Jamiemccarthytv

Tag: darkness

  • Silence is the killer when you look the other way. (How virtuous)

    the newsreaders smirk behind the desk,

    their teeth polished white,

    their words unpolished and dull.

    the world’s on fire,

    but no one wants to say where the match came from.

    they shuffle papers,

    nod solemnly at the camera,

    and move on.

    next story.

    young girls with broken eyes walk streets that don’t care for them,

    their stories—

    torn, gutted, and stitched with silence.

    a thousand screams swallowed by a fear

    greater than justice,

    greater than truth—

    the fear of being called a name.

    racist. islamophobe.

    Or phrases like Resident Alien.

    they weigh heavier than the suffering of the small,

    the forgotten,

    the torn apart.

    the rapists walk free because the culture has grown soft,

    too soft to call evil by its name.

    and isn’t that convenient?

    for them, I mean.

    they know the game.

    play your cards right—

    and the good people will look the other way.

    good people.

    they don’t want to seem bad,

    don’t want to upset the order,

    don’t want to be labeled.

    better to let the girl bleed in a corner

    than risk being impolite.

    virtue signaling is the new religion.

    you wave the right flag,

    tweet the right slogan,

    kneel at the right altar—

    and you’re forgiven.

    it doesn’t matter what’s behind it:

    indifference,

    ignorance,

    or worse.

    the mask is enough.

    but what about the girls?

    the ones they pretend to care about?

    their bodies are battlegrounds

    for a war no one wants to admit is happening.

    the press won’t write it,

    the cops won’t fight it,

    and the priests of tolerance preach

    their sermons of silence.

    it’s a goddamn joke.

    we scream about progress,

    about justice,

    but only in the ways that won’t cost us anything.

    and the victims pile up in the shadows.

    this world isn’t just ass-backwards—

    it’s in full throttle reverse

    marching proudly backwards into oblivion

    while the banners of virtue flap overhead.

    but you can’t eat banners.

    you can’t heal wounds with hashtags.

    and you sure as hell can’t hide the blood forever.

    eventually,

    the truth crawls out of the dark.

    it always does.

    the question is:

    will anyone be left to give a damn when it does?

    (Remember when the U.K stood for something?)

  • The Beast in Seat 23A

    35,000 ft up, 42 drinks down.

    Let me set the stage: an airplane, five hours from Detroit to Los Angeles. A goddamn tin can full of sleep-deprived zombies and corporate swine, all clutching their pretzels and plastic cups like sacred relics. And me—drenched in sweat, reeking of stale, cheap scotch, tearing through little airline bottles like a lunatic on death row.

    This wasn’t just drinking. No, this was a high-octane bender at 35,000 feet—a desperate attempt to defy the laws of physics and sanity. By hour three, the flight attendants were avoiding eye contact. By hour four, I was mumbling incoherent nonsense about the death of civility in America and demanding more ice. By the time we landed at LAX, I was less of a man and more of a biological weapon—a one-man disaster staggering off the plane with murder in my eyes and a thirst that could drown a small village.

    Straight to the airport bar. The bartender looked at me like I’d just crawled out of the La Brea Tar Pits, but I waved a twenty at him and demanded a double. This was the routine, the sacred ritual: land, drink, repeat. The cities changed, the bars changed, but the mission was always the same—annihilation, pure and simple.

    It wasn’t about fun. It wasn’t even about escape. It was about the necessary obliteration of self. The world was a strange, indifferent circus, and the only way to survive was to light yourself on fire and hope the flames kept the demons at bay.

    But here’s the thing: they never stayed gone for long. Sobriety didn’t come to me as some grand revelation—no white light, no epiphany. It came because one day, the demons won. They dragged me down into a pit so deep and dark that even Jack Daniels couldn’t light the way out. But even in my discombobulated subconscious, I knew there was another Jack far more important in my near future. And a Samantha, whose birth opened my eyes to real miracles and shone a spotlight on the skull and crossbones of every bottle, glowing like Las Vegas from space.

