Real is rare
rarely there
in the polluted saluted
sleep-tight sludge-fucker world
smile-fuckery handshakers
marionettes needled to their knuckles
prefabricated friction
created to fake out frauds
lost in the empty lie-down crowd
where is God?
stuck in the elevator of his own creation
take the ventilator out
breathe your own fire
into the chaos
You will be told to keep it down.
You will be called edgy, angry, reckless, dangerous, misinformed.
You will be warned to think before you speak,
but the only ones worrying about your volume will be those who fear your voice.
Truth is treated as noise by those who live
securely behind their own proof of lies.
We’ve been told who to hate,
we’ve been told who to trust,
we’ve been told when to mourn,
we’ve been told what to fear.
And with each order, they’ve made the world quieter, emptier, and easier to control.
A country where anger, grief, heartbreak, and dissent are classified as symptoms instead of signals.
Turn it up until they know your name.
Shatter the windows.
Wake the neighbors.
They tell us to be disarmed.
Let’s make sure they can’t sleep.
Gratitude isn’t a prayer or a posture.
It’s a scar that still throbs when the weather turns—
a reminder you’re somehow still here
while the world keeps finding new ways
to set itself on fire.
It’s outliving a son
and carrying his brilliance like contraband
through a year that tested everyone’s faith
in everything.
It’s knowing the gods are broke,
the politicians are puppets,
the prophets are running side hustles,
and the news is just a fear carousel
you didn’t buy a ticket for.
Gratitude doesn’t live there.
It lives in the cracked places:
the dog who curls against you
like she’s guarding what’s left,
the laugh you didn’t think you had in you,
the friend who calls before the collapse,
the night that lets you pass without a toll.
It lives in the chaos we survived
and the beauty that somehow survived us.
Keep it small.
Keep it sharp.
Pocket-sized and battle-ready—
your own stitched-together compass
for a world that keeps losing north.
Remember:
you’ve been broken open,
but you’re still walking.
You’re still dangerous.
You’re still here.
Mccarthy AKA FATHER SICARIO
Gather close, children of the static.
Tonight’s sermon is brought to you by the Un-United States Government,
that eternal pharmacy of the damned,
and by one Dr. Louis Jolyon West —
Jolly, for short.
A nickname that tells you everything and nothing, which is exactly how the good doctor liked his patients.
Now… I’m not here to tell you whether Charles Manson was a monster or a kid who wrote bad folk songs until the nation decided to turn him into an exorcism ritual for everything it feared about itself.
That’s not my job.
My job is to peel the wallpaper off history and show you the termite tunnels beneath.
Follow me.
Picture Jolly West in his tweed jacket —
a man who looked like he’d apologize
before cutting your consciousness into strips.
A man who weaponized curiosity
and called it compassion.
He’d inject you with questions
before the syringe even touched your skin.
They say he treated broken minds.
I say he manufactured them wholesale.
He was the kind of doctor
who could hand you a glass of water
and three days later
you’d be confessing crimes you didn’t commit
in languages you didn’t speak.
Some say Manson spent time in his orbit.
Some say coincidence is just God hiding the blueprints.
Some say neither Jolly nor Charlie ever met.
And some—
some of us just ask the one question
you’re not supposed to ask in America:
Who benefits when a nation goes mad?
Look around.
Chaos is an industry.
Fear is a commodity.
And the human mind—
well, that’s just clay for the sculptors
who sit in the windowless rooms
three floors below the truth.
But tonight…
tonight we honor Charles.
Not the killer,
but the songwriter he might have been
before someone decided
his chords needed more dissonance.
I imagine him strumming in some halfway house,
dreaming of fame
while a doctor in a lab coat
scribbled notes about “suggestibility thresholds”
and “malleability of identity.”
It doesn’t matter what’s true.
It matters what’s plausible.
And America…
America has a way of making the plausible feel like prophecy.
So let’s raise a glass to Jolly West —
patron saint of pliable minds,
architect of the quiet apocalypse,
the smiling executioner of certainty.
And let’s raise another
to the kids who never asked to be born
into a country that treats the psyche
like a used car part
to be swapped, tested, or discarded.
In the end, children, remember this:
When the devil wears tweed,
we call him “Doctor.”
When the angel grows wild hair
and sings off-key,
we call him “Manson.”
And somewhere between the two
is the truth.
And the truth?
Well…
she’s still missing.
(Response to misinformed feminist poet)
Not every shoulder in an airport is a declaration of war.
Some are just men…
half-awake,
burning their tongues on bad coffee,
late for gate C17,
thinking about rent,
or their kid’s soccer game.
But someone writes a poem,
and suddenly he’s the businessman —
the villain.
The sting without the bee.
Not every man who said, “I don’t believe in labels,”
was dodging a leash.
Some just hated boxes,
the way words lock living things inside.
Some of them loved harder without a label
than others did with rings.
But nobody writes poems about those men.
He said he liked her hair another way.
Maybe it reminded him of his mother,
the woman who read him bedtime stories
when the world was falling apart.
But in the poem, he’s a chauvinist.
No cross-examination allowed.
There were men who fixed the leak at midnight.
Men who held doors,
held breaths,
held their tempers while the world baited them.
But they got folded into the punchline.
Another “boy” in a list of wrongs.
Their quiet was mistaken for guilt.
