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E X - N I H I L O

by Tread

/
1.
my hypothesis is life ain`t monopoly, even tho there`s paper money and the base ain`t free, not effectively anyway, I`m the surreal emcee, never forget that a space between means there are solid peripheries, otherwise it`d be empty and full of the empty- ness, contrast is everything, and Godliness is cleanliness so I guess I ain`t a God, except when I`ve got a job I`m a heartthrob sobbing on your hobnob with eczema that makes me look like a hobgoblin with a good noggin on my shoulders, all the bones can`t even hold it so the back seems to be folding, and I`m getting creased at the seams, I am human origami, an epileptic gettin` balmy trying to pretend that he`s a swami, drinkin 15 dollar wine with my pastrami, cus hell you can`t tell me I ain`t looking good with the food that I eat, cus I am what I eat, and what I eat is the meat from the street, melting sleet in my mouth as a metaphor for water or a lamb to the slaughter or a dam to an otter, jumping on one side of a teeter-totter with a pale of sand on the opposite, create a catapult of confidence and launch my demeanour across all continents, or at least try til I die like Solomon, or your congressman post-Trump 2016 dissolves both legislative branches and declares we`re all cogs in the machine, what a beautiful scene, what a great way for this film to end, and if the left hand offends then the right hand amends, taking a weekend to cash in my dividends and transcend (x2)
2.
put it all apart and take it all together, words are coins and signifiers, yelling nouns and verbs cus langauge is our signal fire, never better never worse, never ever again could I weaponize sin, make it spin like my head when we win and I'm Prime Minister of Canada, demanding a janitor, to clean up all planet earth, spray me from a cannister, vandalizing its diameter, yet I'd say beautifying is a better word, dressing actions so they look like verbs, more like letters, more like effortless effort that takes effort to define effortless effort, floating free on the wind, I'm a zephyr, blood is everywhere, and the worst part is it's red like Clifford, so the innocence is as warm as a lizard, and my last name is King, so my last-last name must be Richard, I could use a pint of Richards Red to nullify this existential dread about all the books still left unread, all the things that need sayin' yet remain unsaid, all the other radiowaves of reality I'll miss til my eyes go infrared, nothings left in my head when I try to dream asleep in bed, that's not a joke, it's a factor I have to consider before I hire redactors to cross out the bad parts, my bad art and sad heart make me a practictioner of the Dark Arts, Signing the SALT and START treaties to subtract nukes in mathematical theory like I'm Archimedes, sipping on some green tea, wondering how much I'll have to save just to afford to be free, economic pyramid schemes are as ancient as the pyramids themselves, dressed to the nines, undressed to the twelves, rooting up them rebel cells, Darth Vader hunting Jedi in his yacht through the Dardanelles, sending his farewell to the Obi-Wan Kenobi of Turkey, force-choking Erdogan, huffing in his evil voice, "you'll never get to search me," never get to search him? I make my screams into a church hymn and just sing to the stars, read my words like tarot cards, things could get a lot worse, and they'll get a lot better, maybe one day, then, I'll see my name emblazoned in big letters in the header of a sold out show. some say I don't got the rappers voice tho, well I say to that I don't have the body of a shoddy either, man, but I'm blessed by Saraswati, what a hottie, sorry I was tardy in arrival to the universal party, but I'm a smarty so I'm catching up on what I missed, checking every schema, doctrine, place & time I need to study on my list.
3.
