Like two devils, one stubbornly opaque and the other hideously awake, Carbon Mike and Jimmy Rabbit played phone tag in the amoral winds at the end of another iniquitous year, finally making contact right before the unhallowed day of inebriation.

“Jimmy, before you head west old man, get that voice mail fixed!”

“I can’t—it’s broke. How’s the new job goin’ bro?”

“Sheeit, got fired.”

“What, that middle-aged, liberal ghost woman who wants her son to be a gangster rapper finally got sick of your Larry Elder bullshit?”

“Nah—I quit that shit, then moved on up! I was working for this pasty-faced, pencil-necked white muthafuca, the manager of us all in a very artistically aligned business, when, over a few drinks at the Christmas party, this dude looks at me—you understand I’m an opaque element, right. You met me. I make Tommy Sotomayor look like a half-breed—this piece-of-shit has the gall to say, ‘Diversity is our strength,’ like it’s the Lord’s Prayer or something. So, I said, ‘Fuck that diversity bullshit!’

“Right out yo traitorous mouth!”

“Damn straight. They don’t want diversity but perversity. So I landed something better and before I start I figured I’d catch up with your outrageousness.”

“Better watch out, son. You know they’re gonna feed me to the dogs. But you, you’re gonna swing!”

“What?!?”

“I’m about to let you in on an eldritch tale, might even turn your ass pale.”

“Oh, I can’t wat for this. Go on.”

“Out in the Tumbledown Mountains, right before you get to the Rustbelt River, there’s a tree, the Traitor Tree, a twisted tree with chestnut colored bark of deep brown and when you peel that bark back the heartwood is white and hard. The dogs I’ll ne gnawing my bones on its roots and you’ll be swinging from the most misshapen branch!”

“Oh, Jimmy, that’s some hillbilly shit right there!”

[Laughter]

“That it may be, but you’ve been warned.”

“Why thank you—how ‘bout you send some of those slavery books this way. I’m sick of the schools teaching my daughter that she’s a born slave.”

“Will do.”

Mike then sent me the following ether message:

Carbon Mike

Sat, Dec 29, 3:58 PM (2 days ago)

Thanks brother!

Here's some verse from an Englishman named Hilaire Belloc. He was an anti-Socialist who nonetheless saw the flaws in capitalism and wage slavery, and proposed an alternative called Distributism (not to be mistaken for "redistributionism").

G.K. Chesterton wrote a glowing review of this poem in which he pointed out that Socialist rallying songs, by comparison, were limp-wristed; that the got-damn Socialists were always marching and singing but had no tactical awareness and no concrete objectives. By contrast, GKC says, my man Belloc musters his troops, executes a flanking maneuver, assaults through the strong point, seizes the territory, kills the enemy, and sits down to a nice hot dinner.

This the voice of a man, a citizen-soldier, a father of sons, who insists that a man is free or he is nothing. The only dame in the piece is Justice—and she's on his side!

Who knew that poetry could be an anti-sissy vaϲϲine?

BY HILAIRE BELLOC

There is a wall of which the stones

Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones.

And wrongfully this evil wall

Denies what all men made for all,

And shamelessly this wall surrounds

Our homesteads and our native grounds.

But I will gather and I will ride,

And I will summon a countryside,

And many a man shall hear my halloa

Who never had thought the horn to follow;

And many a man shall ride with me

Who never had thought on earth to see

High Justice in her armoury.

When we find them where they stand,

A mile of men on either hand,

I mean to charge from right away

And force the flanks of their array,

And press them inward from the plains,

And drive them clamouring down the lanes,

And gallop and harry and have them down,

And carry the gates and hold the town.

Then shall I rest me from my ride

With my great anger satisfied.

Only, before I eat and drink,

When I have killed them all, I think

That I will batter their carven names,

And slit the pictures in their frames,

And burn for scent their cedar door,

And melt the gold their women wore,

And hack their horses at the knees,

And hew to death their timber trees,

And plough their gardens deep and through—

And all these things I mean to do

For fear perhaps my little son

Should break his hands, as I have done.

You can check out Carbon' Mike's work on Future Radio, although he hasn't posted in some time due to negotiating job markets managed by guilty ghost liberals intent on maintaining the Plantation of the Mind.