Their hesitation, for harm.
Some said “period sex is gross”
because no one ever taught them otherwise.
They weren’t gagging at her.
They were gagging on their fathers’ silence.
The one who didn’t say I love you fast enough?
He wasn’t a monster.
He was terrified.
Not of love —
of being written into someone else’s vengeance poem.
He was standing at the ledge of his heart,
waiting for a language that wasn’t a trap.
Not every man who walked away was running.
Some just got tired
of opening their mouths
and hearing the same labels echo back:
chauvinist.
toxic.
boy.
Their stories were pre-written.
Their names replaced with archetypes.
This isn’t some rehab for men.
This is an ode to the mislabeled.
The men who walked gently through a world
that kept calling them wolves,
even as they were the ones
building the fences.
They weren’t saints.
But they weren’t the villains in your receipts, either.
They were just men.
Complicated.
Flawed.
Human.
And maybe,
just maybe,
worth a verse of their own
Circus Truth
The television pukes in every corner bar,
anchormen with porcelain teeth,
their jaws, clacking wind-up dolls,
selling fear like popcorn at the carnival.
You don’t pick your truth anymore—
it’s handed to you, pre-chewed,
a soggy cigarette butt that’s passed around the alley and back.
The left bleeds red ink,
the right bleeds black bile,
and the middle—
there is no middle,
just a beige carpet soaked with the bloody chunder of yesterday’s spin cycle.
Every headline is a slot machine:
pull the lever,
watch the cherries line up to spell
WAR, ASSASSINATION, PANIC, OUTRAGE, WOKE, UAP’S, THE SIMULATION.
They give you “choice”
like a prison cafeteria—
mystery meat or a misery meet with sauce.
And you nod,
mouth full of microwaved narrative,
because it’s all as good as plastic and BPA going down.
The anchors smile,
the podcasters scream,
the Tik-Tokers beg to be put back in lockers.
The news ticker scrolls like scripture,
and the gospel is always the same:
stay tuned, stay scared,
stay stupid enough to buy what they’re selling.
Meanwhile the truth—
the real thing—
squeezes into a clown suit,
red nose, floppy shoes,
juggling grenades for clicks.
The crowd boos,
but keeps buying tickets.
That’s the joke, kid:
truth doesn’t matter—
the circus sells out anyway.
They sell us hope in paper cups.
We buy it, tip the priest in the apron.
A man curses at a parking meter.
Another shoots drywall into his veins.
The rats read stock tickers.
They know more than the professors.
God skipped town.
Left his Bible in the Motel trash.
Politicians grin with teeth like knives.
We clap while they steal our shoes.
The absurd thing is—
we nod.
Every damn time.
Some of us were dumb enough to think we were chosen. Destined for greatness. I was one of those fools.
Then life swung for the skull—my father gone when I was just twenty-four, my son gone at nineteen. That’s the punchline. And I’m still here, scribbling like a clown juggling knives at his own funeral.
Every line I write turns to rope. And rope’s a funny bastard—you can climb it, you can hang from it. Lifeline and noose, same damn thing.
And here’s where I laugh at myself: I can’t stand writers who always find a way to make it about them. But don’t mistake this for that—this isn’t me making it about me. This is me making it about you, making it about me. That’s the kind of pretzel you twist into when you’ve got nothing left but your own shadow to wrestle with.
Greatness? That’s the carrot they dangle so you’ll chase yourself into the grave. The truth is simpler: I’m under the gallows, grinning through broken teeth, laughing at my own execution, and the only reason I keep writing is because hanging myself with my own words is the one thing I’ve ever done well.
Almost Arriving
Every time I inch toward something called normal,
when the day almost tricks me into believing I’ve arrived,
doom slips its hand back on my shoulder.
I will never accept it.
Not in this life, not in any.
Jack is gone, they tell me,
but I spit back the only truth I know:
He may be gone,
but he will never, ever, ever be forgotten.
You will know his name.
You will know his story.
If I remain in this strange matrix of survival,
it is only to keep him alive in every syllable,
every note, every silence that dares to fill the room.
My grief is my rebellion.
My love, unkillable.
A Memo from the Static
(to whom it may concern — and it should concern you)
Thank you, Don Lemon —
for proving charisma is a rental car with the check engine light on.
Thank you, Joy Behar —
for reminding us that hysteria in high heels is still just hysteria.
Thank you, Brian Stelter —
for being the human form of a shrug wrapped in beige.
Thank you, Rachel Maddow —
for delivering panic with the pacing of a bedtime story for insomniacs.
Thank you, Tucker Carlson —
for staring into the camera like it owed you child support.
Thank you, Anderson Cooper —
for being the ghost of journalism, sipping gin in a silver spoon.
Thank you, Bill Maher —
for aging like a bottle of vinegar and thinking it’s wine.
Thank you, every suit who ever told us what to think —
while your hands stayed clean and your checks kept clearing.
Thank you, algorithms —
for serving us rage with a smile and selling our boredom by the pound.
Thank you, influencers —
for dying your hair, your souls, and your timelines until nothing meant anything.
Thank you, virtue signalers —
for raising flags you’d never carry into a real fight.
And finally, thank you, silence —
for being the only honest sound left in this whole goddamn circus.
Signed,
The Static
(still here, still humming, waiting for the last face to fade)