“When the sun came out red through the clouds of my last valley afternoon, Terry led me to Farmer Heffelfinger’s barn. [. . .] We put crates together, she brought blankets from the house, and I was all set except for a great hairy tarantula that lurked at the pinpoint top of the barn roof. Terry said it wouldn’t harm me if I didn’t bother it. I lay on my back and stared at it. I went out to the cemetery and climbed a tree. In the tree I sang ‘Blues Skies.’ [. . .] We went back to the barn; I made love to her under the tarantula. What was the tarantula doing?”
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road–

Like a fish oblivious to water,
The freedom of slavery is what we prefer
When we prefer a life made through exchange.

The vagrant heart becomes lost in the skies
Once from the earth, humanity becomes estranged
And being is measured through what one buys.

So I took that money for a haircut
And got us all who’re otherwise in a rut
Loaded on that night with a big orange moon,

And made out with a pretty girl in a cornfield
But then in the morning I’d lost my shoes.
Days earlier the gash between my eyes had healed,

Stitched up even after I tried to flee
The hospital, and a flashback swells suddenly
Hobbling away from the grilled cheese sale

To fund the protest, in protest of the protest
Humming ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’ in a vale
And wondering why that first love seems always the best.

Lurking beyond the tracks on the east side,
A form of the Baron Samedi needs a ride
Down Liberty Street then left on Douglass.

I think to myself, to eradicate all the weeds
In Sherman Park, there’d never be enough gas
On this earth, no matter how much amphetamine

Got slung, no matter how many hours
Of community service. I plucked a flower
From the grove for my biracial angel,

Near the gravel pits, where crazy motherfucker
Dwight in a drunken rage destroyed his cell,
Set it ablaze to piss it out, on the verdure

Hit by a stream of sun, setting now through
The sylvan gaps in between the woods and our crew.
A distance or difference that exists

Only at the level of individual
Minds, whereas interconnection persists
Throughout the empty space within each particle;

Lurching down Water Street to a crash pad
As it were, and yet this way of life of nomads
In tune with transience is a disgrace?

It’s the social contract itself that imposes
A bellum omnium contra omnes
On free associating people; so

If allegiance to the State’s not voluntary
Then I guess it’s a pirate’s life for me.
Ideologies of Freedom are good

At dominating people’s minds covertly.
Make a person worship money, you could
Convince them: Freedom to Consume is Liberty.