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Title: Cowboy Reaper
Author: Spoon and Thingy
Date: 11/21/2021
Language: en
Topics: anarchism, Nihilism, queer nihilism, anti-religion, love, fear, rewilding, poetry, fiction, anarchist analysis

Spoon and Thingy

Cowboy Reaper

We are Cowboy Reaper Mag.

We are also delinquients, queers, drunks, psych ward escapees, and we

are dirty free. We are not theorists, academics, professionals - in

fact, we don't know a goddamned thing. We share no interest in the

analytic circlejerking or the coffin-jotting of academic theory about

this wasteland that gave us a name, number, and a push from behind. We

share an interest in the crying, the fucking, the fighting, the

drugging, the yelling, the hoping that this wasteland which has us up to

our necks in sludge, incites. This wasteland that is drowning in blood,

blood, blood.

With a World That Makes Us Wish For Its End, Where Do We Begin?

The children of the 90s, born into the still circumventing dust from the

fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of the all-expansive, tentacled reach

of liberal capitalism’s unending reign: the final stage of global,

socio-economic evolution: history’s end. The children born to this

historical moment were sat tight in front of television sets and in the

back of mother’s car, eyes fixed on the passing billboards. To test the

strength of the new global system’s reigns, mega corporations blasted

pseudo-counter-cultural material all across the airwaves, on television

networks, in magazines and through the cordial, humanizing public

gestures that they had the stone-cold politicians they owned perform.

MTV broadcasted Beavis and Butthead burning shit up, and sub-pop sent

Kurt Cobain to the Rolling Stone cover shoot with a shirt that read

“corporate magazines still suck”. These flimsy notions of subversiveness

that did jack-shit-nothing to the increasingly globalized socio-economic

system which made a monolith of our children and sucked the wildness,

the spontaneity out of life were notions manufactured by the ruling

classes, corporate media, the political elite or whoever else we like to

blame these days. These were rebellious acts that would not fuck with

the paradigm, acts that would make kids feel like they were acting out

while really acting within a blueprint for insubordination, marketed to

them for the purpose of sterilizing their rebelliousness.

And about a decade or so after the turn of the millennium, it was clear

that their efforts of sterilization had worked. These children have

retired from their rebellion completely, though they would hate to admit

it. They have turned in their punk band pins for office name tags, their

40 ounces for eight-dollar IPAs, their skateboards for fixies, their

anger toward the social order for contempt.

We children of the current millennium, some of us children of those who

were subjected to the aforementioned media experiments present in the

end of the previous millennium, were passed down the notion that the

sickness which comes over us when walking the cities or in grocery

stores or in the backs of police cars, the sickness which says

temptingly “all this could be different,

it really could be.” is a hallucinogenic, youthful sickness.A wistful

and ignorantly optimistic sickness.

And to a generation born into cynicism, born to walk the city streets

towered over by rigid architectures beyond them, born, passing mild

mannered strip mall upon strip mall which incites in them a sorrow

beyond articulation, what is this hope for a better world, for a world

where “things are different”, but a sickness? To a people who have

realized a malaise of mundanity, of unchanging landscapes as the

accepted reality, it is not their cynicism or their depressiveness which

deserves psychiatric treatment, inversely, it is those that still have

hope that do.

There is a sentiment understood amongst many radicals of the current

millenium that we do not want “another world” or whatever that means, be

it sustainable, fair, classless, horizontal, diagonal or whatever the

fuck. All of it is merely subdued collapse. We want this world in all

its chaos, we want this world to come crumbling down in an array of

blinding explosions. This impulse that the desolate landscape of

modernity incites, this impulse that wishes for the destruction of

capital, of empire, not for the reinstitution of civilized life without

it, but for the sake of destruction itself, opens up a world of

questions.

Specifically it asks us, the troubled children of the current

millennium, who have thrown fits in psych wards and grinned getting

handcuffed:

“With a world that makes us wish for its end, where do we begin?”

For we already know where it ends.

Gone Again, I See?

“Looks like war again this evening”

The announcer says behind the static.

I draw the shades…

It is night again and to forget

The creations it casts upon,

The sun starts to return to its resting position.

And in the dying light, with a new breath of inexhaustible life,

Regretfully,

The sleepers return,

Depriving the street of dreams, depriving dreams of hope.