you're gonna miss me when I'm busy, hitting every corner with my runners in a tizzy, long gone on my way to ressurect Pliny from his molten casket below Mount Vesuvius, studying natures assets from the safety of Pompeii, so oblivious, long before Christ and Eusebius, earthbound hellfire that can still kill the best of us, I don't mean to be a gloomy gus, sorry I'm so serious, pointing out what's obvious, mysterious, it seems ominimous but I'm too curious not too look, and that just might kill the cat as I melt away in magma upon the same place that Pliny sat--- and it's been millenia since them Athenian ships sailed in homogenous sets, gazing at new shores with an Aristotelian lense that washed away all the meaninglessness, like a contract group of thinkers with a cleaning business-- and now the window is immaculate, I can see spectacular mountains at a distance I don't think that I can calculate, so I inculcate the wonder into a soul that's cut asunder, hidden under the obfuscation of so many words and numbers with which I justify my blunders to a group of meaning hunters in their hundreds, til the meeting's interrupted by Icarus who's falling cus his wings burnt, gliding tight to the sun, and I wonder if this Icarus was the only one to feel the burn, it's the hard way to learn, but no where near as bad as if they'd really fucked up CERN and made a black-hole, sweeping us out into space-time so earth becomes a whack-a-mole in transdimensional travel, nature's court bangs the gavel and then each of us disintegrates into intergalactic gravel, and get gone, get to see God and get grown, get good heaven credit so as to get a body loaned -- and the devil's impatient, pacing back and forth through his magma and praying to God that soon the Lord's throne will be vacant and fresh for his taking, meaning Lucifer is the Heavenly Trump that'll shake all the angels from their cozy and ancient complacence, replacing the holy adornments with idols to snake cults of old, "Make Heaven Great Again," or "Make Heaven Cold" frozen over so the clouds look like vanilla yogurt just ready to be eaten, just ready to be sold, probiotic in the billions, got to build that gut resilience up here in Earth's pavillion, and the rabble at them pearly gates are freshly dead civilians, victims of American terror bombs and corporate profit prisons, dulled by oppression so there's only one light shining through their prisms, a crusty old tradition or another shitty 'ism', God beats his bass drum to just the right rhythm to forgive em, turns out the truth was never hidden (x2)
4.
cook me so delicious, I'm seditious in my missives a terracota army lining up to do your dishes but all them statues are a front, in this army, I'm the only real one, yet my verbs are hot cus they're perihelion in orbit, my demeanor so tight to the sun it's like our star's wearing corset, for corporate interviews to gain a cubicle where y'all go dormant til your psychic energies spark mad and make you kill like an American Psycho helping weirdos get the best price on they car insurance from Geico, I watch with an angst as I puff the propylene glycol, get arrested by the cops once they grab a valid warrant, fall fast in the rapid torrent of the force of other people's morals, I'll hang wreaths and laurels at the makeshift funeral for the death of who everbody thought you were, someone we all thought had a far-sight ocular sense and good humor, didn't think his views were homicidally alt-right cus that really isn't alright, but it's right-wing, or, more like I fear everything cus I'm a shivering chicken wing of a man, inherently skeptical of everybody who was born with a tan or who comes from a culture in the sands of the cradle of civilization, progenitor of all innovation, the place that gave birth to the idea of a nation, but then we came along and degeneratively emancipate them with the displaced weight of globalization and further desertification through the force of climate change, getting violent with the force of my pen on the page as I write and debate about how deranged our current basic mode of exchannngggee... is. if the Earth is our living room, then it's time to rearraaaanngggee shit, like the TV and upholstery, cut our fiending for the oil, go cold turrrrkeeeyy, we'd probably be surprised to find our quitting would be wooorrrkking, it's a bandaid fix, for the moment's mix of music and tricks in nuance, sat with the crew in the shoe shop and drew lots to decide who we'd get to be and who not.
5.
