I want to stay up late, drinking coffee while the moon stands high. Talking with friends or, strangers, why not both? Discussing philosophy, the stars, literature and art. Hearing and sharing thoughts of of our own. Not talking points framed by others or references to safe culture, pop themed entertainment lollies. I want to sit across from another mind, or minds, see their eyes warm with thought, feeling, passion. To feel their words, to know they mean it. I want to be there when dangerous things are said, when threads of humanity linger between sorrow, regret, to be puled back by joy and humour.

Is there enough coffee? Is there a night long enough?

I want to sit on the street corner, as it rains. To see the city in a wet mirror of the pavement. To see the lights turn out, the pedestrians thin away. The cars go home. The conversation ever green, not capped by a deadline.

Where jazz music wafts like candle smoke, lingering and abound. The evening could cry into an Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks in a purgatory between out and home. Thinning out into a Theo Michael scene, many down to two. It does not need to end in twisted and soiled sheets. Just different minds, not constrained or dependent. Free, thinking and embracing creative flights.

It could be by the beach or in the bush around a fire, flames licking and crackling over wood, while smoke wraps us all. No drunk stares, no inebriated slurs as toxic liquids fill the belly, losing thoughts of boozes selfish bluster. To hear minds clear of weed or mushrooms, not intoxicated by such conversational crutches. Those who need such ingredients to speak deep, where never that deep in thought to start with.

I want to talk long, maybe kiss, or hug, hold a strangers hand while they share with enthusiasm or heart break a truth they know. Not to know that time is soon to be up. An alarm clock waits, where my mind must be buried, when the morning comes my body is all they need. Carry this, dig that, deliver, unload. Labour, toil. The prison of honourable work, good for me, but always beneath those can pay for it. I want to be able to stay up beyond the yawns, to let the creative mind run free. To unshackle it, to be a mind, a man of thought and with the capacity to think and imagine. Not to be muscle in a singlet. A utility of labour.

Has that time passed? Is the world beyond the need for a multi-faceted man. Experience and wit no longer wanted? No market value. Is it for us to grift? To lie with a smile? To play the game? Or, should we seek dignity, to be a labourer, needed but not regarded. The proletariat poet, the writer with a shovel. You were a fighter? Clearly too many punches to the head, a degree unused, if used would that be better? An academic, like everyone else. Is that how intellect is validated? Chase a career, the sole ambition is wealth. Or, debt which seems to be the worlds badge of pride.

I want to put pen to paper, to feel the words live. Each sentence different to every mind. Mind you, too few read, Repulsed by the harsh requirements of thought, to sit and consider. To actively participate inside the art. Ideas, inspirations, memories, moments, imagined worlds to unimagined universes or those lost to time, strangers into friends and characters embedded as familiars. There was a time.

The puddle on the pavement, a mirror to another place, time. If James Baldwin only saw a puddle, then who could blame lesser minds. Must it be for an artist, to see what could be? “An ugly puddle of water,” is all he could see. It took an artist, his friend, Beauford Delaney to help him see. To find depth and beauty inside the mundane, the over looked, the every night fixture. To see that beauty and depth, even in the ugly and painful. To find it, to seek it out or just observe.

Such were the thoughts of a lowly labourer. As I toiled in the sun, hot, while the work was sticky and incessant. The clouds bloomed grey, heavy with rain. It was not cold. Just wet. Heavy drops, splashing enough to undo work. A summer rain, though no Belinda Carlisle was near. Then, a puddle in the pavement. It grew as the rain splashed. Just dirty water. In it, I could see a reflection, a mirror. The sky, trees, the world around. I even saw a little of myself. In that mirror was where I wanted to be. Sunburned, sore back, and throbbing hands. Dirty.

I went back to work and thought about the tale of Baldwin and Delaney. Just a labourer. But inside the puddle, I was where I wanted to be.

“(redacted) said that she felt gods presence next to her when she was in bed.. she knows that jesus watches over her. And he helped save her life. Whoops”

“You should dress up as him (Jesus) when you see her.”

The humour of rapists.

Men close to power. Men of power. Government and the wealthy class. Those in academia. The elites of society. Those who are powerful because millions of armed agents of government make them so.

Millions of ordinary people, citizens, who believe in the hierarchies of coercion and ensured through gatekeeping, believe in the church of government so long as their hands are fed more welfare, more jobs funded by coercive extraction, people who have to believe in the system. The ordinary and elites alike, who claim it can be investigated, again, reformed, again. Until the next gaggle of rapists, extortionists and murderers ascend.

The gods that sit in the thrones, never believed in it like the commoner does. The gods ascended because they understood it existed to be utilised, climbed. They are powerful because they rose above the ranks of the common person and rested on the shoulders of zealots and mercenaries, equally in the service of governments and institutions. Lower down, most know that failures are promoted, politics is rewarded above competency, honesty and dignity are shunned and suppressed, grift makes money more than honest work.

The gods see genocide as a land deal.

They see a young female, tethering on womanhood, the green youth of childhood as sweet nectar for their tastes, a commodity. A piece of flesh. Fuck chattel to be taken and discarded.

