He pushes the door open; the jangle of little bells on a string. The patrons have all been living here, outside of time, for a long time: they all look up and watch him eye the room for a place to sit. Everybody in the diner is locked in a repetitive gesture, no progress, no end-point: opening and shutting a newspaper, wiping off a table, dipping french fries into ketchup and eating them. He takes a booth across from the man with the french fries.

The waitress is older than time herself. She stands at his side with a pad, nodding at everything he is saying and scribbling in her pad. Her scribbles are nonsense, the pad is full of nonsense. A fry cook endlessly flips the same burger, which never renders to ash: the carbon takeover of all life is happening everywhere except the diner. The repetitive gestures protect one from dying and decay.

The man with the french fries keeps looking at him. Maybe he had been staring at the booth before he entered the diner. Maybe everyone here had been waiting for him. The man doesn’t look at his french fries, and he has spots of ketchup all over his face from missing his mouth. The crinkle of the paper in the basket of fries, the wet sucking pops of the fries scooping up ketchup, the chewing licking and swallowing… the crinkle, the sucking, the chewing, the gesture repeated.

The waitress keeps scribbling on her pad. Her pen is tearing shreds in the paper, her knuckles are white. Smoke smelling like grease wafts from the kitchen. The man with fries stares at him with pain in his eyes.

He looks at the man with the french fries. Grabbing fries from the endless basket. Where is the puddle of ketchup? Not on his plate. He lifts a fry and brings it down, past his plate, to the side of his belly. A living, breathing, gaping wound at the side of his belly. Wet sucking sounds, popping. He jabs the fry into the wound and scoops up a wad of blood and eats it. Cannibalism. Autophagy. The closed circle of blood and food. The man with the french fries is eating himself to stay alive. There is no death outside of time, there is only repetition, there is only repetition. The diner is a closed circle. The diner is open all night.

He said it so himself, from the song, “God” from the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.

Image by my pal Glenn.

every day I refuse to recognize myself in the subway windows a bit more

every day I recognize my refusal to look at myself a little more openly

every day I remember my recognition of  myself with a little more distrust

every day I refuse  to remember who I am a little more ardently

every day I remember to look at myself

every day I remember to forget what I looked like yesterday

every day I recognize what I can’t forget

next to the subway

in front of the mirror

every day

“no apologies necessary”

for the marriage of sibling words,

and the familiar phrases of incest

produce visions of grotesque worlds;

***

the funerals are open to the public,

but the entrance fee is killer;

we’ll bury the babies in mountains

if they have more or less than ten fingers,

***

or if their eyes are wrongly set, at

the back of their heads or on their soles,

and when they refuse to laugh and cry and spit up

from their tiny toothless holes…

***

for all our teeth are ground to dust

and our tongues tenderized to paste,

while the hi-def secret service of speech

encodes a ‘sorry’ on everyone’s face;

So, I ask, are humans animals? Obviously, in the biological sense, we are mammals. Our young use the evolutionary strategy of turning weakness into cuteness to ensure we’ll feed them and keep them warm. There is, however, a bridge that humans have crossed that no other species have come close to setting their paws on. So many little details: the use of a symbolic language, narrative history, and the problem of properly disposing our shit, etc, to name a few. We are genetically closer to the chimpanzee, than the chimpanzee is to the orangutan, but get all three of us in a room and you don’t need genetics to figure out which one isn’t enjoying the fecal flinging fun.

Humans have brains that do more then simply guide us on a repetitive path of survival. We think, we think about thinking, we think without knowing we are thinking, and we hypothesize and conceptualize. One such concept is the idea of ‘rights’ and how these rights translate into social and political legislation, having concrete effects on the way we comport ourselves to each other. They are not god given rights, they are not intrinsic rights, they are not natural. They are the product of civilization, which like many other of its products, came about from the difficult conditions of large populations inhabiting the closed spaces. This also, is not natural. No other animal would come to live this way on their own accord, though, to feed our own swelling populations, we’ve done them the favor of doing it for them on massive industrial scales. We can do this because animals are turned into products, and products do not have rights. And not only for consumption, pets too are products, and though many live in conditions far superior to large populations all over the world, it is not because these privileged pets have the right to live this way. So this leads to the next question: do those under-privileged classes and poor countries have the right to enjoy a certain standard of living, one comparable to an uptown poodle? Is simply being part of the ‘human being club’ entitle anyone to a certain buffer in lifestyle against the primitive ape or garbage-rummaging rat?

A right must be granted from a higher level of institutional authority. A right can only be granted to someone who has some sort of institutional legitimacy, who participates in institutional activities and agrees to have their activities recognized and attached their institutional name. One simple form of institutional legitimacy is the citizen, who is granted rights by their country of citizenship and whose rights were defined by human beings who laid down the foundation for that citizenship in the past. Man gives rights to men (and eventually to women too). Man can take those rights away. The only higher authority is a higher institution, and a higher one above that, all the way until recourse to some mythology or ideology (more products) is championed as the highest rule. Hierarchy does exist in the animal kingdom, but without any recourse to ethics. For the Man-imal, living crammed up against his neighbors, rights and laws are needed as a regulatory mode of control against brutal, animalistic hierarchies. Peaceful cohabitation relies on the respect for authority, the same authority that grants the rights to not be killed and raped by our neighbors (who might be dying to do so).

Since the advent of urban living and the industrial revolution, where many sold their time and energy as their sole commodity, humans have once again returned to their animal ancestry. We now have the right to buy and sell ourselves as products. The laws of the many have evolved to favor the rights of the cheaters, liars, exploiters and killers over the poor and hopeless. Higher authorities are openly acknowledged excuses to live out barbarous self-determination within the confines of institutionally legitimized rights. It is useless to think of the animal kingdom welcoming our return with open paws because the animals, as products, as valued commodities, do not have the right to an interactive relationship with humans. Adam ruled the Garden of Eden, taking on the mandate of naming and defining every living creature, but also being one with them. The Edenic contradiction of being blissfully ignorant of your own institutional exile from the natural world is the primary trauma that needed to be re-symbolized and historicized in our actual exile into a world of labor, suffering and death.

We may have sought a return to nature and an honest relationship wit its products, but only because we have given ourselves the right to narrate it as such. But Eden is now a combination between a zoo and a supermarket. Animals everywhere, playing, fucking, throwing shit, and simultaneously, cleanly segmented and neatly wrapped in plastic. Our current mastery over nature is not the Garden of Eden, it is the claustrophobic commercial chicken factory, thinly humanized by the right to not have our eyes pecked out by our squawking neighbors, unless they’ve filled out the proper forms. Animal rights used to be an amusing contradiction, but what concept today is even more absurd, is human rights.

climbing numbers of seeders,

multi-colored flag icons,

all woozy on the tasteless fruit;

with the trusted logos

watermarked on the skin.

*

the expected outcome,

the hours of earned downtime,

sharing the catchphrase

and in on the joke;

a limp finish to what was

a great race of crawling slabs.

*

watching activates my passivity;

I am plugged in to the race;

the ratios, percentages, and ETAs

sap my attention in a frozen moment—

one moment always changing, adjusting,

never ending, forward leeching, lurching

*

to the five filed sensations

tagged and filed and dead.