The Nihilist Romantics

Paul Murufas











Be About It Press, October 2014







crimes of opportunity

I
when the earthquake hit
a fire broke out
& we looted walmart with the rest of them

II
tear gas in the air
alcohol in arms
running with our heads down
to a pick-up truck
in the parking lot

III
she looked for her iphone
but it was gone
and we were gone
around the corner
and out of sight

IV
little ring
i heard you whisper from the safe
cash for gold!
take me to the merchants....

V
"Whoever cracks the safe gets first pick on the jewelry."
D said, & then J broke its door off with a crowbar.

the gold store was a revelation.

"well boys, you can eat lunch anywhere on the boulevard today, ha ha ha,"
the merchant quipped while he counted out the cash,
but his look under the surface said
"I know your type.
something smells like a thief in here and its you two kids."

they didn't get lunch on the boulevard
but flipped their kickstands and pedaled away
as fast as their bikes would go



stars crossed

I
These are the type of things I say to her:
"honey honey
love you dearest
sweet nothing sweet nothing".
but she is skeptical of me.
Last week we got in a fight and I said
"do you see me as your enemy?"

"sometimes!" she replied,
as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

and there's no arguing with that, in fact,
I think she is smart to be so skeptical, and see me as her enemy,
and keep me at arms length.
she has a talent for self-preservation.
she is an expert at the icy silence
i am an expert at running my mouth for no reason.

when the words run out
i hear my breath feeding back through the microphone,
and separately
we contemplate the radiation of a cellphone to the head.

II
i'm not being fair. she can be so sweet to me.
why else would i call her honey?
i would give up everything else before my pet names,
or the selfies she reluctantly took with me when I visited in August.

now she says she will visit in September, when the moon is full.
she is very particular about these things,
& certain that the stars are determinate for us-
Her Saturn Return, Her Lilith Return, my Neptune sextile Neptune.
I don't understand but say "Okay, honey"
like feigning ignorance will pardon my indifference.

For her it is dead serious. She astro-stalks me.
She has my natal chart saved
on a ridiculous website with a paywall over its love advice,
& i hope she's right and it's intuitively true.

when we talk on the phone too much we get in stupid fights.
but she sees something in the stars for us

four hundred miles away I am looking for the moon.








10:26pm

I.
order of operations

my relationship is going to crash and burn,
i am jerking the wheel off-road
a little more each time we speak.
the depressed person doesn't use logic,
they use emotions to manipulate themselves into helplessness.
or conversely they learn to stop feeling anything, like a junkie,
who adopts the logic of supply and demand as it applies
to ruining a life in style.
my existential angst is that we want different things
not just her and me, but me and the rest of all of you
i want to be high again in my teenage body,
with my parents at work
and a new pack of cigarettes on the table.
you are somewhere else, & want to help me,
after you help yourself, an order of operations
i am mounting a campaign of denial against.

II.
the glamorous intellectuals

being in love is worse than being in jail

you can't see the walls.

at the edge of a miserable silence
exponential stupidities are boiling on my tongue,
things better left unsaid with four hundred miles of
distance to close, in the second week of the cold semester.

she is as lovely as she ever was
i have become weak,
uncertain she'll have time for us
when she finds her new liaisons
abstract men unknown to me,
men from the future with blurred faces
contagious appetites, terrible smiles
stretching open towards me across all of California.

in my nightmare I am throwing things in a bag,
jamming the key into my car door
& racing up the 5 to see her.
police sirens wail on the grapevine,
bakersfield passes in blur.
modesto, santa nella, dublin, bay.
tires skid and the clutch lets out.
"I'm here! I'm here!" I shout.
but the air conditioner knows that I'm asleep...

until I wake up sweating in the Southland.
(the 405 is flowing,
the smog compressed before the rain)
and crawl back to the internet
like a homecoming,
to squeeze a little space
between
the new commodities
and
the glamorous intellectuals.























the nihilist romantics

I
when the tide washes out

it points
away from here.

II
some people just dont want to have a future, i snorted.
its that feeling that well always want to chase she said.
and we chased and chased and chased
but never caught what we were trying to catch.

