a kingdom wholesale, loose strings of coupons;
a throne of pepsi cartons amidst the concrete
lights shine over the infinite rows of freezers
so sample the pork and pass by the petunias
dream of the electronics display let the
laptops regard visions of the self inside which
empty bubbles where words should go but don't
flutter across up blue and white.
to buy mulch is to regard the manure as
nothing but what it claims to be.
i ordered a hotdog after checking out and i sat and ate
and there is a vending machine here that only
dispenses water bottles.

Humankind
Look about you; and what do you see?
A group of people like you and me.

Some are fat and some are thin
All are just covered in a layer of skin

Shall we go deeper into the flesh?
Take a look at what they possess.

Anatomically defined, humankind
Mankind intertwined, designed thus, us

Are we good are we bad?
Do we want all that we have?

Do we need or is it greed?
When we proceed to overfeed

Unrestrained indifference to consumerism
Leaves us open to malfeasance, and our skin wrinkles.

But fear not, the answer is to be found in a ***!
Only £€$¥ 9.99 and that wrinkle is smoothed.

So, buy today and it will go away.
And all of us will one day die and turn to dust.

And all we buy will fade and rust
And love will never be enough

People retreat
further and further
into religions,
politics,
consumerism,
or chemicals
to avoid
confronting
painful truths.

You used to only make $225 in a week
Now you can’t make $225 last a week
What is happening here?
You swore that if you made more you would be responsible and stable
And yet here you are
Barely able to stop reaching for your credit card
Barely able to stop spending your money and your time
Fixated on things you don’t need
You promised that if you made more money you would be responsible and stable
But here you are
Barely able to maintain
And filled with greed...

(Consistent financial irresponsibility is a form of self-harm and addiction)

Unfold the map of the world and trace
a kaleidoscopic boot-shaped country
rising from the waters lavished by Atlantic
in a multicultural basin at the heart

of a flat globe. The Mediterranean birthed
by the Zanclean deluge, witness of myriad
exoduses intertwining genes to encompass
peninsular cradles of early civilisations,

a medley of ethnicities trading goods
discoveries and ideas on sailing caravels.

Two thousand years later the remnants of
the Roman Empire vote, the democracy
they had co-founded two thousand years
before, on philosophies of justice, equality

and human rights. Power to the people,
lost in the process of history making,
populaces disillusioned and frustrated
at millenary successions of failed rulings

corroborated by corruption and personal
greed of those chosen to represent them.

Today Italians vote anti-establishment
thereby at long last rejecting ideologies
of the past, too old to bare credibility
electing a party set outside the box,

no left right nor centre, victory of populism,
communism and capitalism burned
at stake for their crippling sins albeit
international cold-war renaissance attempts.

Marking the end of the twentieth century
the twenty-first bets on the refreshing breezes
of new tantalising illusions, cuts to public debt,
income of citizenship, youth employment,

tax reductions campaigned to allegedly increase
family spending, for whatever we do we are
all bound by a unique reigning doctrine under
the unified global empire, of consumerism.

Streets lined with colours

That beg to be bought

And we like moths

To the flame

Do flutter our wings

Aggresively smashing our heads

At the windows

Decision making,
eyes shaking,
earth quaking,
life taking,
high staking,
things that we love.

Things that we love,
they're better when they're free,
some love expensive,
some love subjective
none love objective
limited,
their love,
intangible,
their love.

Their love, intangible.
How to get it,
who knows.

Who knows,
if we suppose that we all have a heart.
Does everyone feel the same beat?
Do we notice when we're frozen?
Is there a doctor to tell us we have trouble,

The Doctor is here,
"Paul Reever,
have you any fear?
They say you speak ill things
they see your need for belonging."

Da Vinci is here,
"I opened you up,
the human heart should be soft,
tender,
warm.
Your heart is hard,
cemented,
cold."

The Priest is here,
"Demented,
legion receiving
fiend with insides screamin'.
60% water,
a human is,
60% evil,
your being within."

Knock, knock,
my name is dark,

what a shame to claim the fame of pride
insane it drives
bee hives done with lives
sharp knives fill the night skies

flying down when it rains
ending your pain with a strange
bolt of lightning
worth the sight seeing
it's enticing
that all this writing
is enough to stop the fighting

my imagination,
if it were to come true,

perhaps a better ending would start befriending
the sense of purpose
so condescending lack of vending
when it comes to sending
red lips
dismissed

Love,
they say.
Humans get away.
Portrayed with materialism,
all of it is grim.

You ever notice how it's hard to appreciate giant bronze statues when you're hungry?
I rumble

an empty stomach
I need to be filled and a thousand dollar plane ticket leads to an attempt to do that

It gets blasé after awhile

"Oh, you're church doesn't have gold mosaic ceilings? What is this trash?"

I'm surrounded, guns drawn
by an endless litany of priceless art and artifacts

but

I find more inspiration in the teen trying to herd pigeons than the golden horses on the Venice balcony
more from the father trying to teach his baby daughter that cigarette butts aren't a thing to be picked off the ground
(there are some conversations you don't need to speak the same language to understand)
than the ancient cannons in the Salzburg castle wall
the cannons used in some ancient battle that truly represented the blah blah blah
A long time ago men died here, killed each other, defending their home so that years later privileged ***** like me could stand around it and take pictures and not give a ****. All for the low low price of 10 €.
If you stand very still you can feel the ground shake underneath you
the collective drone of the tourists rumbling
Mouths watering on feed me your culture
I step into a building older than my country. In the bottom is an H&M

I fill myself in the simple message poured out of a spray can on a Munich subway wall
I ♥ U

or perhaps, what filled me the most
Thanksgiving dinner
was some graffiti scrawled in shaky hand at the base of a statue in Barcelona.
The graffiti was in French

"Je suis malade"
I am sick