the walls are empty tonight wading through cigarette smoke drowning in faces dressed up and watching try to suck it down a match to warm a tomb 'cause laughter is cancer 'cause cancer is laughter lean against a stair speak another line then seal it with a smile sulking in lipstick take a trip from you until the shapes dissolve dropping and forget ‘til time is the aimless cry into the headlight lost in the back seat ambition crawls backwards on vinyl and sober generations driving drunk for generations...

bolt the front door latch the windows to the bedroom where the dead go lay down; inhale eyes closed; set sail i sleep; feet curled soul slips; unfurled white pills; sin grows bottle hollows trapped in skin and leaving pretend i dream of black skies when the day dies in wisps of gray god slept today i have a secret of lies they told you peered through a black hole found heaven is a fable

Venus deaf and dumb Born a shell to sea Nothing bothers me Empty surf and sand Skating on the land Accredit the sun The blaming has begun We’ve paid it to the mall We’ve built the bricks to fall Try to understand We’ve failed on the land It’s time to leave this place Our home is in the sea A wave upon the sand Feet walking from the land you. you. you

She hides in a closet on shoebox lids through musty suits uncle works on a bottle cigarettes, TV set mom and dad scrape their plates by the Christmas tree they don’t see him the bedroom door, closes in and there’s a shotgun underneath his couch "but he finds me...and he loves me to keep..." "I’m feeling sick. Can we go back to grandma’s yet?" out on the porch the house was loud; she told him so walked into the yard to get some air, against a tree "little bitch," he called. "too conceited to stand by me I’ll do you a favor put you in your place." grounded, hands around her face "I’m feeling sick. Can we leave the party yet?" Empty grows a hungry smile staring down trapped by the gaze a body; the object; body; libido

"Adding the slaves to the calculation of wealth distribution would not bring early America up to the level of European inequality, nor would it change the fact that inequality rose sharply as the 19th century progressed. But, that point aside, no account of life in the U.S. could overlook either the slaves or their descendants." "The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." "Americans of African descent have profoundly influenced the political economy, culture, and physical landscape of this country in every imaginable way. To take an example relevant to this context, as David Roediger shows in his admirable book, The Wages of Whiteness, slavery greatly inhibited the development of class consciousness of white workers, who were all too easily persuaded that wage labor represented a kind of freedom in contrast with slavery. This delusion of independence and superiority persists today, over 130 years after the end of slavery, in highly racialized notions of welfare dependency and the "underclass," disparaging caricatures that help sustain white workers' identification with their bosses' politics and perpetuate countless abuses of black Americans. We have so racialized class that class is often barely visible - which is not, by any means, an attempt to subordinate race to class, since you can hardly talk about one without talking about the other." "In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation." "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class." "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

Monday morning in September got a phone call from far away you had died in your sleep You couldn’t talk or see the faces and voices around you. The year we spent in your room we pushed you around the hospital grounds. This was your song then and its your song now.

I own the lost & found He owns the airport I own the airwaves and all the spaces Inside my cardboard box, there are pieces that don’t belong I own the lost & found. She owns the sellers of the parts I have a cardboard box She has the pieces Between the buildings You call those spaces Dig up the concrete Put in a building again But if we don’t want it They’ll build it up faster for sure Because you call them spaces And they call them places you don’t belong I own the lost & found He owns the sellers of the parts I have a cardboard box He has the pieces I saw a girl today her pretty face was real low Behind her silence, there was violence for sure She’s got a space some broken parts She told me to go away and put her hand against my sweater I own the lost & found He owns the sellers of the parts I have a cardboard box He has the pieces I know a neighborhood A man there was shot up good Blood in their sidewalk Blood on their windowpanes He had a child A blue-eyed boy But someone was angry Someone was sad enough to kill I own the lost & found She owns the sellers of the parts I have a cardboard box She has the pieces Driving a dirt road You see a haystack in the bend Get out of the car seat Run in the hay field But you see their lover And they think you love her to death Get back in the car And drive until you forget that face I own the lost & found She owns the airport He owns the milkweed She owns the monarch butterfly But I own the whole damn field