I signed the checks & credit cards

Went quite a long way but was not moving nearly fast enough to actually notice

Did not make a bazillion on the next financial fad like those Masters Of The Universe

Passing on my accumulated eco-debt thru to whatever dispossessed generations might follow

Did not file any patents or copyrights and no inventions are held in my name

Was unable to attain spiritual enlightenment or even enjoy any lasting peace of mind

Won’t find my name credited on any scientific research papers

Found it difficult to obey every order given by the great generals of the consumer field

Did not uncover any new and beautiful mathematical relations

Lost my senses and grew weak just like all those great ones from every field

Was not a member of the all-star team for many years in a row

But, I no longer remember their names just as well as they never heard of mine

Could not find it in me to produce even a single page of deathless prose

Signed the checks & credit cards and was OK always spending more than I earned

Held the spoonfed opinions of others quite strongly but never learned to think for myself

Walked with a proud independence as I navigated by the bobbing tails of the herd

Did not have a pop hit and then grow fat and doped up out in dusty-neon Las Vegas

Pretty sure I almost won the lotto at least once or twice

Was not ever elected to any office since I never had enough vanity to run

Had a couple surgeries that I would be happy to talk with you about for hours

Got a son who lives up by Portland and a daughter out in Phoenix

Did not save the bug-filled rainforest or protect whatever greasy salmon

Let the quiet lakes and rivers grow filthy, passing by them daily, on my way to work

Could not draw too much sustenance from my predigested holiday experiences

Wound up growing morally thin and drawn out on my half-baked and spoon-fed beliefs

Did not finish my masterpiece because I thought I kept on starting over

Never saw any great circle or felt some spirit in the sky from outside our modular

Once I took time to roll down the windows and smell the roses as we were driving by

Could not notice how, when I thought I paused, that I was still being swept right along

Appear to be finishing up now but I cannot step back far enough to really tell

That is, think I might be just awfully close to that Happily-Ever-After once again

Going to sum it all up and make my peace here in just a little while

Did not volunteer my time but I still like to think I most likely would have

Got no wisdom for my kids but they come sit by me sometimes, just the same

There’s that ex-wife out in Fresno and a brother in Denver who still hates my guts

They laid me off and defaulted on my pension so then I also pissed away all my 401K

But I’m making my peace and seeking forgiveness and just maybe I’ll get buried green

It’s Only A Con Game, Corporate Sports Suckers

Your punk check ain’t gonna change one cent no matter which way the game goes

The big boys are playin you like suckers just to take your meager chump change

You’re a fool to get all worked up over muscular black men dressed up in tights

This is the pabulum they feed you to keep your mind empty and your mouth shut

But you’d watch that shit in the ICU first thing after your abused heart gave out

Your heroes waste their money and get arrested for rape and dope and assault

You know more about their phony sports statistics than your own credit card debt

That childish hero worship ain’t ever gonna get you a share of their title money

Yelling and eating and drinking by the big screen don’t enrich your future one damn bit

Win or lose you will still have to make the payments on that upside down car loan

You ain’t on the team and none of them would even give a rip about yer dumb ass

Wake up and smell the Astroturf and then go scrape that decal off your car

It’s not loyal and patriotic or an honored part of some bogus traditional family heritage

But the advertisers and sponsors play it up like it must be a big part of real life

Get the stupid theme music out of your one-track, beer-soaked brain

Stop watching and talking and dreaming and thinking about it so much all the time

You waste so many hours every week on the Big Game, you might just as well have been asleep

Then you have this foolish gnawing emptiness when its over again for another year

Maybe you can have their copyrighted logo incised on your financed headstone

Perhaps your idea of heaven is a box seat as your team wins the big one every day

And you let the clever advertisers keep on beating their sad empty shit into your empty skull

While you just sit there getting fatter and your heart and eyes and brain wear out

You will never even ask why sports is reported as much as news on every stupid channel

But its really not just a game, is it? Pathetically it is a very important part of your tiny life

You get your thrills through them, and you jump up and wave your fist and shout

You’re a loyal fan who knows all their names, even though they never win a game

With all the time, thought and emotion you have invested, you should be very rich

It's only a game...It’s not only a game, it’s your holy quest, you toadlike little weenie roaster

They’re making millions and your real income is going down even as you sit there

You just charged 5 Gs at 20% interest so you could see the game on a big screen TV

You just can’t separate the artificially flavored hype from the unvarnished, tawdry reality

The noise, color and violence touches a very basic juvenile need deep inside of you

And they play upon it to prey upon you and help you retain a retarded immaturity

Put down the sports news, get off that website and stop dissecting their performance

or just maybe you can take that sexy fantasy with you as you leave your debts behind and die

