Lucky Rabbit

I found a rabbit the other day, outside my house. I thought of its head: body crushed by a truck or car. Life is a futile chess game, missing everything save the pawns. The poor thing looked up at me with its hazy, unpasted peeper, from of its pile of pasta sauce and fur, at a moaning, gray sky and it was pissed!

I saw it’s severed, mashed dome screaming through the cosmos like shrapnel; its eyes and teeth red with fanatical revenge fantasies. It hopped an ethereal pecking order from the steel-belted beast that obliterated it; to the bi-pod that handled the beast; on up the food chain (so to speak) until it found out whomever started carving up prairies and fields for clone housing. This little head spat acid from its vampiric mouth and laid historical waste to the so-and-sos responsible. Poor fucker.

I looked from the smudged square to an adjacent oil slick (from which I witnessed an eons deceased , irate velociraptor materialize – screaming for vengeance -- incensed at its carcass being processed to make pocket fishermen). I realized it was beer o’clock, so I tromped into my house; the smattering nihilism of the human subspecies rattling my brain as I flipped on the stereo, gathering my frothy canister of fermentation.

The aggressive sounds pouring from my stereo jived me back to a misery-loves-company place. It wasn’t the rat-feces plateau of misery which got me down. It was this bloated, suit-clad martini-and-plutonium vision of reality. It flowed from the way life can be like cheap beer; the way it tastes like downstream horse piss, but in the pinch of a low-budget night, it works the same magic. You yearn for the good stuff but you can't scrape for it every time. And the hangovers can be just as bad a drum circle. It’s that carrot of prosperity, the one Status drives past with us on the freeway. All the time you know her tits are fake and her smile is just as impotent as her date, but you can’t help thinking how much fun it would be to be the pinball in between those silicon bumpers - if only for a second. Then the dawn lights you up: Wouldn’t it be clever not having to worry about getting sick or being flipped from your pad in lieu of a fucking good meal? They must have it all, right? Maybe they do, but all is nothing, all is a fraud. All is the shine on the game show host’s blinding teeth.

So I pace the place in a kamikaze furor, all-the-while sinister staffs plaster me from the stereo. The cheap beer rolls down and gets recycled and the world looks somewhat brighter - like taking off your sunglasses at dusk. You think 'maybe it’s not all so offal.' It just might not be. So I perch on the couch like a gargoyle, contemplating which record will support my new-found optimistic mental erection. Musical porno, I suppose. So I dig up something which sounds like sandpaper grating with the grain as opposed to against it. Between that and the alcohol-blood transfusion, I think: hey this shithole ain’t such a dead horse! Then I looked out the window and watch the neighbor’s mutt ingesting the poor rabbit’s head. Que sirah…

But I didn’t lose it completely. Now mind you, this wasn't exactly a a spotlight and choral backed epiphany, but this world is a dog eat hare-guts world, and sometimes it's not such a bad gig. It wasn's as much a chainsaw to the guts illumination, as much as it was a surreptitious sucker-punch. What made reality a filth-greased chute was the vast and under-realized potential of our species. As I sat sucking down somewhere between eight and number ten of the night (speaking of potential lost), it seemed that my cultural dimmer-switch was set for an evening – a long evening – of romantic alcohol-based denial.

We, the flickering night light in the bathroom that people are, can smell the miasmic void we're dangling above, but can't seem to scrounge-up any proper contingency plans. We have so many options beyond our videodrome, camera-headed existence, but we let the high-ballers sip from their opulence, while driving their economic combines through our fragile swaying existences, as we gasp for new and better reality constructs. Our TVs reflect our own failures, allowing us to twist the daggers into our backs until we’ve bled-out to nothing but the gut-rot whiskey, which itself was fermented from our ho-hums and oh wells (like the roads paved with our idyllic intent). Where did we go wrong? Can we stop the future before it consumes us like morbidly obese buffet goers, all set up with their between-plate magazines? Sometimes I hear it in the night - a subtle murmur - the scraping metal on metal of our collective unconscious’ gears. But it’s so faint that I often attribute it to sleep-deprived or intoxicated aural hallucinations.

Outside in the yard, my mangy neighbor is smacking his lips above the partially-incgested Sumerian astrology chart which used to dart around the yard. I’ve once again smacked into the brick wall of my own short comings again as the number nine (or is it ten?) pop-hisses it's arctic, hoppy goodness at me. Gotta flip the record. Maybe change it all-together.

Wherever you are, oh severed bunny head -distended and ruptured and angry - do your worst!