Mark Blickley

“A Heads Up Dream For Peace”

I resent when beheading videos go viral and zombie apocalypses top viewer entertainment lists as it makes it much too easy for them to ignore the walking dead sharing a subway ride on way to a final destination that proves being heads up simply exposes one as too easy a target regardless of the helmet I first wear in boot camp when angry drill sergeants scream at me during squadron maneuvers to pull my head out of my ass so I don’t kill my buddies because of a lack of concentration though I was concentrating real hard when Happy Jack took the two shots to the head that exploded his Chicago style ghetto humor all over my face and flak jacket  dripping down inside sand coated combat boots that allow me to walk away and proclaim heads you lose but tales you win if you’re alive and able to speak  of them to a passenger audience who bury their heads in smart phone images and sounds to  avoid their neighbor’s headless pain of surrender seated alone across the aisle where no one else sits to coax a face from my torn and stained civilian clothes while the train chugs to the South Ferry final stop where a whiff of rusty river replaces my body odor and signals a free boat ride that promises freedom when midway to Staten Island it glides past the Statue of Liberty and I plunge towards the crowned Lady who will read my DD214 safely wrapped in protective plastic and pinned to my pants pocket along with instructing letter that will guide me towards my very own plot of land in lovely Virginia where I can sleep with silent brothers and sisters and share a peace my grateful government will mark and preserve with a uniformly crafted and informative headstone... 

“D.O.A.-- Dawn of Agriculture”

Before the Dawn Of  Agriculture men like ME where slapped into the shadow of sexual shame but now who needs muscles or chiseled chins, great size or strength, a lover’s passion or a manly countenance ‘cause  for ten thousand years now I  can persecute any female for infidelity towards ME  and hold paternity privilege over MY biological  children  because we exceptional farmers invented marriage to  destroy human sexuality  by enslaving women with MY property for sex so I no longer need to share or compete or settle for an alpha males’ sloppy seconds within foraging groups  that are forced to share what they carry  with them instead of our  enforced legal couplings that takes the innocent, primal pleasure and mystery out of sex by connecting shtooping  to birth thanks to dirt MY dirt MY very own thousand acres of seeded soil littered with pens full of  MY trapped sheep, cattle, goats and pigs which means I can pork any female  I fancy and  destroy any man who thwarts MY desire as simply as the bulls I castrate  into submission to easily herd  into MY  slaughterhouses that feed all the inferior people no longer dependent on their hunting and gathering skills but on ME to stay alive so not only am I not considered a sociopath by hoarding food but am praised at harvest time like a goddamned Babe Ruth hero because I have legally claimed and legally raped those precious few life giving inches of topsoil with rotating crops and extended grasslands that exhausts and shrinks the earth, MY earth MY reign of  forcing agricultural workers  to bend over in the fields, stupidly exposing hairless backs to sun poisoning  instead of their protective hunters’ heads of hair  harvesting MY food that shrinks the  testicles of everyone who is forced to feed on the  cheap calories of MY  industrialized plants and animals that lowers fertility, but who needs big balls anymore when you don’t have to kill larger animals  in order to survive or attract females with your superior physical attributes proving I am the social parasite Sultan of Swat who grows fat on the food  I’ve  seized by stealing Paleo land in the name of government protected ownership!

 

Mark Blickley is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. He is the author of Sacred Misfits (Red Hen Press), Weathered Reports: Trump Surrogate Quotes from the Underground (Moira Books) and the just published text based art coffee table book, Dream Streams (Clare Songbirds Publishing House). His video, Widow's Peek, was selected to the 2018 International Experimental Film and Video Festival in Bilbao, Spain. He is a 2018 Audie Award Finalist for his contribution to the original audio book, Nevertheless We Persisted.