F*ck Normal

Mickey J. Corrigan Spouts Off

[redlipstickresurrected]

Gustave Doré aka Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré (French, 1832-1883, b. Strasbourg, France) - Leviathan the twisting Serpent, 1866, Woodblock Print

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Allegiance and Vengeance

You mask up, load up, gang up intent on winning something the wreckage of the innocent the ambush of the protectors the body slams, heat ups beat downs, gassing babies strapped in cars children trapped in schools how low can you go we watch the footage we look in your eyes and our hands shake and we see jail ahead and behind you scars of unfulfilled dreams of years of cruel wants of resentments curdling with unearned power for revenge unleashed fury for old wounds old anger you hold like a small bird to be crushed in a hard fist.

[kafkasapartment]

Roseate Spoonbills..(Platalea ajaja), resident breeders in both South & North America. Primarily found in warmer regions. They take small aquatic animals, including fish, crustaceans, and insects. Coastal wetlands, a sadly popular location for high end homes and yacht marinas, are essential for their survival.

[mickeyjcorrigan]

The day soft blue green palms hissing in the rippling breeze a roseate spoonbill a flash of pink wings.

Addiction can be fate choices like memories baked in the low oven of long ago childhood.

High waves cough up seaweed tangles, smooth stones, colorful glass bits soothed by long years in a harsh salt bath.

No way of knowing who you'd become time had its way with you until you found the self you wanted planned on later discarded in a pile of pills.

Gulls soar puff clouds swoopy terns dip piercing small fish wet sand sticking to calloused feet

a sick freedom holding you down like gravity a ship's anchor a gravestone.

[dailyclassicart]

Franz Ludwig Catel - "Monks in a monastery courtyard" (1856)

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Thank you, Saint Augustine

the past is past and has ceased to exist along with our friends, parents loved ones and the future doesn’t exist yet and the present the present is a gift that has no duration gone in the time you take to read this

[1five1two]

'Young Woman with a Wreath of Flowers in her Hair'. Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer. 1896.

[mickeyjcorrigan]

King Tide

A word artist in a tidal rush of passion for the autumn moon he swept in, swept you up you thought he was lightning salt washed, kicked loose of the downtrodden earth and your blood flowed free

but he was just papier-mâché you poked a finger through found dust, fluff, dirt you found yourself again floating alone in a sea of inexorable time.

[dailyclassicart]

Louis Meijer - "Thunderstorm"

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Why You Can't Stop

The purple shade is drawn tight you share a thirsty lushness the smell of rain on sand, on sea the language of the water

You share a thirst and lushness with the sea, the shore, the sun the language water speaks to you rising loud above the thunder.

Like the sea, the shore, the sun your body craving what it craves rising loud above the thunder such need a storm inside you.

Your body craves what it craves you cannot ever shut it down your need a storm inside you whips your body into frenzy.

You cannot ever shut it down the purple shade is drawn too tight and you are lured back to your thirst the smell of rain on sand, on sea.

[acollectionofbrokenthings]

“You deserve better” is an interesting way of saying I’m not worth getting better for

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Lost Horizons

Another sunset floods the bay you climb in again, go under not to surface until the light losing yourself in the fine blue night

you climb in a bottle, gone again underwater for that deeper dive lost once more in the fine blue night floating away on a sweeping tide

under the water in deeper dives face to face with hideous shapes you float away on a weepy tide of horror, sadness, regret in waves.

Facing the morning in hideous shape you make a sunrise pact again no more horror, sadness, regret as waves of promise buoy you up.

Day drifts past in mindless ways another sunset floods the bay sun sinks slow, you sink fast not to surface until the light.

[remanence-of-love]

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Ship of Fools

Green tinged, sea unworthy you've arrived at this point on a short voyage of self-delusion

everything urgent until the next urgency

your walls stuffed with cash owed to a government you're taught to mistrust everything "they" tell you the lies of this life.

The lover drops her body when you are offshore; you do not return to grieve, you believe we all come back.

When your leader transcends the cycle of birth and death to realize full potential independent of body and material universe

you run the deck in circles circles in hot hot sun hours and hours year after year aligning your energy trying not to know your own lost mind.

The cockeyed crew locks you in the hold to await enlightenment that never comes.

[pwlanier]

NOT IN FRONT OF THE KIDS

Aaron Maier-Carretero

( 2020 )

Oil on canvas

Phillips Collection

[mickeyjcorrigan]

When you see

a poor soul sprawled on the sizzled sidewalk bones bruised, bloodied the pockmarked arms someone's ruined mother, sibling from hell, you say have a heart and reach for your wallet.

I don't, I say try living with the mad fist fights on kitchen floors burnt chicken, flying knives fear hidden under unmade beds uniforms at the door, big men dragging the body out screaming and the stink when you walk up to your own front door after the relief of school a black shroud covering the sad crumpled lean of the battered home where you must cower in your hard shell.

So I say walk on, on past the outstretched hand the familiar pleas no thank you, no please don't stop.

[everylittlethingshedoesismagic]

(via Pinterest)

[mickeyjcorrigan]

After orange sunsets, cocktails on the sand, the smell of Coppertone, Noxzema truth soaks through to where you can't see the hard seasons coming only beaching, shelling, drinking mangos ripe, plummeting from fat trees, sky the color of luxury on a lush island of blue dolphins, teal sea smooth pebbles and gray fins brilliant days you wear no clothes in the salt bath that will fill and spill rainwater, tourists soaking up summer living blind to bias, cant and suck deaf to thunder, eyes wide shut on black clouds on a long string like a killer kite overhead.

