from MOLOTOV By Nicky Tiso   "We are not throwing this Molotov cocktail to defy the idea of privatized property, but to quench a thirst deeper than that, one of reconciliation with a former ardor that we both need to know exists; To show we are not afraid, that we do not live in fear but outside of it, peering in with curious eyes that long to know if our spirits are, in fact, flammable. Long have we hibernated with dissevered wrists and watched dying histories drip, remembered only by the floorboards, but no longer! "We are born into trauma, becoming so wrapped up against the torture of survival, so in denial of our impending deaths that we turn to God and civilization. We refuse to admit this isolation and suffering we all feel is part of a latent desperation, a shrill cry from our animal instinct. It is gagged and bound but that doesn't mean we can't bite! "Yes, I hear the booming voice in the back of all our heads loud and clear. It seeps in through a gaping wound in our conscience without the compromise of input. It is our culture, and we must treat it like Old Yeller. It speaks in uvulas of capitalism riveting "buy" at the bottom of every breath. Its coat hangs mustily on the air we breathe till its scent is so mind numbingly thick we forget how we reek. "And what's the best we can muster up to combat this monster? Sympathy? Sorrow directed towards someone else! As if we are innocent bystanders? No, being a bystander is precisely what makes you guilty. We are one of the snakes on Medusa's head! Hardly innocent of a world turned to stone. "You decadent, disgusting, television-watching fucks can sit on your ass while the flames of hell escalate around you. I do not want sympathy! I want revenge! Does not the acid we produce rain back down on our heads? Is our eyesight not funneled like the double-barrels of a shotgun? The age of innocence has ended. We are born guilty if not fighting. "For how ever advanced we dress ourselves up to be, we still bathe in the blood of the indigenous, foaming with bubbles of civility. And in our glory, we have mutilated our essence. We have forgotten the worth of life; the value has fallen between the couch cushions with our pocket change. We have amputated the earth and risen above it on concrete legs, we brought God down to sea level and broadcast the moon. We are in the age of tank treads and prosthetic heads, staggering inside a nation that will rise and fall like all other pathetic nations. Power is like pollen and it is spring, my brothers! Time to clean the slate of the miry excess we wade in. Forget your anthems that have atrophied your spirits, we are our own song! Sing against this profitable enterprise of conjured human division has got us all drunk on a Friday night!" Ironically, this story is best enjoyed by purchasing the completed anthology