melting like a butter stick, call me Klemmens von Metternich, my rhetoric like Arabic insofar as it is poetry, woe is me, embedded in me knowingly and it's why I write so ferociously, keyboard clicking like a pen scratch to paper, my emotion flows filled with gators, I contain it on the day per day, sir, then get release through playing God as a creator, the unmoved mover, the ungrooved groover, a former YouTuber sans the moral rage or humor to tutor the skulls of the rat race, killing with a cat's face so I don't leave a trace of blood upon their mattress, so there's no case to chase, no abstract base, does white skin mean I'm a part of a paper race of heavy cranes acting like Black Lives Matter wearing smeared blackface, or am I wearing false paleface? (or am I wearing false paleface?) in the preface to my future book, I can quote my own rap hooks like a narcissistic mystic, my main claim: if you blink, you might just miss it, so sort logistics and go wing it you the first exhibit so try not to fidget, I know I know, you're much more than just a digit, that's explicit, not implied, like a pigeon you will fly, breadcrumbs til the day you die, just a vision of precarious living that's got us livid and you'd better just admit it, please don't forget it, we're heading off an edge while smoking just to look edgey, contrary to my last read, Machiavelli, weed smell heavy, I'm so smelly, rub my belly, drinking beer in a bottle shaped like Buddha, reciting the words of Pablo Neruda, "Rise up and be born with me, brother" -- in another summer we discovered how to make our weak hearts flutter, cus I was melting like a butter stick you can call me Klemens von Metternich, my flow so solid like the Antarctic ice shelves as they delve and swim with the weather, climate change means it's summer forever til it's all just a desert
6.
clamping down on the dreams of the cells inside my body, physically draconian, I don't think they really want me, dead so freedom comes, through a moribund sense of hypochondria, the powerhouse of the cell is the mitochondria, ground myself on the landing-strip of my own inner La Guardia customs and enforcement are my thoughts and they embody a different kind of difference, squealing like Deliverance, reuniting cognitive dissonace, cus dissonance can be harmony, my brain is an open season pharmacy, retaining information on the pirates of the Barbary coast, diagnosed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as extra likely to revolt, cus adjustment that is structural ain't functional, and it can't be a free market if they shove it down your throat / / / cloaked in the connotations coaxed out by misinterpretations of my words upon excommunicated examination, you think you see straight through me, but that's just it, you see straight through me and glue your eyes to the wall keep your eye on the ball, and keep Windows XP installed, divided and destined to fall like the -States- of America, disunited within aggregate numerical standards, stop, drop, and role when you hear Bernie Sanders spit fire at Pruitt's Senate confirmation hearing, a smile from eye to eye as we try to stay positive while we feel the end nearing, gearing for apocalypse, scared of all these populists who think of other groups as monoliths, I'm just staring at the glow of the L E D on my laptop screen through which I watch and scream in my own short scene, within the larger super-movie of Humanity: A Story of Abuse and Resilience, let's just say I'm a gangster rapper and I'm gon curb stomp you and your affiliates, "You're a traitor and a member of the Rebel Alliance," under arrest for defiance, fading like a quasar and then piquing like a supernova star explosion growing giant, fulfilling some bullshit predicted by the Mayans thanks to confirmation bias, but go ahead, blame yourself for neglecting necessity and acting impious, acting and trying, trying way too hard to make straight true art, but that extra effort's gets gas-lit by a fear of the absolute and unknown, giving a half-mast flag salute in my own autonomous zone demarcated in bounds thru my poems, and the fact I've been maligned by corporate credit on the phone, they don't recognize the independence of my throne and one man dynasty, half asserting my primacy in rap despite anxiety and that voice not built for a hip-hop lyricist, just a boring professorial empiricist, and homie, that's my real plan B, maybe get a mansion like the Great Gatsby, don't think of God when you cook, go on and grate that cheese, scrape those knees like you're still just 3 years old in a town lit lightly basked nostalgia, what I can see through squinted eyes, the sky's too bright thanks to my epilepsy meds, white chalk-like valley centre-grooved little pills, back feels like it's been pierced with metal pins up the length of my spine, so the chill becomes a shiver in this Powell River winter, now in the city of a long dead queen, sitting on the faultine of the Juan de Fuca, patiently waiting out the age of Kali Yuga, you call shotgun, I call bazooka, Buddha calling on me just to leave posessions in the light under Luna, Roman goddess of the moon lost in history's proverbial Bermuda, sinking like a pirate ship torpedoed through a space-time cycle slip, on the tip of my tongue, and the tip of my dick, tips of my fingers, the clocks on the peripheries of our flat earth continue to tick.