III
a long time ago
i thought the future came from a balloon,
& there must be something to that
if discarded stanzas of the past
still flicker on a lonely synapse

or was it not that long ago after all?
when youve held a belt for someone
time becomes confusing
a month or year might pass
but in a dream youll be there with the belt again
like an itch, or a twitch, or a bad memory.

once i thought there
couldnt be no future fast enough
but I learned you could get high on the future too,
like if i wanted something bad enough
it could ground me to the earth
& keep me from hurling out of the atmosphere and into space.

time has re-arranged itself, words on words on words,
a love poem a drug poem a poem about the past

I was once naive
now things are filtered through a different light
my own failings, my own struggle, my own.
now I am here, in the middle of things, now I am myself.
though once I was someone else entirely-
washed out with the tide,
& receded.

back at home,
the dog's gone blind.
she wags her tail but points her nose to the left of me.
Dad says "take her for a walk"-- but she won't walk!
she stops at the edge of the lawn and tries to shake the leash off.
like me, she is afraid of what she cannot see.
or maybe she is bored with it.
she stares at me from rheumy, running eyes.
In my head I hear the dog's rebuke-
"I've had it with this bloodless fucking suburb.
let me stay at home and scratch my sores in peace."

& Mom still yells at the computer-
why shouldn't she?
the word processor has changed
& all she wanted was for things to stay the same.
growing old has not deterred her from the issue of her son's salvation-
she wants me to parlay with Jesus.
I tell her that i can't hear God. she says I have to try- try!
& for a moment I feel naked and remember trying,
but that was someone else, he has receded from me.

the tide washed out and points away-
carefully, carefully
as not to break my mothers heart
or stumble into relapse accidentally.
these things I can measure. by the day, by the month,
by the cigarettes and words and dollars, adding up and flaming out in turn.
the tide recedes and comes back in
it washes me from long beach into rehab, from hollywood to pasadena,
from oakland to a san francisco courtroom and los angeles again,
& back and forth & back and forth,
on a blue line into long beach,
to the house where i was raised in.

i was a squatter with cold toes but now I have a bath to take.

instead of shoplifting I add to the grocery list.

instead of riots i wait at the crosswalk.

even the tear gas is nostalgic by the glimmer of the past-
surging through a crowd with Emma
the nihilist romantics
holding hands
for the end
of the world.

the fire goes out. the tear gas clears.
when I see Emma next it's been a year.
she's picking up the pieces, and we laugh about them now-

"some people just don't want to have a future" i snorted-
"it's that feeling that we'll always want to chase" she said,
& oh, i know the feeling, like the wind, like a fire,
like drugs in the middle of the night
with no sunrise and no morning and no alarm clock










optimism

I hope the pig
who murdered Michael Brown
gets thrown in prison
and shanked to death
on the toilet.


































Four Meditations on Wild Reaction [Reaccion Salvajes]

Note: The photograph below, and the quotes preceding each section of this poem, are
from the first communiqu of Wild Reaction (RS), issued from Cuernavaca, Mexico in
August 2014 and translated by waronsociety.noblogs.org in September.



I
"After a little more than three years of criminal-terrorist activity, the group
Individualists Tending toward the Wild (ITS) begins a new phase in this open war
against the Technoindustrial System... from now on the attacks against technology and
civilization will be signed with the new name of Wild Reaction (RS)."

my new hero is the vanishing point:
somewhere and nowhere all at once

an internet modem in the mouth of a vacuum,
a smartphone dipped in gold. dipped in diamonds.
encrusted with priceless gems and introduced at half time of the superbowl

the camera-man in a grip's union panning wide:

the new commodities the glamorous intellectuals
a motherboard and a mainframe,
a smartwatch a smart wrist
a smart organ grown on a scaffold

introducing the smartheart. the smartbrain.

with facial, gait, and brand recognition. the datacruncher.
a twenty four surveillance system. an integrated security network
an organic artificial intelligence. a security guarantee,

a biotechnologist with his brains blown out by a terrorist.

the vanishing point:
somewhere and nowhere
like a parcel bomb to a university,

like a drone strike.

a decorated airforce pilot pulling triggers via satellite projection
and
children with their lungs pierced under rubble
amid charred remains, categorical denials, cover-ups. compliant journalists.
The Los Angeles Times emailing the CIA flack- "how do we spin this for you guys?"
whitewashed and erased
casualties and censors, nowhere, disappearing,
but somewhere like a desert, like a drone bleached in sun on the horizon
like the drone that hovers on the graveyard
of a murdered child

II
" Everything that involves civilization, technology, and progress will be fiercely
attacked....And if for that reason, during an attack, some citizen is wounded or killed,
we wont care, we will be indifferent and indiscriminating...the community, the sheep,
the society does not merit our consideration...let it be clear, if they cross our path they
are going to regret it"

from the top-down, an algorithm whirs
we bleed out a new trajectory
a new robot for the woes of each preceding robot.
some things you can count on
the handcuff and the helicopter,
the scientist and the statist,
fascism and the hashtag:
selfies in the military. selfies with a pig at the police station.
UCLA zionists. pro-israeli facebook propaganda.
a 12 year old who stands with the IDF.
journalism at the end of the world:
live tweeting an execution. live tweeting sex.
fucking on Google Glass, gazing into my partner's Glass.
the missed connection the casual encounter
a smartphone dipped in cum. dipped in blood

it's biological
to have a wild reaction

when 'Support Officer Darren Wilson" makes a hundred thousand on GoFundMe.
when cops cash out for killer cops
when pigs wave flags when black kids die
when pig-lovers wave their flags while Wilson runs and hides

