Recycle Me, Force Your Art Upon Me, Blessed, and Intelligent Design
(Boyle Heights, California, USA)
Recycle MeI am trash
No recyclable parts
But please help me last
Help me become a salvageable art
This is not some lark
6 Reuse me, fast
Force Your Art Upon Me
Walking along I see
Murals all around me
I hear music blasting from cars
Photographs in store fronts
Statues in sculpture gardens
6 All begging for admiration
Blessed
I have always had trouble with my "blessings"
Because it seems that to be "blessed"
Means that you're measuring your success
Against others and their "unfortunate" trappings
Am I blessed to not have bombs being dropped on my head?
6 I am blessed because I won't starve to death?
Or because today I am not dead?
Those are reasons to be blessed?
I am blessed because I have breath?
Because I have shoes?
And you're blessed because you do too?
12 How come my feet can't be as naked as they were born?
Would I be eating if the unblessed weren't starving?
Most likely I would engage in food porn
And my belly fat would still be enlarging
I simply refute that my "fortune"
Has to be measured against the perceived "misfortune"
18 Of others
I am not "blessed" and neither are you
Because if death is the only thing that is true
And truth is something that is sought more than most
Than the shoeless, famine stricken person's blessings we should boast
Don't dodge those bombs
Intelligent Design
Paley's watch and the time it tells
Has a brilliant design, it certainly isn't a stone
It isn't granite or things deemed lifeless
It intricately measures time and its complexity
Like when we grow old the tree stays young
6 Even if you don't understand the ways of trees
You can't deny their architecture
Or how the growth of the trees
Don't hinder the growth of the grass or surrounding flowers
That feed the deer and cattle
Whose carcasses decay and feed maggots and buzzards
12 That nature has been intelligently designed
Like the watch, that tells arbitrary time
Arbitrary because if it is six o'clock here
Why isn't it six o'clock in every hemisphere?
The watch is dumb without more hands
Just as the tree can't be smart if it's a log
18 If it becomes a dead house
Does nature work like the clock?
Every seed planted by the bees pollinating
Feeds the buzzards beak?
Did the buzzard's creator also create the watchmaker?
Relying simply on their omnipotent acuity?
24 That design is awful
Watches were designed to change time
Trees were designed to be used
Magnets for those thirsty or hungry
Or used by those selfish creatures who need shelter
They were designed for exploitation
30 For every breath taken by life here
Owes a debt to the breaths of the trees
For even a tree in famine
Still breaths until it withers
Its final gasps, life for the buzzard to eat
Those creatures laid underneath the shade of barren branches
36 Feeding the buzzard until its wings weak from hunger
And that is why time and design are equally complex
Not simply teleological
And if you don't understand that and know
That time had run out, outdated, was never defined
If you knew that the organism that ate the buzzard and finished off the tree
42 Were resigned to existence without time
The tree died and so did the buzzard and the flowers, like the grass
Then the rains came and the bees and the sun
Made the flowers grow
More buzzards were born, and more beautiful trees
The prod and void of that mysticism
48 Is simple empiricism?
Knowledge isn't something told
It is something gained or waited upon, endured
It doesn't appear out of no where
Like the watch
The watch is dependent upon an owner
54 A creator
To profess what each hand says
But is it like the growth of a tree or flower?
I don't have to mold or fuse or define a flower
I just watch it grow
Would an intelligent designer allow
60 For its creation's anarchy?
To be what it wanted to be
To love and enforce theology?
What is the time?
Not Los Angeles time
I'm in London
66 I'm in Sudan and Indonesia
What is the time?
Does the flower still abide?
I'm glad it is finally the same
You're late and the sun died
Some flowers didn't bloom
72 Patience doomed
Because the clock's battery died
What is happening now?
Ignorance is happening at this time
How did the watch or the stone come to be?
Without you fucking me or me you?
78 There had to be a mover, a maker, with smarts and dignity
Did you hear that the sun died?
And the watch was fixed
Tick tock, tick tock
...
...
84 Tick tock, tick tock
Tick tock, tick tock
Almost out of it
(Boyle Heights, California, USA)
