pocket,

but my pockets have holes in them, so I never know where my mind wanders.

 

though the stream of flowing, mesmerizing mind nuggets 

get tucked away in a field meant to go on forever,

yet typically ends whenever I get too nostalgic over the corner store

that my friends and I hung out at,

at which point I just spend the next few hours

scrolling through Buzzfeed and Facebook trying to remember how gloriously wonderful I am.

 

it must be nice to live in the moment,

or to be able to read David Foster Wallace without scratching your head

several miles per hour every other sentence.

 

I like to imagine an alternate dimension in which I’m either 

smart or zen-like, though never both,

or at least not at the same time, since I’m not certain what either

state I’d like to be in,

since all I know is the state I am in,

satiated in high notes bleeding from a chorus

made of claymation on a string of the most interesting images

ever conveyed.

 

they say you have over 80,000 thoughts per day,

but I could never count that high in one day,

so I tend to doubt the reality of what I know

and what I am as an illusion between what I id and what I ain’t.