Long-Term Free Market Environmental Solutions

Old growth forests wont be such a divisive issue after they’re all cut down and milled
Species preservation will be a lot cheaper once all those many useless ones finally go extinct

Numbnut loud pickups and noisy Harleys will go silent when there’s no more gas to waste

Government meddling is being eliminated thanks to Washington’s political paralysis

They’ll stop this poisonous salmon farming as soon as there’s no little fish left to feed them

The American prairie will come back when it becomes too hot and too dry for our crops

Clean energy wont be an issue once it’s either burn coal again or simply freeze to death

Email spam will disappear when the bastards cant afford to run their servers

We will reduce our population to sustainable levels via global wars and epidemics

Everybody can live a developed country lifestyle when only a billion or so of us remain

We’ll curb transportation greenhouse emissions completely by wasting all of our cheap oil

Our fanatical Islamist enemies will be weakened after they finish their internecine jihads

Once we’ve stripmined the seas, there’s no worry that the fish are too full of mercury to eat

Global income disparity will disappear when everybody makes 20 cents an hour

It’ll all be organic when petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers are unavailable

Sound bites will be simpler to create once the vast majority of adults are illiterate

OHVs and snowmobiles won’t be issues if they cost too much to pull around for wreckreation

There’ll be no housing shortage when they turn foreclosed McMansions into refugee housing

Agribusiness won’t be able to waste fossil water when there’s no power for their pumps

Lean and healthy grass-fed beef will be the norm because people will again eat all the grain

Won’t have to regulate mileage or emissions when gas always costs at least $5 a gallon

Forget greedy developers when the forests are torched and the snow doesn’t fall

Once we’ve sucked the Middle East sands dry we can just ignore them once again

Our collapsing house of credit cards will halt the Chinese environmental disaster

The Russians, or probably Asian occupiers, will prosper when Siberia thaws out for development

Fertile virgin farmlands will open up in Canada once this warming really kicks in

Australia is set to prosper from unlimited solar potential as it dries out and heats up even more

The disruption of the monsoon will relieve the filthy overcrowding of Indian cities

As South Africa becomes a desert, its problem with malaria will be greatly reduced

Millions of fire-blackened acres will curb recreational pressure on our wildlands

The collapse of commercial fish stocks may allow the battered bycatch to recover

Government bankruptcy and a lack of military fuel will curb the world’s only superpower

Alienation and anomie will evaporate in the vastly simplified struggle for everyday survival

Multinational corporate collapse will put their faceless leaders where commoners can reach them

Obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure will disappear right along with cheap factory food

Blunt reality may finally force us to once again reinvent our tired and failed religions

If You Haven’t, You Can’t Know

If you have not awakened to the sound of a creek burbling beside you

Where do you get the gall to vote against cleaning up our lakes and rivers

If you haven’t squeezed the throttle and heard the hoarse bellow and felt its raw power

You’ll never understand why OHVs are just the most fucking fun

If you never saw the earliest morning sun kiss a wild mountain basin

You can’t ever get a clue as to why wilderness might just be important

If you haven’t had one of your platoon buddies get his legs blown off right there beside you

You’ll not understand the great camaraderie even in a pointless and immoral modern war

If you never robbed a frightened white man at gunpoint when in need of a fix

You don’t understand what shaking with drug-enhanced psycho excitement is all about

If don’t know the rapture with which our savior fills our hearts

Your eyes are simply closed and your soul is truly dark and empty

If you have never gotten all shook up over the smell of meth abrewin’

You cant criticize the beutifool buzz that rots our teeth and makes our hair fall out

If you haven’t ever lost more than you could afford but just kept on playing anyways

You will never know how good it feels to win back even just a little bit

If you never stated proudly you were eager for the chance to clear your name

You cannot know why you then claim to have no comment regarding the allegations

If you never became quite still and simply regarded all of your wandering thoughts

You can derisively dismiss that phony bullshit about the sound of one hand clapping

If you haven’t nearly died and then realized you are looking at a peaceful sunset

It’s hard to know just how miraculous each and every second of our lives really is

If you should ever notice yourself dwelling on some phony sport or another

The door to your cure has begun to swing open in front of you at last

If you haven’t quite grasped the lure that drives men to unmuffle their vehicles

You really need to get right up here behind the wheel in this big bad baby

If you haven’t ever sweat too much and breathed too hard

You will not truly appreciate the gentle sun of a desert Winter

If you only ever eat vegetables, fruit and all that other so-called organic shit

You cannot understand the addictive joy of salt, sugar and hydrogenated oils

If you just read the bible and watch what’s new on TV

You’ll miss the wisdom of Mohammed and his buddy Isaac Newton

If you never spent too many lonely nights in the dark, all alone

You cannot fully appreciate the peace of slumbering together

If you’re always in an angry hurry because it’s still late once again

It really won’t be too easy to just sit there and listen to those stupid birds

If you’ve only weighed their arguments and critiqued other’s decisions

It’ll be hard for you to understand undertaking any real action of your own

If you never questioned the endless mowing, watering, fertilizing & pesticiding of your lawn