    Now, 24 years later, I’m sober. Clean. A goddamn Boy Scout. But I’m not stupid—I know the beast is still out there, pacing in the shadows, waiting for me to slip. And I won’t. Not now. Not ever. Even with the loss of my son Jack, the thought of diving back into the bottle just to escape that pain is as repulsive, grotesque, and cowardly as the former lush I used to be.

    If someone put a gun to my head and told me to drink, I’d laugh. I’d tell them to shoot, because a bullet is quick, but one drink? That’s a slow, deliberate execution—a drawn-out death sentence dressed up as a good time.

    Sobriety isn’t a victory parade. It’s a knife fight in a phone booth. But I’ll take that over waking up in an airport bathroom, trying to piece together what’s left of my soul.

    This isn’t an ode to sobriety, where I tear a rotator cuff giving myself a proverbial pat on the back. It’s an extended middle finger to the beast that once ruled my head. And if that’s not worth raising a glass of sparkling water to, I don’t know what is.

  • Junkyard Ghosts Looking for a Fight

    it started one night

    when the moon sulked behind the clouds,

    and the air buzzed with the sound of something unnatural.

    not birds, not planes.

    just cold, unfeeling machines

    drifting against the wind’s will,

    junkyard ghosts looking for a fight.

    no one knew where they came from,

    but the bastards were ours.

    man’s great pride and inevitable mistake:

    to build what he doesn’t understand,

    to send it soaring into the sky

    and call it progress. 

    then came the orbs.

    smooth as polished emeralds 

    gleaming like they’d been forged

    in some black star’s furnace.

    no rivets, no seams, no blinking lights—

    just quiet, humming judgment

    from an enormous void we thought was empty.

    our junkyard ghosts looked fragile, 

    wings bent, rotors spinning like drunk spiders.

    they moved in straight lines, predictable,

    while the orbs curved through the sky

    moving like whispers of a language

    older than time itself.

    and when they clashed,

    it wasn’t a war,

    it was a slaughter.

    men in suits argued on screens,

    pointing fingers at each other

    while their creations were crushed like ants.

    “defense budgets,” they said.

    “countermeasures.”

    as if the sky gave a damn

    about our bureaucratic bullshit.

    and all the while,

    down below,

    we drank ourselves blind

    under the flickering glow of bar signs.

    some prayed to gods

    they didn’t believe in.

    others wrote poetry no one would read.

    but most just stared at the sky,

    watching our junkyard ghosts looking for a fight

    and losing.

    they fell one by one,

    burning bright as they tumbled.

    our man-made birds and blades,

    our drones and flying dreams—

    reduced to ash

    against the cold, calculated cruelty

    of their orbiting gods.

    but here’s the rub:

    the orbs didn’t care about us.

    we weren’t the target,

    just collateral damage.

    they were here for our toys,

    our arrogance,

    our need to scrape at the stars

    like desperate whores.

    one by one, the orbs descended.

    more silent than death,

    merciless, cosmic executioners—

    the kind who don’t bother with last words,

    just the unrelenting swing

    of the reapers scythe. 

    and when the last of our machines fell,

    the sky went dark.

    we should’ve learned then,

    but we didn’t.

    we kept building,

    sending new junkyard ghosts

    into a sky that didn’t want them,

    still looking for a fight we couldn’t win.

    and somewhere,

    in the cold reaches of hell and beyond,

    the orbs are still watching,

    waiting,

    ready to remind us

    that we’re nothing more

    than ants on the edge of the abyss.

    so pour another drink.

    raise your glass to the ghosts,

    to the machines we built

    and the arrogance that made us think

    we could conquer the stars.

  • Lights, Lawsuits, and Lunacy

    Lights, Lawsuits, and Lunacy

    There he is, another fat cat in a fine suit,

    a man with too much money

    and not enough sense.

    They always start the same way:

    hungry, scrappy, with a spark in their eyes,

    climbing over corpses just to taste

    the champagne fizz of fame.