[the-torchwood-archive]

[mickeyjcorrigan]

The Trouble Between Us

Men are no longer who they once were if they ever were the men we women wanted needed dreamed of invented in fairytales.

It's our job to improve men but they think it's their job to resist.

They want to be nouveau traditional yet old rules apply: they go to work we go to work we come home cook, clean, cater childbear and childcare and they come home hungry, amorous.

Between us lies a vast abyss: our words count for nothing on their side and stretch to infinity on ours.

[undr]

Max Dupain. Melbourne with rain. 1946

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Fortune 2024

You will spend 95 minutes each day on TikTok 61 minutes on Instagram hours and hours on tumblr!

The world still won't know you're here; eventually the world will take everything away.

Your job outlook: skewed toward certain subfields: class, race, sex, politics the only expertise your identity.

Scant good news mostly bad news some will come direct; eventually you will not be reimbursed for your pain and suffering.

Coins collecting dust and rust trade and barter extra dimensional; eventually there will be only what can be simulated.

Dementia: no longer in absentia.

Ah, life: it's not for everybody.

[semioticapocalypse]

Leonard Freed. From the ‘Police Work’ series. New York. 1972

Follow my new AI-related project «Collective memories»

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Nostalgia

You watch the crowd at all-day happy hours the painfully fervent dancers boogie to Janis and Jimi bouncing on rubber soles puppets on a taut wire bending the current reality around and around an idea a child's wish, a longing fulfilled by the flashback soul-sucking gravitational pull of all that is on offer here:

safety, security, white neighbors and free golf chain stores, social clubs fast food, plastic go-cups gas-powered go-carts sunshine, water aerobics softball and pickle ball hospital and memory care you never have to leave everything is close by buy, you can afford it retired from the struggle responsibility and maturity welcome the mass hysteria cheer it on and on between cocktails, games your mind set adrift warped by sharp discounts in drinks, taxes, expectations twisting the time away.

Where there's a ventriloquist there's also a dummy.

The sales center is buzzing boomers booking new builds as the concept explodes doubling down on growth across the dry-rot land rugged by greens grass sucked free of fresh water family farms, native wildlife all the old trees removed to make room for a stream of over 55s telling you of their deep well of lust for their long lost youth and from this they say they extract a dark fuel:

you can go and go on that until you can't anymore.

[undr]

Henri Cartier-Bresson. Madrid 1953

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Last Words

Some death row inmates decline to make a statement to you or anyone else they leave behind.

Some death row inmates shuffle and mumble their words unintelligible their minds long gone.

Some death row inmates state something simple like: Peace.

Or something more complex: I am here because I took a life and killing is wrong by an individual and by the state.

Or something deep: I'm saddened by what is happening here tonight, not only saddened but disappointed that a system that is supposed to protect and uphold what is just and right can be so much like me when I made the same shameful mistake.

Some death row inmates have said: I could never forgive what I have done.

I have had time to consider the pain I have caused.

I wish I could die more than once to tell you how sorry I am.

I go out with great love and respect.

I hope you can live the rest of your life without hate.

And others: Kiss my black ass. And: Kiss my white ass.

Quotes are the actual last statements of some of the individuals executed in Texas since 1976, people who had years to contemplate their own transgressions and those of the state against them; from Final Words: 578 Men and Women Executed on Texas Death Row (November, 2023).

[dec2007]

there is nothing in the distance

[mickeyjcorrigan]

They say you can’t

die in a dream but I can, I did twice I died both times in a runaway car smashing into a bridge being smashed from behind ramming a concrete abutment flying into roaring blackness a massive explosion of sound and fury each time I crashed my old body soared sorry to leave loved ones behind and thrilled to be filled up a lightness of being floated high above the chaos, the suffering darkness below the body carefree, free the only time it happened twice they say you can't die in a dream but you can you will.

[3k0o]

[mickeyjcorrigan]

Speculative Identification

You're a good person you deserve this everyone else is helping themselves to the spoils go the rich in the empty den of memory

You're not a bad person everyone else is jumping in phones going, cards flashing charged up with hidden violence and the tyranny of the group

You're not a bored person just all messed up with no place to go standing at the corner of red and green who to believe, who to follow by the dawn's surly light

You're not a greedy person you can't help what you already got freely handed down to be squandered and your wine has a fine bouquet with a hint of immigrant labor

You're a good person, you deserve to be a part of this community of everybody's desires fulfilled after all, you were born with it, this existential promotion to patriot, American citizen.

[kvetchlandia]

Michel Maiofiss     Le Bistrot, Paris     Undated

[mickeyjcorrigan]

What Shows Through

weak glass crackles soft reflections shimmy hearts hammer a pulse a madman in every building a monster in every café

a world made from nothing needs another catastrophe to prove once again what shows through.

Wet sidewalks glisten frosted in warm blood walls sooted gray pocked with bullet holes newspapers flash headlines

when we leave things out like the truth what's left nothing is what shows through.

The upright upstanding their creased suits their careful hair their manicured teeth leading the way pointing the way to where nothing is all and nothing shows through

—and this is how it always ends.

[fairydrowning]

"I wish I had done everything on earth with you."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

-Painting by Ron Hicks

[mickeyjcorrigan]

You

My world ended when you came into it— a typhoon, a mudslide suddenly everything looked wrecked in an eye blink when you opened yours the land crushed flat green hills hollowed down blue rivers, lakes sucked gray skies dirtied, grimy, slippery sun mangled red, smashed against the black and blue moon, blinkering stars frosted with an icy chill I swallowed, choking back the yawning sinkhole I swallowed, holding down a bruised heart as you snuggled up overheated, demanding a looming abyss my world tipped off its original axis the future fragile— a spun glass pacifier in your slender hands.