Hours in the Garden (Meditations in the Midst of a Collapsing Empire in 3 stages)

" Freedom to build, to seek, to welcome, to embrace.

Experience lived, created.

Life is art

ever-changing

fearlessly defiant.

Stagnation is death.

No final plateaus,

just endless phases of self-discovery.

The search is the end, not the means..."

 

Afraid, confused,

still breathing.

Still thinking in adolescent Hesse-like platitudes

with Empire snapping at my heels... 

 

Global insecurity trader, no-futures speculator,

-Free Marketeers-

Life-patenting, death-fabricating, bio-pirating, sub-prime loan officer.


 Corporate dominance

economic growth indicators look good.

GDP  

Greed, Devastation and Pain.

NCA
Neoliberal Community Assassins.

No one’s watching those figures in the Hague.

Justice Foreclosed. 

 

Cannon fodder youth coming home in designer body-bags.

No pay-raise girls in low-rise, wealth Gap, Haiti sweatshop jeans,

stocking high the last pieces of Earth at Wal-Mart...

without health insurance.

Ritalin-Prozac High School graduates.

TADHD, ODD, chronic depression, social anxiety disorder diplomas.

Pot criminalized, psychotropic-pharmaceuticals legalized,

Pol Pot killing fields in a bottle,

Lilly Inc. selling millions on prime time.

 

20 something-angel faced-god fearing-vegetarian-Facebook user;

Precision-guided bomb maker, child killer,

works for Raythion, works out at your gym,

watching Rangers baseball and Entertainment Tonight while on the treadmill.

Cubicle state-sponsored terrorists smelling of Body Shop lotion are fearless.

They don’t get prosecuted or extraordinarily renditioned.

The perfect fascist product:

celebrates thanksgiving with grandma,

sings Christmas carols in church...

without bodyguards.

 

And the AC and heat are on in the house 24-7. Comfort at any price.

Mountain top removal is the rural poor’s problem.

Ignore.

Not a word spoken at the bus stop

about the black bodies floating in the Louisiana bayous after Katrina.

Escape.

I-pod isolation and over-sized sunglasses keeps us safe from strangers

and hooked on surround-sound Paris Hilton pornographic media spectacles.

 Watching every perversion, but that of a young poor man getting blown...

Blown to pieces by a billionaire's IED

For Halliburton, for Town and Country, for Big Oil back in Texas…

Back in Texas-Back in Texas-Back in Texas.

A mother is given a fucking folded flag and tries to understand

Her living hell.

 

Kill me, Make me a killer, Fuck me, Fire me.

Validate my now, Validate me now.

Sell me something quick before I get distracted.

Occupy me. Steal my land. Make me an occupier.

Criminalize my resistance.

Lie and manipulate information.

Starve the global South to feed the global North, and call it Free Trade.

Overpopulate to sell more shit.

Sexualize without liberating and then punish babies having babies

with Christian guilt and institutionalized racism.

Commit cultural and ethnic genocide.

Incarcerate. Eliminate all threats... 

 

Can I still really exist? 

 

 Not at the table. On the menu. Power eaten.

Lie to me again. I forget yesterday…all of it. I am numb;

Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Abu Graib, Enron, WMD’s,  S&L, Iran Contra, Vietnam,

Pinochet, Selma, Hiroshima, Haymarket, Trail of Tears.

Columbus...the murderous rapist. 

 

Armed Struggle Entertainment Channel, not in my Verizon bundle plan.

$79.99 a month deal for the peace of mind of digitized, sterilized Reality TV

without the unemployed, or Mumia on death row,

Peltier serving life on trumped-up charges,

immigrant bashing, Exxon-Mobil nation building,

Blackwater mercenary murderers,

US-sponsored Zionist terrorism, dead Iraqi children, 

the truth behind the trillion dollar corporate bail-out and the 9 trillion dollar debt

Or the Death of a Planet for a Profit... 

In the kitchen of a fancy New Orleans restaurant serving mostly wealthy whites, 

a black friend tells me that “a man ain’t no man if he ain’t got no plan”...

Thought I was on it then, or did I pick a non-profit career instead?

Should I have settled down? Procreated?

Stayed focused? Made a commitment to reform?

Was it yesterday or twenty years ago? 

Conceptualized, not quantified,

uncommodified and unexchanged.

Uninsured, unsure, unbred, unarmed...armed,

but it jams sometimes.

Insurgent

Not scared of him. Worried for him.

Scared of you, worried for you. I know you. You live next door,

or maybe simply virtually, capitalistically and parasitically assume to exist there.

 

"Safety breeds mediocrity

Fear sinks and stagnates

Predictability is intellectual death

A bad novel personified

Creativity lost, life at a loss

A dull shadow, a boring product

Strolling numbly along the gold-paved psycho path."

Afraid, confused,

still breathing.

Still thinking in adolescent Hesse-like platitudes
with Empire snapping at my heels...

 

 

By Adrián Boutureira

Boston, 2008