    But the climb turns sour—

    it always does.

    The money grows heavier,

    the women get younger,

    and the lies stack taller

    than their penthouses.

    And now he’s cornered.

    Accusations like alley rats

    gnawing at his gold-plated ego,

    lawsuits snapping like

    cheap whiskey shots at last call.

    He denies, of course—

    they always deny.

    Truth is just another currency

    they barter for silence.

    The tabloids call it shocking.

    The fans call it betrayal.

    I call it Tuesday.

    Another kingpin,

    another scandal,

    another reminder

    that the glint of the spotlight

    hides more shadows than light.

    But don’t worry,

    he’ll be back.

    They all come back.

    The world loves a man who sins,

    as long as he sins with style.

    And us?

    We’ll keep buying the albums,

    dancing to the beats,

    clapping for the encore

    while the bodies pile up backstage.

    Because we’re all drunk on something—

    power, fame, or just cheap beer.

    And none of us want to wake up

    to the hangover of reality.

    There’s a mirror there and we certainly don’t like the way it lights our own lunacy.

  • The Green Tablet

    The green tablet.

    All my life I stumbled, staggered like a drunk at closing time, reaching for something, anything. I’d been told to find meaning in the sermons of men, the wisdom of books, the clink of coins in a beggar’s cup

    it was all more of a junkie’s dream. The kind of thing you’d find slipped in between the folds of the Interzone, tucked inside the sweaty palm of some two-bit dealer with half his face gone, nodding off in the alley. I wasn’t looking for it, not really. But it found me. They always find you.

    Years spent in the static haze, the off-channel white noise of existence. I moved through life like a virus spreads—covert, unnoticed, but always present, always creeping. Everything felt slippery, synthetic. The streets, the people. All part of a bad signal, fuzzing in and out of view. I tried to decode it, cracked open veins and heads alike, trying to read the messages in the blood and the circuitry. It all led nowhere. Circling the drain.

    Then the tablet. Green. The color of rot, the color of new life. One third of the tricolor draped along the walls of the long, hollow corridor of time, reverberating with the somber hymns of Irish proverbs, and maybe, just maybe, carrying enough luck to turn pessimism into hope. Sort of like a coin toss, only with a tablet. I didn’t so much find it, it found me, pressed itself into my hand, throbbing like some living thing. Organic. Synthetic. All of the above. I swallowed it without thinking.

    And then the world folded in on itself, a collapsing wave. Time ceased to have meaning, space unraveled into dimensions I didn’t believe  existed—places where gravity was just another bad trip, a suggestion instead of a rule. The walls of the room bent, melted, reformed. Faces flickered, sliding in and out of their skulls. Bureaucrats with insect eyes and needle fingers. All the usual suspects.

    The tablet wasn’t knowledge. It was beyond knowledge. It was access, a key to a hidden layer of reality, a frequency just out of reach unless you knew where to tune the vibrations. And there it was—the whole system laid bare. The machinery behind the facade. The puppet strings of control, the invisible hands pulling us all in circles.

    The thing I’d been looking for in gutters and bars, in the eyes of strangers and the bottom of empty bottles. Turns out, it was the very thing that made me stop searching.

    I don’t remember what was written on it. Maybe there was nothing. Maybe it was just the act of finding it that mattered. That green tablet wasn’t salvation, not in the way they sell it in churches or schools. It was just a reminder that the world, the one I had spent years fighting, didn’t give a damn. It never would. And finally, I no longer needed it. 

    I wasn’t stumbling anymore. My new found saunter suggested confidence, not arrogance—just the ease of a man who knew the system and could slip through its cracks unnoticed, the few eyes that caught me probably green with envy. But I always looked past them, through their lost souls, and left a simple inscription on their softened brains…

    “You want out? There is no out.’”