I can see the swastikas on their American flags, in the infrared lighting
the torchlight of a burning cross at their Klan rallies
the howdy-neighbor fascists of suburbia

some things money can't buy, or can't buy our way out of
a drone wars killing kids gone unreported and ignored
a drone strike like an email sound, like railing lines of adderall
& poets in a jacuzzi with their necks laid back,
& poets like benign tumors,
& poets like a temporary tattoo
washing off, down the drain and into the vanishing point

III
"...now RS is formed by nihilist saboteurs, incendiary nomads, individualist delinquents,
terrorist anarchists, politically and morally incorrect critics."

postcard from Mexico:
"A nanotechnologist with his brains blown out on the pavement."

postcard from Italy:
"Anarchists headed to prison for knee-capping a nuclear scientist."

postcard from San Francisco:
"The Best Fried Chicken Under $60 In The Mission"

postcard from Texas:
"We've got to finish that pipeline!"

postcard from Washington:
"Bombing Iraq again means never having to say you're sorry."

postcard from Washington:
"Drone striking Syria means never having to say you're sorry."

postcard from Texas:
"The 10 Best Strip Clubs For Bribing Congressional Aids"

postcard from Pelican Bay:
"You call a man a monster and then you put him in a box for the rest of his life."

postcard from Chowchilla:
"No one can prove a rape if the COs turn off the cameras first."

postcard from Guantanamo:
"You lock someone up for twelve, thirteen, fourteen years, and they never face any
charges, and you spy on their lawyer, and you torture them and censor the names of
the torturers."

postcard from India:
"Draining aquifers for a Pepsi factory means never having to say you're sorry."

postcard from Brazil
"Commodifying the rainforest means never having to say you're sorry."

postcard from Ferguson in the Media:
"Demonize the looter. Demonize the rioter. Demonize anyone who fights back.
Constrain yourself. Work with institutions. Run for Mayor. Sign a Petition. Call
yourself an activist."

postcard from Ferguson in the Media:
"Put out the fire. Demonize the fire-starters. Separate dissenters into categories: the
good protester and the bad. Visualize yourself as a fire extinguisher. Visualize world
peace. Lay down."

postcard from Wall Street:
"We are peaceful! Lay down! Lay down! Lay down!"

postcard from Mexico:
"A nanotechnologist with his brains blown out on the pavement."



IV
"... we are at the edge of the abyss, since we do not intend to adapt ourselves to the
system nor to its submissive society, nor to its moral values....That primitive essence
continues with us, it is not domesticated, it feels uncomfortable in the cities and it
whispers constantly to us: 'You do not belong here, destroy your cage.'

I do not belong here-
it's barely believable I can exist at all

head under poisoned sky
drinking water pumping
from a river drying up,
and it will all change in my life time
but I don't think that's today.

in Southern California nobody
reads eco-terrorist communiqus from Mexico
& you would almost think that
water springs eternal from the tap.
& there would be eternal smoothies,
eternal traffic on the freeways
gasoline eternal from the pump--
Los Angeles!

we'll live forever, yes
they're shooting porn in The Valley now
I can hear the sloppy fucking sounds from Glendale
on a video that will live on and on,
on the North side of a border from Wild Reaction

somewhere and nowhere
like hollywood,
like heaven,
like the ocean turned to acid
in a waking dream






















Dedication

This one is for my big sister Michelle, who has looked out for me from the first.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank Alexandra for providing the impetus and encouragement,

and Eydie McConnell for the art photography.
































Notes on the artwork

The three collages in this chapbook contain both found materials and writing/art in
the author's own hand. The images and photographs used were poached from
various sources. Special notations, in order of appearance:

not that long ago after all
Photos from internet image search "black tar heroin". The Narcotics Anonymous
key tags were passed down to the author several years ago, per N.A tradition of
"birthday chip" recipients gifting their key tags to a "newcomer" (roughly defined as
anyone with less than 30 days clean, regardless of prior N.A attendance).

the cold planets and the small bodies
Found science books, Found greeting card.

the nihilist romantics
All photographs in this collage appear in We Are An Image From The Future: The
Greek Revolt of December 2008 (AK Press) The collage's base is a Found Valentine's
card.




























Contact:

Be About it Press
beaboutipress@gmail.com
beaboutitpress.tumblr.com

Paul Murufas
paulmurufas@gmail.com
asnakethateatsitself.tumblr.com



Portrait by Eydie McConnell