Yet, YOU have to believe in the system. You have to love government. You can not imagine a world without it. You need it. Funding comes from debt, taxation. Theft sold as a benevolent act of redistribution, rather than as a mechanism of control and punishment and a means to fun wars and schemes that suit a monopoly. Justifies it.

If only the gods were saints, then it would all work out. Just wait, vote again, reform some more, Tax! Regulate! Coerce harder! It will work this time, next time, Utopia is so close on the horizon, if only we crawl across the bones of the innocent, the sweat of the extorted and the blood of the raped and murdered. The laws and taxes will set us all free, in this Utopia!

The gods love you for it. They rule because of it. They are above it all, above you.

Dress as Jesus to fuck with her. As you fuck her. No idea how old she is. It’s unlikely she really wants to be there.

Does it matter to most? The reality most income is based on, the belief in it, is founded on coercion. The monopoly on violence is all a government is, It will murder, kidnap and beat any one who defies it. The trade off is that it provides order, stability, infrastructure. These are the things it provides to legitimise it’s existence. The social contract that no one signed, but was born to suffer. That’s the myth, the lie the gods need to reign.

Walk into the Canberra war memorial, see those foreign names, home grown martyrs to be revered as saints in a necropolis dedicated to violence. The blood sacrifice of glory, pride and nation. Over there. Killing then. Over there. The Unknown Soldier, a revered emblem, for all warriors, the tip of a nations pride, the empires blood sacrifice. What did he die for, nothing found in Washington, D.C. Nothing found on Epstein Island, he did for the things inside of his own mind, his own heart. A sacrifice in the end for them, over there, killing and dying, far from home, for them.

Manifest destiny? Breathing room? Gods Will? The White man’s burdern? The Nakba’s? Exterminate first, then land develop. Investment, jobs, gentrification above the dead. That’s how civilisations are built.

Freedoms erode. What can you do? What are you allowed to ingest into your own body? What can you view? What can you say? Are you a child, under the guise of an insecure and obsessed parent? Or, are you both a cog in the mechanism of a system that needs flesh to function, to tax, as armour should another government threaten, to validate it’s power. You are a subject beneath human gods. Flawed, immoral, ambitious and cruel. But subjects love their gods, they must, or the gods do not thrive.

Remember. Never forget. Such words were muttered as the death camps were opened up. The pale, skinny bodies of the survivors, days from death trembled with each breath, a piece of bread dangerous to their starving stomachs. That genocide was legal. Codified by a government and it’s allied governments. Lawyers and academics convened to rationalise the mass murder. It was a rationale built on exceptionalism, hatred. Policy. A job program. The killers were ordinary men, who believed in adventure and benefit to themselves. Gods made it possible, in that case a father figure of their fatherland, a great leader for the cult of race and nationhood.

Gulags and purges, mass starvation, mass murder, torture, rape all for the collective good. A scientific utopia devised from the minds of imperfect planners, tinkering with human life, academics and engineers deploying slaves for a planned economy of starvation and scarcity. Not for the gods, not for those who are more equal. Comrade leader, comrade gods each rose above and ascended even as the slavery and mass death was because of the proclamations of socialist egalitarianism.

And, should children be blown to pieces in the jungles of South East Asia, across a border it was an ‘illegal’ and ‘secret’ war. On the other side, it was a legal and open war. The innocent died beneath the bombs of the same air force. The illegal war meant as much as the legal one. Semantics to further rationalise the government. No president flew the bombers. Just men, eager to serve and kill. Thousands dead. The bombs fell regardless of legal or otherwise. It never mattered. Except for the murdered.

We can see children’s bodies falling to pieces as they are pulled from rubble, does it matter if it is in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Vietnam, Cambodia? To the grieving it always matters. To those, who lover government, there is nothing it does which can make them question it’s legitimacy. Religion has that power. It’s an infection of dependency which erodes morality and ensures loyalty, based on coercion and dependence. And reward.

What is more horrific than seeing a child burned to pieces, skin, bone, clothing melted into a disfigured mess, mouth frozen from screaming in pain during their final moments. To an American do they care if it was there government? To an Israeli, a Russian, a Briton? The policy makers made a decision and their uniformed warriors must act upon it. This is an understood reality. Its reasoned, rationalised. Academics give lectures on it. Legal documents are printed in the blood of such victims. Careers are made.

Is it any wonder that those who sit at the very top are capable of such sexual sadism? They would find a humours bravado to share it via a Gmail exchange? Most love them, or at lest reason with their power because of money, debt. It’s all debt now. Barely cash, certainly not sound. Meaningless now, based on belief, all our belief. Debt. To be paid back when? Never? Inflation, tomorrow? How? Debt, to buy things most don’t want or need. More landfill? To indulge into vices mostly there to numb and forget our days? Days spent in jobs most don’t love, for debt. To buy things to make the time lost and energy spent seem worth it? The older we get, the less horizons we have to climb towards, more are behind us. Time is more important, moments and yet, we now give that away for debt. That’s the magic of the gods.

Is it any wonder those who would benefit financially and as the status of elites above such a system, such nations that they would see an innocent girl, or woman with such dismissive disdain. To these gods of power it’s simply masturbation. To her, it’s her whole life.

The gods maybe incapable of changing how they think. Their subjects however, have no excuse.