  • The High Isn’t Coming

    god is the new obedience.

    the rest of us? just junkies chasing the first high. eyes glazed, hands outstretched for the next hit of belonging. the tribe, the party, the movement—they offer you a fix, say you’re one of them now, part of something bigger. they sell you purpose in a pill, a flag to wrap around your shoulders like a noose disguised as a security blanket. but here’s the thing—just like the junk dealer’s push, it’s all laced with something lethal. the high doesn’t last. it never does. you wake up sick, needing more. always needing more. and the cold truth is, the club you think you’re part of? it doesn’t exist—not the way they sold it to you.

    talking heads and politicians, like junk peddlers, know the game. they cut it just right, enough to keep you hooked, just shy of dead—or at least, that was the plan. but the bodies are stacking up. 279 die every day from counterfeit killers. more dead recruits than Vietnam, and these aren’t soldiers, just citizens swallowing the lie. it’s all poison. they toss you a pill, tell you to vote, tell you it matters. but it’s counterfeit, a placebo laced with sweet nothings. you down it, even though it chokes you every time, feel good for a minute, like you’ve made a difference, like you’re part of something righteous. but what’s in that pill? more poison. just another way to keep you tethered to a system that doesn’t give a shit if you live or die. hell, they’d prefer you sick, obedient, just healthy enough to show up and follow orders.

    and they need you to chase it again—the high of belonging, the sweet lie that you’re on the “right side.” but there is no side. it’s grey. the world is grey, the people are grey. the skies are always grey, the streets paved in grey since day one. I’ve walked down that avenue, eyed grey faces lost in the grey mundane of their everyday. everything’s muted, colorless, lifeless—just the way they want it. they need you blind, seeing in black and white, picking one of two flavors, because they need you to believe you have choice. But you’re just another number on that team jersey they sold you at the concession stand. they know you’re never actually going to be a real player on the squad. that’s why the numbers are grey—just bright enough to keep you loyal and coming back for more counterfeit salvation.

    i’m done with their game. i’m done swallowing their pills. i’ll walk through the grey, hands dirty, eyes wide open, because that’s where the truth is. the rest of them? let ‘em keep chasing that first high, keep lining up for another spoonful of sweetened bullshit. i prefer the chaos, the mess. i want the real thing, the uncut stuff—bitter and sweet, raw and true. not the garbage they keep the masses hooked on.

    it’s all an illusion, this belonging. a drug they sell to keep you numb, keep you thinking you’re alive, when really, you’re just another junkie in line, waiting for your next fix. the question is, when do you wake up and realize—the high isn’t coming?

  • Uncivil Savages

    Uncivil Savages

     

    Here we are, a nation of uncivil savages.  

    Bumping into walls, knocking over the furniture, 

    blind to the fact that the room we’re in 

    isn’t even ours. 

     

    Identity? What a joke. 

    It’s a mess of recycled sound bites and half-truths, 

    spun out like the web of a spider high on bad dope. 

    George Orwell’s laughing his ass off in the back, 

    maybe sipping whiskey, shaking his head. 

     

    It’s not the left. It’s not the right. 

    It’s just jabs and crosses, a nice little show. 

    The real damage, the real kill, 

    comes with the headkick you never see, 

    brought to you by your friendly neighborhood 

    Weapons of Mass Distraction.

     Flying elephants, underground donkeys— 

    who gives a damn? 

    We’re all shopping at the same supersized mall 

    jacked up on steroids, neon lights buzzing overhead, 

    propaganda posters hanging like cheap art 

    next to racks of aborted dreams. 

     And what are we doing? 

    800 million eyes, glued to glowing screens, 

    watching, waiting, scrolling past the snakes 

    slithering under the walls. 

     They’re coming for the kids first, 

    turning them into slaves. 

    Then they’ll poison the rest of us, 

    and we’ll call it anxiety, 

    pop a pill and go back to pretending 

    we’re free.

    So tell me—is this what freedom looks like?

  • My 5 and your 5.

    Somewhere uncomfortable

    I’m always five minutes late. Doesn’t matter if it’s therapy, a meeting, or a funeral—hell, I know for a fact i’ll be late to my own, if I even show up at all.