I watch them roam,

Their pets,

Once dogfighters now rescued and domesticated with muzzle and leash,

Borrowing change to give to the hip but dirty looking,

not-really-homeless buskers,

The money adding another uptick in their already rising trust funds,

Discussing which local pub they will terrorize the regulars at tonight,

entering with their shirts tucked in, removing their prescription

sunglasses, their noses never dropping below the midway point on the

wall, their law, accounting, business degrees, their office internships,

their desk gigs never leaving their minds the entire outing.

I watch them.

Watching their sports games, beginning their mixers, prying beers out of

the ice.

Grunting and releasing celebratory cheers over jackshit nothing.

Opening the windows to let in the approaching night winds

And to let the hungry and the hopeless outside

Know how much of a ball they’re having,

Pretending the testosterone fueled humidity of the room does not cause a

continual tent being pitched in their pants.

I watch them a while…

Depriving myself the last moments of light they got steppin’ so eagerly

to bask in,

I draw the shades.

I light the candle wick and condemn myself to the singular flame,

Like a pulsing womb the light inflates, deflates in an ovular shadow,

Breathing steadier than I.

And it was into this light I was swallowed, some time ago, as were my

shaky fingers, tangled up in the confusion of her clothes.

The coyness conquered by unsheathed flesh,

Removed and made into shirts, pants, socks, undergarments

All piled up on the carpet.

Our cold and bare vessels, trembling against one another.

She is with me still

And we still tremble but,

It is tonight,

Tonight, that I am alone,

Alone for miles, millenniums.

And she is a girl no longer and I am a boy no longer.

I plucked them clean, they plucked me clean

We are textureless, fluid, flattened, we are bipedal, featherless, we

are reborn,

we are new! we are new!

No identities now.

Between both our legs:

Smooth, barren, nothing

We venture there despite it.

III

I think of home now in clouded forms

Of bile smoke that no figures may be discerned through.

The woods and cul-de-sacs, the bedroom lights through windows, the

street names, names and faces, the heritage, all gone now, swallowed

into the gut of the ghosts in my trail.

Father called yesterday and it wasn’t till’ then

I noticed his accent. There is a silence between us now like no other.

It petrifies.

And for mother, I know she’s out there on the stoop, smoking like a

chimney just how I left her, howling at the moon like a freak, trying to

summon Christ almighty. She is losing her marbles, becoming non-sentient

again. She is due for the loony bin damn soon, but I’ve left my sister

to make the call.

She’s got a furious step in those cowgirl boots of hers, my sister, a

certainty in our bloodline I was denied.

She won’t be a girl much longer either.

And for the sacrilege, the helpless flailing, the malnutrition, the

sodomy

I thought that since I had left, I’d never see another rapture,

It was home, where the hate is, where I thought it resided

But it follows, it grapples onto my inners.

11:14pm now,

And I take the train to the closest corner store that does not profit

enough to bother for ID.

I pick the cheapest, most bulbous bottle of wine off the shelf,

Warming my gut, downing the bottle out of the paper bag on the train

back,

I watch all the ugly, delicate angels, falling all over themselves,

Who had been forced into these ungodly hours by the sleepers I watched

through my window earlier.

Who were made into the sleepless, unwillingly.

The mothers, returning home, lugging heaps of groceries, hydrating

straight out of the OJ carton from the grocery bags,

Special ed kids, bleary eyed, alone, studying the train map in hopes of

getting home without trouble.

Their mothers probably somewhere on some other train with heaps of

groceries as well.

The street walkers and ladies and boys and in-betweens of the evening,

doing their eyeshadow in the reflection of the subway door.

And the workers silent, downtrodden with heads dropped until the name of

their stops are disgraced by the distortion of the loudspeakers.

When the sun comes up tomorrow

They will all be made into whispers…

Returning home the bottle sucked clean and shattered on the sidewalk

behind me.

I lock myself back in my lonesome cell.

The wick still burning, with my private library of leather mags, libel,

holy litanies, surrounded by manuscripts and magnum opuses soon to be

put unto the fire.

Drunkenly, I stagger back and forth in my 20 by 7-foot room.

I wanted to overthrow the government

All alone.

I thought of the tools available:

Homemade bombs, black-market RPGs, gasoline, cybernetics, machetes, a

ball and chain.

All for those laden souls

Threatened with electro-shock, rehab, psych wards, gulags, boarding

school, the military, conversion therapy, prison,

Threatened with fists of stepfathers, secrets made public, or

abandonment.

All for trying to return through airport security with cheap wine

wrapped in bed sheets from overseas, for stripping down in public,

revealing their barren, scarred flesh to the wasteland of the night and

having a good fuck until the floodlights and handcuffs interrupted, for

distributing half-assedly stapled pamphlets calling for chaos,

insubordination, insurrection on school grounds, who were entranced in

their little performances for their friends, under stairwells and in

alleys and were taken in for public disturbance.