7.
throw me overboard like a bit of bad plastic an angel just called and said that's drastic, I asked the angel if they were all a gaggle of raptors in the heaven of the Jurassic, the reply I get is muddled through the incoherence of cosmic interference in the microwave rays of radiation, thought I could harvest the power of the angels with a solar panel in my basement, but it turns out that I've encountered the need for a Gieger counter before the hours tick too far away and crush me into finer powder with no verbal fire power, spot me in the highest tower looking for a hip-hop buyer, just a taste that can never go to waste as long as I've got a face to be saved through a crowd I can save with a pinch of particulars packed to persuade, when I'm in the mood, I'm a one man parade, just takes a little philo for the every-all manifesting ex nihilo, rap from nothing but amino acids in my free flow crossing coast to coast from New York to San Bernardino, where that Californian sun got me coddled like a cosmic guido in a safe space, racing away from the race of the races, white supremacists scare me too, but they grow dumber and bolder within the dark places, whether its the barracks or mom's basement, it's as if they were Sith in hiding, writing Mein Kampf's in anonymity and biding their time, guiding fresh blood for their soil to the Shrine of the White Man's Burden, so damn certain every bad thing that's occurring has got a different colored person hiding right behind the curtains, shows up so show yourselves, you multifarious Wizards of Oz, always takin er jobs, and besides, aren't they aware wizarding is contrary to state law? God, sweet Jesus, just read my complete treatise and see I'm the nouveau nerd-rap kinda Greek genius who sleeps dreamless through the night so the load time between dusk and dawn is magically seamless, no loading screens in sight; reality in full HD, every pimple, scar, cosmetic face mask in proper focus for all to see, and wish to be, realize our skin is pixelated like on television, trapped in my tunnel vision struggling to fulfil my lifelong mission in leisurely efficience without blowing too many gaskets or pistons through my paragraph opinions watch me go on virtue signallin' as I read from the book I mistake for my face, or the face I mistook for a book, oil fields on fire inside my own little Kirkuk, and for that statement, you could call me pretentious, instead, however, I'd claim I'm a recent invention straining all convention to limits left unmentioned as reality barrels past what words can express, sit back, relax, gaze, listen, and forget the rest.
8.
dance with me across a galaxy and we'll cure both our inner maladies, sadness is an old friend, a bringer of bad news and tragedy, perhaps, more accurately, we'd call it tragecomedy, and it consists of biting honesty til honesty can bite straight at my face, tripping me just as I cross across the lost little island represented by a cross drawn in the sand, the finish line to the human race, every winner gets a sponser and a brand so they too have a chance to make a grand to the power of ten, excess in the name of the best parts of zen, I don't want another Barbie to my Ken, I'd prefer an Eleanor to my Franklin, Telling all I know of what Foucault suggests to the Roosevelt's, Grab Teddy & the Rough Riders so we can head to hunt for pelts, Maybe down in Similkameen Country, instead of sitting all alone at home watching something on TV about a Hill with One Tree in the title, setting out to smash our idols so the tidal wave of homicidal entitlement no longer stems from the barrels of guns held by a legion of seethingly jaded riflemen, I find the heat of a bullet to be just a little bit stifling--- I don't want another Barbie to my Ken (x3), I prefer an Eleanor to my Franklin (x4).... On that fast tank and think you can really get away? think you can really find the way back? think you can really find the day? what is this-- gone, it's disappearing, it's all done, I think we're crying in the hotness of the summer sun, and your tears will reflect the lights, and then your face will get burned like you got tans goin' down, like you a clown, a real sad clown, like you a clown, a real fuckin' sad clown.
