Eat the Poison Candy

Back in 1980, years ago, when I was just a little ratling only beginning to navigate the vast cyclopean waterways of the Great American Sewer, our president, the Gipper, announced that it was Morning in America.
Meaning it was time for everybody to wash the glitter out of their hair, go see a doctor about that yellow stuff coming out the end of their dick, flush their stash, cover their tracks with their nice three-piece suit, wipe the coke off their noses and leave those incense and peppermints behind. Yassuh, it was time for all us niggers to quit dancing in the fields and git on back to the ole plantation, and work for Massa Reagan.
Ever since, people have been trying to button themselves ever tighter into those steel shiny empty suits, with creases sharp as razor blades to slit your lying throat if you try to move an inch to the West, or and inch to the East. So when you pass by the gutter you can cock a snook down into the fertile depths and sneer at all the rats you see and their glittering red eyes that seem to laugh back at you as you pass.
But all your Good Li’le Amuuricans, they can’t stay away from that sewer. Let me tell you, you get a real, groovy, kandy-kolored view of the sun through the amniotic fluid of the Great American Sewer. You wouldn’t believe how green the grass is. But you can’t hardly ever get to see it with all those straight and narrow types always peering in.
They want to get a reeeel goooood look. Cos they’re afraid that, hey, wait a minute, those rats we drove into the gutter, those freaks and outcasts and losers and whackos, are they having more fun than we are? You bet your ass we are. But there’s a price. A price you don’t want to pay.
But you do like to watch, don’t yuh?
Yeah, you want to lean as far over into that sewer as you can without falling in. You’d like to get down and swim in it, if you could do it in a protective suit. Because it’s the poison candy that everybody wants. But they don’t want to nibble a little at a time and die a little every time. A little nibble, a little death. They don’t want to suffer and die a thousand times so they can build up their immunity. No, no, they see rats like me floating on biiiig sun-reflecting rafts, eating great big chunks of that poison candy. Just gobbling it down, because it tastes so goddam gooooood.
They want it, too, and they want, it now.
So you like to live your Lie. You get hooked on drugs and you spend a lot of money on rehab and a lot of time crying and screaming for mercy. Then you point your plastic finger at me and show me your little pink scars and ask me for a big piece of poison candy. How dare you come down to my sewer, where I live every day with my very own Mr. Jones? Though the Poppy has moved on, Mr. Jones has never gone. My Jones in my soul full of red angry scars and purple rotted holes, from which cold black blood that smells like the ozone from the Wheel of Fire erupts with the regularity of Old Faithful. Me and Mr. Jones that could eat your habit alive any day of the week. My Jones to get junk and get high, and spill blood and get laid and make the great cities in my mind burn high with red flame and blue, and spread my visions to all the world so that I never die and only scatter. Like Divine Cosmic Dust, fine and spread across the universe. To the Seven Seas of Time and the Four corners of the Universe, ever expanding in endless entropy. I take chaos like a formless sword of rock-hard antimatter, the Rigid Cock of Doom, and shatter the fabric of reality by virtue of my blood.
My blood and my outrage, my sweat and my piss and my puke and my tears. They lay out that road of excess to which I, a pilgrim may travel to the Palace of Wisdom, where I will be a Rat no longer, but a Human Being.
Yeah, you want to come down here where I lie on the bed of broken glass you threw me onto, where I eat pain and piss transcendence, and you want to call me brother and eat my poison candy cos you had to trade in your BMW for a Mercedes so you could pay your health insurance deductible on the cushy rehab your Blue Cross got you into? I didn't go to no rehab, Jack. They ain't got no rehab, down here in the Great American Sewer. Where do you think I got all these scars? I pulled the habit out of me; in blood and pain to start again.
I would kill you with a tiny crumb of my poison candy, if only I didn’t want to eat it all myself.
But you want that poison candy. And you want to feel that smooth, warm, sewer water like the waters in your mamma’s tummy against your soft chalky skin, don’t you? You know it would take that itch away. Yeah, you know you want that poisoned candy that your old granddaddy Adam ate there in God’s Garden, that goooooood shit you forgot the taste of long ago. You think you got to get down, down on the ground to get it, don’t you?
So you take off your shiny steely suit behind closed doors and you do Bad Things. Real Bad Things. You sit up in your office and you count the money you didn’t make, then you point your finger at your neighbour when all that fairy gold just melts away. What do you care who loses their shirt, as long as you get closer to that poison candy.
And you close the door behind you in your cosy little office at home and you go out there on that old debbil Internet and you troll for all kinds of creepshow things. I’m talking about having a woman all dressed in leather come over and beat you with a belt studded in Sheffield Steel Spikes while you jack off into your big diaper wearing a baby bonnet and cryin’ for Mom. I’m talkin’ about enticing somebody to come see you for a little fun and games, and tying them down with piano wire, torturing them with metal and fire and sex, when you come in their eye and burn their thighs with branding irons, and keep jars full of foreskins. And you want to fuck little children, and dead bodies and the wounds of people who had car accidents and the wet and red eye sockets of bloody new skulls, or open your legs for bones dipped in scented oil and get a good eyeful of some young, squishy teenage kid’s fuzzy balls and his pink, soft lips where he’s not really a man until you make him a boy forever and call him your slave. You like the knobbly feel of un-popped pimples against your thighs instead of the scrape of stubble. Killing the old people whose shitty diapers you don’t want to clean anymore and jacking off in the wrong restroom, hearing all those death rattles in your ears.
And then…
When you’ve cheated widows and fucked pre-pubescent orphans, when you’ve raped skulls and beaten up on sad crack whores and covered the scabs and sores of your inhuman copulations and your thieving and sanctimony with the flag of Our Great Nation, here you come.
When you have gambled away and lost the last shred of your decency on having that shiny steel suit melded with your body so that your flesh has become metal and your blood is OPEC crude, here you come.
When you have crawled on your stomach so that maggots have eaten your guts and left shit and files inside your empty belly so when you breathe everybody around you can smell death, here you come.
And then…
You take off your shiny suit of steel, and show me your sores and your sins and your green and purple rotten skin and the hole where your soul sat and fried when it died and get down on your knees and you beg me not to tease, with your mouth full of disease, and say gimme some poison candy, please?
I have to look at you and shake my head and tell you how wrong you are. And I get to laugh at how you’ve lived The Lie and sucked it down to the last gristly scrap of sinew on the dry bones.
Go home, pretender. You’ll never be like me.
But let me tell you a junkie’s secret. Junkies are born, not made, and when you meet the smack it’s just like love, because it only makes you more of what you already are.
And brother and sister, whether or not you have succumbed to the forbidden love of the white , white milk of the red, red poppy, when you are born freaky you die freaky and live freaky in between.
So you can’t ever be like me.
Can’t be like we are.
Never, never, never, never, never be.
Go home, go home, and reap what you have sewn.
And then…
You ask me for a piece of the poison candy. Because you know now that it would kill you if you took the slightest bite. And doing what you’ve done to yourself, all you want to do is die.
And I will only laugh at you, no mercy in my hollow eyes.
You can’t eat the poison candy.
Now, go and live with yourself until you die.
Alone, never having tasted the poison candy.