You probably never walked barefoot in some quiet forest meadow

If you really have thought through what you are saying right now

You won’t need to be told to just shut the fuck up, once again

If you haven’t hiked hard up to an alpine ridge on a clear september morning

You don’t deserve the gas it takes to drive your SUV over the pass, ever again

If you haven’t even saved a penny and lived large off of your maxed-out credit cards

Don’t bother to complain to me about those evil those Tax and Spenders

If you can’t even do the four operations of basic arithmetic in your head

Don’t you dare and try to question a scientist’s so-called fuzzy math

If you haven’t ever swam in a warm ocean during a real rain

You likely worry way too much about getting a little wet

If you can’t conceive of any society not based upon simple greedy profit motives

Sustainability surely sounds like another cockamemie liberal fairytale to you

If you never were in awe of the interwoven cycles of the web of this earth

You’ll find it easier to believe that we alone are possessed of a soul

If you still believe a god who awaits you created all of this and left behind his word

You need never even look into the void yet for even the briefest single moment

If you hadn’t seen those kids grow up and loved them so much through thick and thin

You cannot understand their exceptional nature or the uniqueness of their gifts

If you felt you always needed to stop in order to smell the roses

You were lucky, because you never noticed you really were not going anywhere...at all

Clues That We May Have Displeased Him

Teachers burnt out by armed fatherless gangsters and cursing infant whores

Laid off engineers numbly transitioning out the door with a few shabby boxes of books

Working class fathers brewing Meth and waiting for their promised good new jobs of tomorrow

The terminally ill finding religious solace in the fantasies of their pain meds

Mothers placing folded flags on clean beds of the sons who are never coming home

Malnourished babies sucking emptily at their refugee mother’s emaciated breasts

Salesmen with many tired-out stories whose services are no longer required…anywhere

Convicts who return with a certain sense of relief to their secure families behind bars

Self-medicating counselors helping substance abusers find decent ways to cope

Once-proud farmers forced to work for miserable hourly wages on corporate pig farms

Frightened young peasants toiling 14 hours every day for $3 and sleeping 20 to a room

Aging middle managers pitifully eager to please even after their recent downsizing

CEOs excited to clear their names of baseless charges yet, speaking only through their lawyers

Exemplary black men with extreme rates of hypertension and prostate cancer

Politicians standing firm on unilateral decisions privately made consulting with personal saviors

Rabbis, coaches and fathers swarming about in teen internet chat rooms

Devoted doctors performing hurried cosmetic surgery on old women in order to make golf tee times

Our children running amok on caffeine and sugar, but…they’re just expressing themselves

Loan swindlers pleading for federal bailouts to profitably refinance the already defrauded

New nurses changing jobs for raises but never quite learning proper medical care

Lonely and trusting retirees cruelly duped by those of their own offspring’s generation

The forgotten working poor agonizing in the night over whether to pay rent or buy food

Volunteers spending their own time and money only to be sneered at as foolish suckers

Rappers and reverends pimping their narrow fantasies like they were running sick old whores

Frogs gamely in a last stand on the crisscrossed ATV tiretracks of doomed wetlands

Hungover so-called craftsmen erecting one more overpriced modular dream suburb

Another clueless Texan idling a pickup for personal comfort, way out there in Calorada

Our boys on their fool’s errand amidst a civil war in a country we destroyed

Graduates who can’t read or write any language and don’t really know what they ‘r sain’

Gushing acceptance of every increase to already-insane levels of dEfense spending

Despoiling the land to rapidly guzzle any last oil reserves...without creating any alternatives

Believing that noisy, expensive, gasoline toys results in some kind of recreational renewal

Growing up without healthcare, exercise or education but…getting lots of fatty foods & sugary drinks

Letting the slickest, greediest and most self-centered continue to set our course

Mouthing the ironclad platitude that this blight they greedily label progress cannot be stopped

Falsely pitting people and jobs against the environment that supports them both

Balancing taxes on vices to maximize revenues while still retaining the hopelessly addicted

      Coupling pious patriotism with divine right in a loudly ignorant, exceptionist duet

Not being able to stand an office job yet eviscerating the beloved outdoors in your work

Tossing half a billion plastic bags per year in a mocking tribute to our own lifestyle

Using false interpretations of musty fictional scripture to foment hatred and conflict

Writing off any candidate who cannot compete in raising funds for empty media sound bites

Fretting over foreign pollution after outsourcing ours to dirtier offshore production standards