Before the beasts come to tame and lay this trembling, queer, brown

vessel of mine to rest

I wish to perish chewing on the ends of their rifles,

I wish to drown kindly in the kindling flame that burns them up first.

I wish to desecrate as a willful sacrifice for all my ugly, angel winged

siblings who are in the shits up to their necks!

For I am only waist deep.

4:03am now,

I am naked, crouched over the toilet in the stall of a public restroom

The sterile pattern of the floor tiles sobering me.

And I puke up all my dreams of revolutions, of revenge, of a tomorrow

less full of shit for all my human siblings

Into the bowl.

It floats in the water.

Cloudy and blood red.

My bones ache now, and I have no hopes, no plans.

They have become diluted and faceless in the rivers I use to dull my

clenched fists and my contempt.

They rest for now for the sun is returning.

“Tomorrow I’ll start, I am dreary”

“It’ll be war” I think to myself

“It’ll be war”

Tomorrow, tomorrow…

Heavy-lidded past life regressors are religious oppressors in

thoughtless disguise

It’s difficult to have these sorts of conversations without devoting an

unearthly amount of time to the disproving and definition-debating of

such large, over-encompassing terms like “religion” and “secular” and

“truth”. I’d like to avoid such deviations from The Point altogether,

bypass them, if you will, and instead just acknowledge the shortcomings

of these words and their associated definitions up front. Religion is a

one-word substitute for The Procrastination, The Great Delay, The

Absolute Suspension of Necessary Disbelief.

So instead of marveling at the overall uselessness of language like I’m

fucking Noam Chomsky or something, let me phrase it this way instead:

why is Buddhism a religion? Or, if you’re picky, why is Buddhism

considered to be a religion? Well, I think that most people (but You

aren’t most people, are You?) would say “Well, ya know, I consider

religion to have something to do with belief and ritual, as in the

belief in some sort of divinity and the ritualistic maintenance of said

belief, and Buddhists believe in a divinity which is larger than or at

least more important than they are, and they perform acts of ritual

maintenance of this belief, and so they must be religious or following a

religion. And it doesn’t matter if that divinity comes from God or Gods

because they don’t have those because whether it comes from the nature

of your surroundings or nature, itself or your insides or other people

or the moon or whatever, because its more important than everything else

is and they believe in it. And so, it is divine. And so, it is a

religion.”

To that I reply, well, there are little clipped voices in my head that

assure me of my own demise if I don’t cross my fingers a certain number

of times a day, and I believe in their divinity above my own sanity, and

I maintain my belief in their importance as ritualistically as something

can get, and so what can you make of that, huh?

And even more importantly, if a religion’s components are belief in

divinity and its ritual maintenance, why do the heavy-lidded proponents

and practically slobbering followers of disingenuous New Age hippy-dippy

horseshit spirituality have such a kicking-difficult time admitting to

themselves and others that they are literally religious? And the common

retort to that would be “well, gee, I don’t even think that Buddhism is

a religion, and I don’t think the parameters you set are even accurate,

and honestly I don’t even think that religion is real or a useful or

accurate term,” or whatever else. Excuses, excuses.

And to that, I reply that the parameters I so graciously set for the

definition of religion are the loosest that they could be whilst still

maintaining what my mathematics professor would call a ‘usable degree of

accuracy’. I reply that my parameters exist because religion is not a

useful term, that I’m sorry if you don’t understand how words work,

really, that if a word is too large and overbearing to describe a

concept anymore then the concept itself must be parametrized and

described through use of its definition. I reply that you may keep your

pens loosely threaded in your fingers and your eyes perennially

half-closed and your jaw loose and freeform and your opinions without

nuance, but you at some point must come to terms with the fact that the

only difference between your instantaneous religious beliefs and those

of a Christian or a Buddhist or a Jew are their rite specificities,

their laws, and, of course, your above-all-else need to feel special and

smart in a way no one else could ever understand. Your entitled

attitude, if you will.

On love

There were theoretical mathematics professors more understanding. Land

mines more tender. Shattered glasses more intact. And yet--

As her eyes flitted over his (clothed well but not well clothed) body,

over its various and ill-maintained contours, its once-hardened ridges

and tremulous curves, she decided that what he could not make up for in

anger, he ripped wide open with beauty.

