I am not impressed

I am not one of you.
I am not of this place.
I am not a sterile alien
in an environment mediated
for my comfort and convenience.

I am not impressed
by your pretentious stateliness,
your hollow decadent sobriety,
your cluttered simplification,
your demonic rationality,
your psychopathic paranoid security,
your technological connected isolation,
your nihilistic self-conscious alienation,
your incomprehensible layers
of ironic PC cynicism,
your empty distracted busyness,
your guarded defensive attempts at socialisation,
your beautiful plastic carcasses
taunting my desperate loneliness,
your sterile industrial filth,
your abstracted categorised scheduled
attempts at spontaneity and joyous expression,
your reactionary self-justifying
fear of anything remotely different,
your angry ancient humiliated defeat,
your opinions,
borrowed from deformed malignant celebrities,
your offence,
reeking of violent disgust,

Your pleasures of the flesh
are merely self-abuse and delusion.
Your freedom
is selfish irresponsible isolation.
Your democracy
is entertainment.
Your consumer capitalism
is just a flurry of hysterical advertisements,
shamelessly manipulative,
to justify emptying the earth
and filling it back up again.

Your entire wretched civilisation
disgusts me,
makes me want to gouge out my eyes,
castrate myself in hopeless horniness,
harden my heart with bitter cynicism,
or run away into the wilderness.
(I choose the latter.)

I see through your pretense.
I don't believe you.
I see you,
trying to be fake,
painfully real,
painfully feeling, noticing,
undermining your own observations.
I see your brittle tender humanity
tucked inside your personalised
plastic packaging.

But I haven't been paying attention
to the hype, the cultural conversation.
How am I supposed to be talking now?
Am I naive or offensive?
I don't understand.
I have stepped away too many times.
I'm too far gone.
I'm not like you anymore.
I'm not a part of your futile games.
I'm just a confused beast
just self-conscious enough to look normal
most of the time.

But messy silly fun in the wilderness
is obscene and illegal in the city;
and I cannot reconcile that
with my need to not wall myself
in a private garden of despair.

But right now
I love you.
It hurts me
but I love you
and I want us to travel together
in the forest, up the beach,
into each other's hearts and trust.

Somehow I still have faith
in your ability to break through.
I possess precious memories of
moments of mutual discovery
that are more real to me
than your robotic role-playing.

I am merely human, transforming,
amorphous, ignorant, intuitive, emotional.
I need love, intimacy, mutual respect,
honesty and purpose.
I refuse to imprison myself in
a suffocating private paradise.

I want to sleep under the stars
or in my tent,
on the earth,
wrapped up warm
with you, in embrace,
without thought,
deep sleep
and
deep wake
into a vivid morning
transcendent in the new day,
no tendrils spreading me around the world,
unwaveringly present,
flowing through a simple beautiful life.

Community

We gallop back and forth, all around the world, not knowing where we belong.  We follow the Rainbow, we follow the sun, we follow each other, ever-hopeful for the real life we feel in our hearts is possible; speaking about it, singing about it, visualising it, declaring it.  The world where we feel connected to those around us, alive, fulfilled.

We have a sacred role to play that is not separate from earning our living.  We make a contribution and in return, the appreciation of our community provides us food, shelter and love.  I simply need a home in which I can be naked and safe, alone and connected, with my lover and my housemates, a cosy nest in which I can wrap up warm and make love with the beautiful man who loves me.

I want to feel loved and appreciated, to make a contribution, joyously, spontaneously, from the best of myself, exactly what my people need, whether that’s performance poetry or a clean kitchen.  I am even happy to do mundane repetitive work for a busy capitalist in return for currency, but apparently the constellation of my being, as I have formed myself in this life, through which I can connect easily with diverse people, does not appeal to a utilitarian employer.

I offer the best of myself to the world.  Nothing is more fulling to me than to connect, to inspire, to serve.  To make the best contribution to the world I am capable of making, utilising my joy, my pain, my heartbreak, my sexuality, my creativity, my spontaneity, my unconventionality, my talent, my confidence, my arrogance, my empathy and my intelligence.  I will look to the world, see the job that needs doing, and do it.  I will ask the world what it needs and I will do my best to do what is asked of me. 