9.
sometimes I feel like I'm achey failure in the making yeah, the workloads larger than the space I'm taking just to keep being, sipping on my pabst or yerba mate try'n flow when I seek through the pages days to days n weeks to weeks, months to a year, in a blink, like I was asleep and just dreaming speeding through my lookey lookey life all confused about the meaning like what it is ain't life's a big blank canvas, paint with the colors that are seeping through the walls of our seperation, "is it NOT beautiful?" adage, just some simple veneration, got that talkity talkity voice of shame that says I ain't good enough, impatience-- got me looped up like a loose-leashed dog trying to lose me some, just a little, just for one fucking second in the sun, and what's it to me if I can learn how to be, and thus learn how to lose, sometimes win, and just keep, some sort of relative even key, a central basic nascence and patience somewhere deep inside of me, the deep acceptance of my sadness and discomfort and mortality, - I don't know if sanity is sanitary, my hygiene is a task, when it's bad, it hangs heavy, hangs steady til the wind gets heady and the neon sign above my head starts to fizzle out and fall on to the top of my wall of seperation, my skull as partition between me and the bigger me, a superimposition, operating on my fallacies with a steak knife and incredible precision, when I fuck you in missionary, it's cus I'm on a mission ejaculating my emissions without copyright permission, so I'll sue you for plagiarism when I see the kid is really living all the dreams I dreamt myself, a black belt, as in a belt that was green and colored in with black felt, false professionals working false professions sad and neurotic in their measured confessions, as shameless as Jeff Sessions white complexion sans complexity, sans equity and all phased and faded in non-sequiturs about the sins of being secular, his penis is molecular just like his samples are irregular insofar as we found semen in his stool, Attorney General of thinking far too generally, he'd rather it weren't the Union, but the Confederacy so that's what he's doing, turning the clock backwards cus everyone (say in Southern accent) "should have a gun to stop them school shootings," no, Jeff, you need guns to shoot coons, but you're a looney who just croons at the thought of equality, cus them gays make you fume, can we find it in ourselves to really bomb the tombs of the ancients in the sands of Iraq, like a country is just shards of glass that look better not intact, cus that way the shattered lives shine like the stars, burnt out as the light reaches these eyes of mine but beautiful, none the less the question I said must be beckoned and offered and said, "is it NOT beautiful?" whether clear or so inscrutable, you think the hypothesis is mutable, or it's become a mutant, the skin is all transluscent cus I can't afford nutrition as a student, unless I'm prudent which I haven't learned to be, haven't yearned and studied through all kinds of pain to see, whatever it is I'm looking at, looking past the ashes inside of the plastic bottle of happenstance I keep back in the back of my backpack, *back in the back of my backpack*
10.
getting epileptic, so perplexing in its setup, my mind's a disinfectant for all fallacy, that distant frontier's kinda mind-state mentality and actually, the opposite of depression isn't happiness, it's vitality, recognize the galaxy flows straight through your regional locality, municipality inside my soul's inner sinner's Galilee; my brain is a focused tonal mobile taste of all totality, singing with reality to express my abnormality and insanity as song, something beautiful when spawned and redrawn through interpretation, inspiration, revelation til it's so present that it's gone, under the invisibility cloak of your nose, bad news hiding under Shakespearean prose so the thorns from the rose don't sting so bad when though's sadness has a reason, lease emotions by the feel of the season, plundering the nihilists of meaning cus, well, they don't seem to need it to keep breathing as they cry that life's so fleeting and that death is always creeping up on them, but forgetting you need death to live // otherwise this life just 'is', and there wouldn't be a contrast, it needn't be a contest, we all bleed into the context found beyond expression via concepts, the feeling that my seizure aura's grant me during onset (tho I still really wouldn't recommend it), a sense of reality involuntarily bending, makes me realize this body is a vessel that is me and yet I'm lending, or renting in the 21st century meaning it's probably sans repenting, and I'll never recant, never contract from the vastness I chant as my mantra, til it's my last stand against the Spanish Reconquista on the tip of Grenada gazing out at Mount Gibraltar, cus I'm the Cosmic Walzer healing ulcers with my TV evangelist touch, climb down from the alchemist's bluff, together we'll weather the storm til our feathers can grind like the pragmatists gulch lost in the flavor of my taste as expressed through salt...