Watching as plans and animals pitifully struggle northward as the heat just keeps on increasing

Them Libral Lifestyle Police

They’re gonna make you wear leather sandals and force you to barbecue tofu

They’ll be closing down all the Taco Bells and cutting off our Big Gulps

They want to quiet down your pickups and your holy harley-davidsons

I heard they even mean to make us go to school to get a license to have a damn kid

They want to stop us from draining and developing these idle, bug-filled wetlands

They don’t want your kids to pray or recite the pledge of allegiance at their school

Their godless moral relativism is destroying our Traditional Family ValuesÔ and beliefs

Pretty soon you won’t be able to say shit, even when you have a mouthful

They’re trotting out the same tired social programs that failed so many times, years ago

They want us all to drive the same kind of unsafe, uncomfortable, little shoebox cars

They are trying to take away all of our wondrous health care choices

They think that we should all be eager to recycle trash without even getting paid

They’ll have us turning down thermostats in sweaters and shivering in the dark

They preach the virtue of the flip-flop but question the very word of Jesus Christ

Their meddling with our food supply is going to cost us all a lot of money

They mean to cut into your freedom with this so-called healthy lifestyle nonsense

We’ll all be paying out the wazoo cause they’re afraid to burn a little coal

Beef and pork will be expensive and tough if the bleeding hearts get their way

They get this recurring dream of socialism they forget was disproved so long ago

They want your kids to grow up thinking the colonists did some kind of Holocaust

They’re gonna put a ban on fireworks and take the Christ child out of Christmas

They want everybody riding bicycles no matter what the weather

They mean to suck back up to the Frenchies and even start following their leads

They’re setting timetables for our defeat and letting our brave boys die in vain

They want to handcuff energy producers and stop us cutting housing timber

They’re dead set against our jet skis, OHVs, dirt bikes and snowmobiles

They want us living in gloomy dirt dugouts with unreliable solar and wind power & no A/C

They’re trampling our property rights with their squishy concerns over useless species

They’ll have us paying more per pound the more trash we throw away

They’re planning on national ID cards that they will say are just to catch illegals

They want to trot out expensive social welfare and shut down all our prisons

They’ve gone completely overboard on this expensive hoax called climate change

They’ll put fat, lazy, bitchy women over you with no way to get rid of them

They want the whole country to look like everybody goes around in wheelchairs

Pretty soon you’ll need a smog test permit for your grills and your lawnmowers

They are over-regulating our once-proud auto industry straight into bankruptcy

They want to cut off all that good cheap Chinese stuff we buy down to WalMart

They’re out to gut our military and leave us open to the terrorists with ICBMs

They plan on giving up most of our sacred sovereignty to the United Nations

They’ll pass out free birth control during your children’s hands-on sex-ed classes

They want your kids to get real comfortable with the homosexual lifestyle

They’re handcuffing entrepreneurs with burdensome environmental regulations

They wish to kill off Christianity and replace it with some new age pseudoscience

Their moral relativism would have us all believing that there is no such thing as sin

They’re gonna start to tax and regulate even the places where we worship

They’ll try to put limits on how many miles we drive in our pickup trucks per year

They want us to promote based upon race and sex and economic background

They’re gonna lock up all our federal lands from way back there in Washington

They’re pushing us all towards some vague, castrated, vegan, pacifist idealism

They want us to believe that either all the animals have souls or that we do not

They’re out to stop a guy from driving his big diesel to work if he wants to

They’ve got this silly notion that our current lifestyle is somehow unsustainable

They’re soft on defense but love to slaughter precious human embryos

They question that the marketplace efficiently replaces foolish social planning

They will handcuff the President on gathering information for national security

They think that outside developers should not have the right to local control

They want to cripple the power industry over a few tons of mercury emissions

They’ll put hybrids into NASCAR and want canoes in the bass tournaments

They have no respect for the NFL and those big blacks shimmering in their tights

They’re even against the well-trimmed green lawns that we fertilize and fumigate

They want to take away your guns but let doctors go murder more unborn babies

They’re all for letting any Illegals in to take our jobs and give their kids some welfare

They claim that corporate agricultural entities only care about their stock prices

They say that raising our packaged meat as cheap as possible is dirty and immoral

They’re pushing this fuzzy sustainability crap which will cost us all in jobs and money

They’ll make you exercise and eat raw broccoli convinced it makes you healthy

They want to teach the bible as literature instead of out front in biology classes

They’ll have us loading groceries in dirty recycled bags into weenie little golf carts

They’re putting plants and animals ahead of families and national security

They want everyone to live like bees in tiny city apartment hives without any yards

They would legalize marijuana but track and control alcohol consumption

They even seem to think that being born again has something to do with recycling