And who was it, anyways? Who was it that scanned so mercilessly but with

no ill intention? Who was it but her that so closely analyzed his

stagnating form? That instigated these cricket-ridden one-siders over

his very presence?

Who was it but the author to trace the outlines and insides of his ever

present, always missing self, always invariably coming to rest on the

sags and wet swallows of throat and face? It was me, blunt, brutish,

informal, unsophisticated, tired, naked to any shining notions of

deformity me who, nevertheless, in the final analysis, in the private

drawroom of her mind’s eye, came to the conclusion that one had to

regard his beauty as a hideous and deeply poignant dent in an otherwise

shining coat of armor. As though General Sherman had carried an

eyebrow-hair tweezer.

And what else was there but his face?

He had a moral compass like a spilled ink cartridge. His views of

mankind took the form of written musings so foul and innately

pessimistic that even the mere idea of their transcription causes a

little sourness to well up in the back of the author’s throat.

What he - a man of unwashed trousers, of two shirts, of a torment worn

short and broad, of shitting and fucking and rusting fishing poles, of

highbrow, threadbare anguish - could want with me, with my kiddy socks

and bloody shoulders, my broken wrists and weak jaw, my bruised knees

and brutish nose, I do not know. I never thought to ask. I remained

unkempt by his gaze, busy watching the whites of his eyes yellow and

expand to the tune of a song short and sour.

I wrote him music impossible. Plays unperformable. He wanted me

desperately, and I desperately begged him not to.

(The author would like to butt in for a moment here and be very clear

that his affections did not go unreturned. Those crooked hugs and lippy

smiles, those nibbled necks and watery eyes, they did not go unresponded

to. Each kiss was sweeter than the last - except, of course, those

received in the dead of a night blue and hanged, rattled by the passing

train cars and coyote cries. Those reigned high, mighty, and supreme in

their wetness and bite, leaving each bottom lip red-rimmed and glossy

with its pooling of blood. Each quick squeeze of hand left a little

catch in the author’s throat. A little sourness. A little despair. But

even in those blue-black nights, her hair was left soft, but uncurled,

unkempt, unbrushed. Maybe what she saw in him was his refusal to

question her methods, maybe it was as simple as his lack of hairbrush.)

Once, the author made the simple mistake of rising from bed too early in

the morning to give a kitchen a light. Give a mouse a cookie, and the

whole world will go bananas. There was a little tripping, a little

wading in the toilet bowl, a little time spent plotting a later session

of sunrise-watching, one that would go unheeded and forgotten. Give a

cowgirl a sunset, and o just wait and see what she will renounce.

Through wading and water, an echo sounded. A crash, a hit, a shotgun

blast! If you will! Whatddya say, pardner? That such a loud noise could

sound from the blasted gray bathroom of a suburban house in a sprawling

neigh-bor-hood, much less in those warbled wee hours between clock-hand

three and four, was inconceivable to even the rowdiest of cowgirls. Even

the deepest cunt-plungers, the heaviest breathers, the most avid and

adept crackers of viper-skin whip could not have come up with a

herkier-jerkier noise.

The author cannot say she was not terrified of the repercussions. It may

not be suave to say so, but there was a fuddy-duddy cut on the right

thumb and a resounding crash, one whose hums and whimpers remained

fuzzed in the air for hours after the initial slip-up.

And that is what it was - a slip-up, a drop, a miscalculation in counter

space and sink depth, an o god o no, o jesus fucking christ!, a terrible

mistake ending in an f-d thumb cut and a piss-poor judgment call in the

efficacies of cracked marble countertops.

The author cracked her whip upon a similarly cracked telephone screen.

His affections did not go unresponded to.

“I like everything about you; I just broke a glass on my hand in the

bathroom sink.”

To wish to be selfish is a terrible thing.

(There is no reasonable love, she whispers. Strokes a hair and cries.)

To wish for a cigarette is a terribly selfish thing.

(There is no reasonable love, and to this she licks his nose like an

upchucked third drink. Sprawls naked in his living room and thinks of

ungodly men and beautiful women.)

To need to be held is a wishful thinking.

(There is no reasonable love. It dawns on her, there, in the empty

corners of a house unloved that they were the first to teach her this.)

She may cry, but thinks herself sick, instead.

(Eureka, she whispers.)

“What do you think about when you masturbate?”

“...”

A little time passes. She takes another bite of hamburger (the author

presumes, as she can never remember if it was the girl or her

left-hand-man who was the ostensibly responsible vegetarian-type that so

plagues the American collegiate campus, so blossoms like a barn-orchid

upon the lips and taints of women over the west coast) and wipes her

ketchupy lips on a barstool napkin. Hair of the dog.

