Free Verse: We Just Don't Care

We Just Don't Care

by John Kendall Hawkins

.

We don't care in Australia,

sings a mean girl band sassy as

P*ssy Riot high on Vegemite

real femme fatales thumbing through

a future that doesn't include me or you

You can pick em up

in your hotel california Holden ute

and go to the outback

and scare some of the Ind'gens away

to make room for some boombox disco in the sand,

but we don't care is the looped song they dance to,

the only song they understand

.

We don't care anywhere

.

There was the worry about AIs

taking over our jobs and keeping tabs

but they've gone further than that

and have decided to colonize us

the mind virus has hit us hard

and we're crazy as lunar eclipses now

lots of darkside comfortable numbness

.

We don't care anymore

.

and we're saddened more suddenly

when we read Russian yachts are being seized

to cleverly highlight who's really in charge

an idea proffered to Biden from our own oligarchs

who have prodigious boats some the size of footy fields

I read once of near-naked lads serving cocktails

funny word cocktails, I get queasy as,

but then ships do that to me, and what a Manhattan!

oops, he's up here

.

We don't care anymore

.

I could tell you stories

until you were blue man group in the face

awful tales only Errol Flynn could really swashbuckle through

take, for instance, the lie

that Lady Libertine in the harbor was never prettier

naked when they stripped her down for a shower

and took away all her cash-crop barnacles

but then you read somewhere

she was modelled after the mother

although some say it was after the artist

presenting a bates motel situation

where Liberty is a psycho dressed as mom

off her fruit cellar rocker

in a kind of war between beauty

and his own terror of being alive

only in the peephole moments,

dead inside otherwise,

life and light down the gurgler

.

We don't care anymore

.

we're post everything and the AIs

will have their way with us

laughing when we plunge into sexbots

building databases from our semen samples

knowing us better than

we ever knew ourselves

laughing at us to think that

we would humanize machine thinking

laughing at the irony of the actual reverse dynamic

and by the time we find out what's up

algorithm goon enforcers are knocking at the door

come to take birthday boy away

to take him from the flaming chocolate

horror shop cake with cherry atop

come to take him away and blow

blow his fuckin candles out, and wishes too

.

We don't care anymore

.

the human puppy lovers are out with straws

they push through to the other side

into the quick of virgin minds

to suck the pure light free, vanilla sky

black leather vampires of pure delight

and old people's brains, too

strawberry fields forever yields

innocence and whipped wizened, yum

and as Turd Blossom once purportedly said

this is how it will go for a while

the hounds will follow one scent,

while we piss on another tree

lace the ground with boffo banana skins

the 'pathics run wild like pol pots

on roller skates and kite flying thrill runs

through the killing fields back home

We, the world's fast food people

the fast food now for monsters

animals with phrasebook English skills

the better to taunt and catnip with

killing kettles alleging pots are black

.

We don't care anymore

.

I'm not sure we ever did

millions of years to reach this here

the apex of evolution

only to be driven back to the rages

of the Dark Ages

literally controlled

by super-predators with machine thinking

monsters of the blackest lagoon

with yachts filled with bend-over boys

and mind-hacking tools

not to be found on Wikileaks

the real deal Snowden's revelations

were only surface scratch for

the way waterboarding conveniently appalled

and kept from prying eyes

black site atrocities too depraved to defend

slicing and dicing T2 shapeshift cops

at war with the human body, pulled pork irony,

over which they pour Adolph's meat tenderizer

and throw one on the barbie spit

ready for eating when it screams like a red lobster

thrown in the pot of hot water of debt slavery

eight octaves high over middle C

evolution for the hell of it!

.

Oh-oh, was that a knock at the door?