11.
do you remember when I lost the ember? I used to semper fi til the one day I would die but the chains on my ankles still remember her nasty temper that would make that bachelor tremble sending circle-earthquake tremors through the neighbourhood and tumble trees with 'timber!', we both scream it in surrender, your touch was once so tender, and yet now it's torn a scar into my head, Harry Potter with a straight-line, not a thunderbolt, Boddhisatva drinking cheap wine straight from a tunnel vault, My pummeled waltz is the result of all the pain I've hung aloft to dry... the kinda guy who has to write otherwise I'll choke my light and end my life, probably by my own hand, don't mean to be that sad, but honestly, we all embody an eternity, one eternity, unified in vision and a love for this absurdity that's both nourishing and hurting me, damn it all it's worth it, see? you can't count on some dumb guarantee that life is reading BBC, CBC, or about the era BCE, abstract concepts that define what's "free" and in so doing keep restricting me, conceptual idolatry committed by Leviticus before his type went extinct just like australopithecus, and both are resurrected in the words of a syllabus... kiss kiss, bitch hitch a ride on over. do you remember when I lost the ember? (x2) I used to semper fi til the one day I would die (x2), but the chains on my ankles still remember...
12.
you ain't ever gotta see me as a victim, pants pulled down to my crown on the ground, cus I don't wanna be a King, it ain't my thing, I'm more in to combining decline and ascension, defying convention just to ease up on the tension and clear the mists of this depression, I caught a glance of my direction, but these mists can fade redemption til there's nothing left at all except a question I forgot to mark with a felt, before I placed myself into the text forgotten on this dusty bookshelf, and find my wealth in... CHORUS: *a self-same sense of self, a self-same sense of self, fly on the wall or a book on the shelf, a self-same sense of self, open the pages, each page is my face, it's my self-same sense of self* ... a self-same sense of self* a fly on the wall or a book on the shelf, up atop the grandfather clock while I watch everything disguised as an elf, creepy when you're sleeping, and still weird when you're awake... all I've got to say to you is everything will be insanely okay-- insanely opaque, like all I see is the periphery between the surface and the depths in the water of this lake as I'm sinkin, all I got left is the sound of thrushing liquid and the thoughts in my ears so I keep on thinkin--- death is just dissemination, redistribute my sense of self and my restless inner patience, and in disintegration I discover where I came from, the big bang at the beginning blasting straight from God's bass drum, *DA DUM CHHI* I'm the definition of outgoing with no income, university's adversity got me living in a room strewn by the Tread typhoon cus my head's above the clouds and on the moon, now it's looking like a Bombay slum, and I'm the slumdog $6 heir, trying to exorcise the whole inclination to recital of the good lord's prayer, not because I don't think "he's there," but I don't think it's "he" and I don't think it's "there," if it's anything it's everything, every person, every thought every action, every movement, everywhere, not hiding in a cloud kingdom, or in a monarch's lair, that ain't fair, suggests he doesn't care *ad-libbed speech bit* (CHORUS)
13.
**dip your toes in the river, it won't ever be the same try to read your own mind, your goal will be to feel insane** or at least convince your therapist you're arrogance is a varied response to Gandhi's non-violent terrorists, so let me clarify I'm terrified, a Gemini, half a color-film televised paradise, and half a paranoid genocide, I'm living under house arrest within the open fields of my endless mind, it's arrest because it's lonely, unless I let the books, stories, films, Goodwill Hunting for harems, so they can do all my errands, while I just sit down and browse Reddit and other forums, (I'M A LOST SOUL), but I just say that cus I'm found, (I'M AN ANGSTY 24 YEAR OLD), no it's ok, I'll sleep on the ground for a sterling pound, turn around, head is crowned, I hear the sound of the Paterson-King usurpers, I'll outwit while on uppers, it's an utter mess, the world, but at least I've got the buffer of the internet, cus I'm infinite in my interest, gonna introspect until the intricate connect-the-dots is finished, even then my gaze is undiminished **dip your toes in the river, it won't ever be the same try to read your own mind, your goal will be to feel insane**

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released December 11, 2017

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Tread Powell River, British Columbia

Cosmic poetry in infinite motion until we realize there is no end, after which he keeps on rhyming
--**--ethereal
oddball
rap--**--

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