I watch the red ribbon slip out of her hair and fall upon the floor,

where her panties already lay. She is walking towards me, steadily. The

showerhead turns, as if watching, and sprays the opposite wall with a

small stream of red-hot water.

“What?” she asks, eyes big and round like Crimean dinner plates. There

were IRS GS-9s in Peoria, Illinois who watched television programs of

cowgirls riding jellybean horses, whipping cotton candy lassoes. Their

eyes resembled hers. There was a coolness, a stillness, an overall gaze

of complicity and repression. A mark of cowardice, callousness, and

general stupidity.

There are no cowgirls to be found in Peoria. Only 1040s and W-2s and

miserable little men. Somewhere in the Dakotas, a horse rolls over and

licks its saddle.

A blink, a sigh, a mouthful of (perhaps faux) hamburger. “Like, when you

dig?”

“Dig?” Her head bobs, not unlike how I imagined her to look whilst

fellating the left-hand-man, in all his bubble-bathed glory.

“Like, in your cunt.”

“...”

“Princess? Are you listening, princess?”

There is an intense sigh, a shaking of the head (though side to side,

not at all like I imagined it), an exasperated eye roll. She is sick of

my shit, I think.

There are no cowgirls in Peoria, but there are paper-pushers and

cart-boys. There are GS-15s whose cocks are begging to be sucked,

practically throbbing with anticipation. A GS-10 pushes back the awry

bangs of her forehead with one hand and the hood of a 15’s you-know-what

with the other, simultaneously. In the coat-cloaked office of a man

unwed but not exactly lonely, she defies the first law of the Internal

Revenue Service - there is no such thing as true efficiency.

She sighs against my lips and threads her fingers through my hair, still

blonde and uncut. I think of England, of the Belgian Congo and the

Russian army. I think of Princess Diana and cell towers, of cowboys and

cowgirls. I think of ethics, of moral philosophy, of Sophocles and

Sappho. There are trains which run in a little neighborhood off the

schoolyard I have visited twice, and I think of their graffitied sides.

I think of their drivers, their wranglers, their confidants and

hitchhikers. The lips part, pucker, and her little sideways mouth moves

in one swift motion I would only later describe as “heavenly”. I am

afflicted, but pretend to not be.

“I don’t think I’d call it digging, frankly, and I wouldn’t go so far as

to say I think of anything, I guess. I use my mind when I need to, I

do.”

A cocked head, a smorgasbord of pornographic thought. I wonder if she

knows what it is I think of, and then shake off the thought with a hard

shoo and a harder thrust. She is no wanton; she shows no inclination.

“You are always so crude with observations. I can hardly stand it. And

what do you dig for, child, honestly. That’s what a man is for.” A

barely nondescript cringe ensues.

There is ketchup way above her top lip, almost close to her shadowed

under-eye. A tiny red dot, almost sensual in placement. She struggles to

remain soundly un-facetious; I can see this struggle play out on the

uptight un-sags of her cheeks.

Say my name, she whispers. I am not in a condition to say anything. I am

not in a condition, at all. I think of Camilla’s boyish hairdo, of

Socrates’ vapid circlejerk.

“I mean, honestly, child, do you think it is so out of the realm of

possibility that you may be harboring some sort of crimes of nature?

That you may be afflicted by more than a schoolgirl’s onslaught of

psychopathic thought? That maybe you are simply one of those-

O raven. O monastery. O mother of milk, o winter of men.

She cradled this image in her barren throws of a womb, as though it is

the last such image she will ever, can ever hold.

She, woman of mercury-laden thermometers and fishing poles. Woman of

premarital amoeba training, of shitting and fucking and threadbare linen

throws. Woman of culture breathes in, and out again. Retains her vocal

capabilities. “O monastery”, she croaks. “O great navel. Umbilicus of my

desires, rope of fertility and all things unrequite, show me the wisdom

of your keyhole, unplugged.”

She awaits the arrival of something. Unaware of what, her stupidity

resonates. Permeates. Lifts, puckers. Her stomach quivers - much like

his did, once, in that train yard so many light-years and sound-scapes

away.

The aforementioned navel stretches its lint and sighs. It is tired; no

calls will be made today.

“Where is the beginning?”

What is, a cheat. A liar. A terrible, awful woman. A thief of things

unholy but unpaid for. A scarlet letter, inscribed with toe-trodden ink

on her neck.