For our Branches are buried in mud, and instinctively thirst for rain and sun even while sunk in the muck.

But they’re smothered to choking in that damp and locked from the light in that dirt.

We were born with a sharp garlic taste for lust, madness, and with an inarticulate goat-cry lodged in the throat. But every noble, kicking, fearsome, joyous impulse in us can’t live while our lungs and hands and brains and souls are trapped by the rank Sludge of the Burying World.

Because the Burying World hates anything secret, strange, and wild. It wants us tame, drooling, limp, soft and clawing around in the underground or not at all. It wants us like Wax to better receive the bombardment of impressions from television & advertisements, billboards and the Buy-This Datafeed. The Burying World is the world of sensory overflow. The Burying World is the world of the Close-Up & Zoom-In; it’s the world of graphic representation run amok. The Burying World wants your Eye, wants to bore a hole in it to fuck. And then it will ask for your money.

The Burying World knows what you want, because it has seized your senses and pumped you full of well-marketed desires like formaldehyde. The Burying World coddles your narcissism and makes you think you deserve everything. That you should improve yourself endlessly. That nothing else matters but you [and only the ‘you’ that is able to purchase and desire]. Not other people, not a tree or a creek, not a cow or a lark, not Art or the Spirit. And so the Burying World keeps you slavering after its products and messages — yoked to its Pus-Drip-Feed — through planned obsolescence and psy-ops marketing. The Burying World fastens thick cables around your neck.

The Burying World is the world of convenience and expedited-everything. The world of Minimalism, Economizing and quick, marketable Feng-Shui-Simplicity at the expense of the bounding heartful healthy Sprawl that we are born craving. The Burying World wants to strangle your thoughts and words into easy-to-digest Soundbytes and Energy Bars. The Burying World will chain you. The Burying World will take your Gazelles from their well-gamboled Steppes to trammel to Troughs for fattening up.

The Burying World numbs your sex and makes pallid your grins with isolating devices, gadgets and technologies. The Burying World automates and automates until there is no need for us to intervene in the endless layers of Processes regulating Processes; Machines regulating Machines. Removed from the world, we rot. The Burying World will feed on our compost.

The Burying World hates the past, hates history, and lives in the eternal, marketable Now. The Burying World is afraid of absolutes, whether in Art or in morality or in church or in state, and would rather you accept everything in what seems to be an enlightened & progressive relativism, but which is actually a spoon-fed blubbering Apathy.
 (Read More . . .)

There’s a stretch of overpass somewhere after 40th on the Westside Highway, from within a cab, at night, the wind in your face, the cool wind in your face bathing your eyes, where on your right launch these sudden things, planet things, high-rises and apartment-towers lit up and mysterious like glowing-algaed underwater obelisks –

& maybe you’re a little drunk, maybe you’re relaxed and dissolving into the seat a little during this stretch of overpass after 40th, at night, when you’re in the back of this cab and everything’s okay, the night finally over, everything settling in your brain like cool milk, like a soft cool hand on your hot forehead –

– five minutes, five little minutes where everything’s absolutely okay, nothing has yet happened and nothing yet will, a glad stasis, a waiting-and-not-waiting, a being, breathing in through your nose so hard your throat feels ice-watered, the wind in your face, on your skin, in your brain –

when come the sudden things,
the giant underwater glowing things,
the high-rises noble, dispassionate,
a little cruel,
like ancient statues,
bearing witness like olmec heads, like maori,

and you’re a boy again,
on a daytrip to the beach,
praying the car won’t stop,

the salt-sea smell in your nose,
hearing the shore grow closer, distant gulls,
tasting sandgrit in your molars,
watching power lines dip and rise, dip and rise,
wanting nothing to ever choke this perfect sleeping breath
of pure motion.

“Knock it down,” the man beside me says, “clean it up.”

A building is being demolished outside, there are strange sounds, the steel beams are squealing in shocked animal protest, people walking dogs pause and gawk, bikers brake and linger.

Stand long enough and little white particles will accrete to your hair and clothes and to the alveoli of your lungs, blown by the wind from the wrecking place. Yet we stand, and watch. And some thrill.

We were born with a hunger for violence –- atavistic, slumbering, forgotten, euphemized, dressed up in the clothes of progress and civilization, but never erased, never unyoked to our spirits.

And if we can no longer slake it, from atrophy of will or muscle, we build things to do it for us –- or sate ourselves by proxy of army and mob.