A Subtle Amendment to the Liquor Laws

Writing and poetry
From the 1990's

by Richard Van Ingram

Call the names of the courthouse occupants. Who will avenge us? Who will exact vengeance? The weathergirl watches, glistening wetly in the half-light, replaced by perfection.

Looking to the television I saw a barroom and its tanktread. Orange fire, mercury vapor. The zombies swing at the end of a ragged rope of activity that has nothing to do with choice. Pistol fist, coaxial cable, tornado tongue. And to make love to lithium batteries without our own knowledge.

It lurks in the sub-basement of my moldy reality sober as a judge while supertechnology knows my footfalls as well as a battlefield and she stands before the camera's lustful eye. Worse, you like it.

Lamps, arcane blazing, night hating, nature eaters. The stainless steel machinery of doom, sugary death love sticky melting fattened on the blood of the slain, rusting toward eternity like living candy apples.

Is evolution a mistake, the mother of errors? Which clothes should she wear in the cerebral cortex and other centers to regulate compression? The streets of my hometown, the last gasping giggle of mad, blind reality?

The screen's information signaling those who abuse our flesh, for we suffered to mix together with the reality of the video, naked. Iron maiden, silent lover, the kids pairing off and tasting one another behind the old canned green beans. For the sake of ignorance were ground down, cooked on fires fed with wood of the forest. The priest cries ashes to ashes, tells the tale of winds passing in the carwake. And in that barroom they served nothing but the experience of pain and pleasure. The party commences. Imagine the future as an assembly plant where you are spare parts in a larger process in their candystore minds.

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