    I’ve been seeing this shrink for a while now. Good guy. Listens well, scribbles occasionally, throws a “hmm” out like he’s adding salt to a shitty dish his wife whipped up. So, one day, after the usual “you’re late again” look, he finally asks me, “James, why are you always five minutes late? No matter what time we set, it’s always the same.”

    I shrug, staring at his overly polished desk, and say, “Well, Doc, best as I can figure, my five minutes and your five minutes just aren’t the same.”

    He raises an eyebrow like I’m onto something. Like I’ve finally cracked the code to the universe of perpetual tardiness. So, I keep going.

    “See, your five minutes, it’s precise. Probably feels like 300 seconds ticking away, one, two, three. But mine? Mine could be five seconds, or five hours. I don’t feel the difference.”

    I could tell he wanted to laugh but was trying hard to remain the professional. He adjusts his glasses, the kind of move therapists do when they’re buying time to decide if they should diagnose you or just let it slide.

    “Maybe it’s because you taught me to live in the moment, Doc. You ever think about that? Maybe I’m just so focused on the now that time… bends. It warps around me like some kind of slow-motion bullet in a movie. Except, instead of dodging it, I’m just late.”

  • Ghosts in a cheap room

    Ghosts in a cheap room


    my old man was tough but I wouldn’t call him a bastard,
    rough hands, stentorian voice,
    but it was those eyes, they were odd in a beautiful yet chilling way , the way he’d stare right
    through me, like he already knew the end.
    he checked out early, left me holding the bag—
    a kid too young to know the game was rigged.
    I got older, meaner, learned to drink it down,
    fill the empty spaces with smoke and bad decisions,
    but nothing ever took root, just ashes in a cheap ashtray.
    then my boy, Jack
    all bright-eyed, all promise and fire, went cold at nineteen.
    like he was never even here.
    one day laughing, the next day gone,
    As if the most beautiful ghost ever decided to punch my gut and keep walking.
    so now it’s just me, an old man stuck between
    some past that’s long dead and a future that’s already given up.
    they talk about the Father, the Son, and some Holy Ghost—
    but what do they know about ghosts?
    all I got are dead men’s whispers
    and shadows that follow me from room to room.
    maybe I’m the ghost now,
    some sober, leftover thing, wandering between bad memories and worse nights,
    waiting for that final bell to ring me out.
    but until then, I’ll keep dreaming of drinking
    the cheap whiskey that almost drown me,
    chewing the lousy cigarettes I cannot light
    and telling those ghosts to fuck off—
    because it’s all just a bad joke , a hit—
    and I am the punchline.

  • TikTok killed Hollywood

    TikTok killed Hollywood, and I watched it die,
    in a dim-lit bar on the 3rd street promenade
    where ghosts from the golden age
    whispered eulogies into cheap whiskey glasses
    that shattered just as the silver screen cracked,
    like brittle, glass bones under the weight of 30 frames….
    and in one second, just like that, there were filters that washed away the grit.
    I saw the stars fade,
    one by one,
    replaced by brats in their bedrooms,
    dancing to bullshit algorithm’s,
    lined up one after the other to join the pixelated parade of fleeting faces.
    there were no more dream factories,
    only copycat hackers of distraction,
    likes and follows replacements for a deflated currency,
    every scroll, heroine at the end of a billion thumb prints
    the old guard, lost in digital dust,
    while new idols born without a single talent
    pushed trends of bite-sized dopamine
    compressing all creativity into an offensive nothingness
    Hollywood and its lost souls echoed the silence of unread scripts,
    rejected Oscar winning directors
    and queers being canceled for being queer
    blown away by the winds of virality.
    the city’s neon lights flickered,
    as if to signal the end of an era,
    a final curtain call for the grand illusion,
    now reduced to a series of swipes.
    so here’s to you, TikTok,
    the swift assassin,
    the desensitized dream killer, you paralyzed and buried a behemoth,
    leaving us to mourn the magic,
    lost in the endless scroll.

    The takeover