fooled again

With its capital consolidated, production was divorced from places and peoples, and laws, and the histories of struggles for peace and freedom from servitude and aimless toil without end save sanitoria, for the loyal, and poorhouses for the rest.

Investment, crushing and relentless, clamping tight, draining blood, muzzling shut pleading mounths, suffocating the resistance now flipped in word plays: One man's terrorist ... is a general's mercenary, paid for in arms, sacriledge, and betrayed trust. Capital has been weaponised.

Watching our reflections on TV we clap and applaud, twiddling dials, grinning like fools, toothless; or angry like madmen cowed and hissing, with staring eyes blinded by the flashing light. Presenters proffer gold and wares their hands wringing, our ears splitting with the endless shouting and screams our minds are breaking, wildly fleeing but hopelessly stuffed with sweeties and fat.

Grain stores are emptying; food a product mouths multiply, parched and gaping, crying, whimpering somewhere far away, or in the next room. Fevered, rattling bags full of bones, our songs grow louder. Get out of my head! For pity's sake. It's over. Despite the headlines our war is lost not won. Everywhere new ones break out freshly fierce, forgotten in fields and dark dry forests, or on dusty dunes now bleached on screens. With electric messages, like mosquitoes, drones explode in blood, black dots on market stalls, while static crackles through the air.

Fires spark beginnings, their ends lost in libraries, abandoned for arcades and malls, real or imagined, where torn and threadbare fashions parachute nightly down plumes of gas and soot. Everyday is Christmas; we scramble for rewards wedded tightly in packaging; disposable, discarded, disappointed as their giddy newness expires and the air tarnishes and promises melt, and the prize, barely imagined under skintight plastic, soft, yielding, suffocatingly strong, draws us inside instead.

And our voices cry out to the audience we imagine, lost in the echoes returning, unnoticed by unseen millions.

We imagined one world surely, it was true undeniably and remains so, yet this was never assured. We assumed. Now our prayers have been answered with goods, and the State we imagined ours dissolved. Yet power remains and grows elsewhere, unfettered by rules - or by humans. The cultures we built are now serviced, fawningly, by masturbating moguls madly ranting and raving for more. A complex of war and machine unleashed; freed from victory, its armies pillage.

Each day we choose not to see, chasing the dream, the impossible dream everywhere we look, our roving eyes snagged like fish dragged on hooks. Reeled in by pixelating billboards gleaming in puddles, displaying young bodies, perfect smiles, perfect grins, perfect lives somewhere away from this grey boredom, this day after day, same journey, same faces, same sun coming up going down. Thank god, we've been freed to work how we choose; available, like a dream, always turned on, eager to please, listening for calls, abused, yet excited, afraid, and daring; Again, again. Again!

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