Web

I saw biology for what it was. I was fascinated with ecology. My first introduction into academic biology was in middle school. I couldn't wait. I was bitterly disappointed. Everything was on a cellular level in books; what's in a cell, what makes up a cell, not what a cell is or does. There was no biology you could actually see unless you were taking a scalpel to a living frog pinned on its back by its arms.  There was no understanding for the interconnectedness , the beauty of life, even microscopic life. There was no life. Everything was sterile, dead. I hated it. I reacted with joy to the quivering wonder of life under my own microscope at home. I focused on submersing myself in solitary exploration of life in the woods and forests and found my most rewarding connection to it in a magnificent little jewel of a pond at the base if a hill above my house. I spent hours, days, weeks in solitary observation and deepened my understanding of it in books I found in used book stores. The world of the insects and reptiles and amphibians and mammals and plants and microscopic life became my world, my home. Then one day I wandered up to the pond and found it covered with oil and pesticide courtesy of the county mosquito abatement department. It was an obscene, brown smear, a holocaust.  My world was gone but not the understanding that the world, the world we are all a part of supports and is dependent upon each miracle of life that is woven into it and is above all, unimaginably beautiful. But when the chain is broken, the web snapped, the result is chaos, horror and death.
   This memory is a parable for what we as a species are going through.  Like every other life form past and present, we are a part of this world, no more, no less. For most of our existence we were well aware of this and we reveled in it. As our society became more complex and we moved away from nature into a world of our own creation, earth in her glory was no longer our mother and became our possession. Humility was replaced with arrogance. Other life was not our brethren but our subjects. The spirits of life on earth no longer guided us. We invented a single god, our own god who made us in his own image. When we decided we were superior to all other life on earth, we believed ourselves its masters. It was an easy step to the belief that some of our own species were superior to all others. We had been so successful as social animals because we took care of each other. That changed. God's chosen people, the master race, the greatest country in the world are all obscenities that usher us towards extinction. City states once fought for territory, countries once fought for empire and now empire devours itself from within. The world we have created is built on technology that devours the world that created us. The cities of graceful pointed skylines that once sprinkled the world now smother it like a fatal rash of identical monstrous slabs, rectangular boils, crowded tombstones. Art was man's crowning glory. Music inflated the soul. Painting, sculpture and literature took us to the infinite world of the imagination. Today technology is our apex, money sucks the soul dry and war will be the end of us.
   The most successful link in the chain of life has broken it. The species with the most potential to understand the miracle of life and appreciate its unbelievable rarity in the vastness of the universe now threatens its existence. A unique life form with unlimited potential that once graced mother earth now infests her.


The war on terror allowed the elite to eviscerate the constitution and wage perpetual war but the construction of the police state under almost everyone’s noses was their most impressive feat and how they did it was the most cleaver weapon the elite came up with. With an incredible infusion of wealth, they created a generation of technocrats and changed a completely new wave of information dispersal into an industry that appeared innocuous and necessary on the surface but was insidious and malicious from almost the start. As we posted and tweeted and googled, as we searched with geo location, rode in ride share, rented in home share, downloaded an app for everything we did, as we immersed ourselves in every aspect of the sharing economy, we shared every part of our lives with the tech industry behind it and the tech industry figured us out, classified and compartmentalized us, sold us for a fortune then sold us out to the police state. In fact the tech industry that seemed to be such a wonderful and desirous addition to twenty first century life was itself the beginning of the police state and when the surveillance of the police state was unmasked, the police state claimed it was doing nothing more than had already been done by tech industry.  By the time the banks failed, when the depression hit, when the shit hit the fan, the tech industry and the police state had become one. Everyone was already figured out, classified, compartmentalized, sold and sold out. Anybody with even the slightest proclivity to resist the boot descending on the country’s neck was disappeared before the boot dropped. Any left over spontaneous uprising was dispensed with by a heinous array of crowd dispersal weapons developed in the incredibly lucrative foreign wars of the previous decade. Now the royalty of the elite look down on the peasantry from their castle of technocrat nobility surrounded by a police state moat and a second Dark Age has descended on humanity.

I walk through the city’s winter streets and
dirty rubbers in the gutter taunt me.
I breathe this sticky detritus for fear of not breathing even as
death is a comforting companion to the frightened and confused.
Life grinds on.
Dirty rubbers cling to the flesh of the city.
The air of the city is a stale puff of cigarette smoke huffed
from the dry mouth of a listless slut leaning against a lamp post. 
Life grinds on.
Dirty rubbers suck at the soul of the city.
Its citizens are drifting wraiths moaning in front of pretty windows
full of shiny toys,
pretty windows in the street,
pretty windows in their homes, pretty windows in their pockets.
Life grinds on.
Yellow sky hangs on the towers above me.
As I shuffle beneath the steel cathedrals, the priests within them
look down and smile.
Their rancid imprecations rattle out of the smirking mouth pieces of
pretty windows.
They lovingly stroke the mantles of war and terror
they proudly wear on their shoulders.
The world is theirs
and their glinting eyes caress it.
They toss a shower of sanctified fear
 upon my head, a sprinkling of dirty rubbers that slaps into the gutter 
at my feet. 
I stop and look up at them.
I smile at the thought of prying open their  jaws
and dropping the dirty rubbers into their mouths one at a time.
I see the terror in their eyes
as the oozing rubbers slide to the back of their throats.
They swallow and gag and gasp for air.    
The ripe odor of sold sex boils up their noses.
This is not torture, I purr. It’s enhanced interrogation.
And whatever you have to tell me will fall on deaf ears.
For now we are all, each and every one of us,
dirty rubbers in the gutter.