I love you and I give you full permission to offer me, in return, the love, the touch, the money or the home I need; whatever you feel capable of contributing I receive with the utmost gratitude.  I have needs too and I do not expect you to fulfil them, but I accept and appreciate your gifts when they come to me.

This is a spell I am passing out into the world.  I have needs right now that are not being fulfilled.  I need either money to pay rent or a home I don’t need to pay for.  I can contribute cleaning, cooking or gardening. 

I need loving touch that does not need to be sexual to satisfy the need in my soul for huwoman touch.  I need people to call me, message me, and visit me spontaneously.  In return I offer you nutritious meals, poetry, conversation and love. 

I am your Quinoa and you are my world.  Let us be a community.  Let us offer each other what we need.  I am always happy to talk to anyone about anything at any time, in real life, via message or voice call.  Assuming it is humble and not abusive, honest and gentle, I can listen, I can discuss and I can empathise.  I am not afraid of your emotions, I’m not afraid of your truth, your fears, your passions, your ideas, your shame, your joy, your sexuality or your trauma.  I only request you offer the same sensitivity and respect in return.  I can do my best to love you in whatever way you need if you would only ask. 

Please don’t be scared of me, my people.  I’m not a freak, I’m not better than you, you do not bore me.  Maybe sometimes I am awkward, intense or standoffish, but I so appreciate when people break through that veil to communicate or share with me.  I wonder sometimes if people are afraid of me or if I repel them.  I have so much love to give and so much love to receive.  I need you in my life, all of you, my locals and my distant friends, Melbourne, Facebook, the world!

Last night I performed my electronic spoken word masterpiece “My Very Nature” at a queer spoken word night at Hares & Hyenas on Johnston Street, Fitzroy.  It was a cosy, friendly place, I was given free drinks, but people would only speak to me long enough to thank me for my performance, no one allowing the conversation to develop beyond acclaim to a simple pleasant chat.  It felt like being famous.  What a peculiar hell that would be if people spoke to me like that all the time.

I am in this city now and I would like to stay if you’ll have me.  But I need real, daily, supportive community. 

Solidarity is the best tool we have in this world and community is the only way we can live, however we each choose to form these communities, wherever we choose to live.  We need each other and we deserve our freedom.  Our freedom of association, our freedom of interdependence, our freedom to live together, work together, eat together and sleep together with the utmost consent. 

I live in a society where everything is based on mutual consent.  There are sometimes coercive institutions interfering with our consensus decision making, but we have the power to defy and evade.  We have cracks to slip through and grow in, like a resilient dandelion. 

I want to live in a beautiful world populated by huwomans who love and support each other in all areas, even where there are taboos, such as money or touch.

A Lucid Failure

This is the text of a performance I gave at the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival.  I was intending to produce a play called Lucid, but I failed and instead performed this monologue.  You can also listen to an audio recording of the final performance.

[I enter in smart-casual attire.]

~

Today I stand before you weak.  But I am not ashamed.  I have been strong before, I remember what it feels like.  I know how to get back there.  But right now I am weak, clothed, civilised.  I have no gifts, no riches, no joy or inspiration to offer you at this moment.  I offer you only a taste of my despair and desolation; my story.

You came here tonight to see something I was unable to deliver.  But perhaps my failure is as worthy of your attention as my success may have been.  You may have come for entertainment; and if so, I apologise.  You may have come for nudity and scandalous displays of humanity, and in this I will do my best.

I have come here tonight to stand before you fully naked, because I think the human body is a work of intense beauty, and that gentleness, vulnerability and honesty are the most powerful ways we can interact.

I wrote an intimate and challenging play, intending to assemble a team to rehearse my convoluted play until we could perfectly replicate it on cue, but I failed.  I wanted to present vulnerability and intense presence in an entirely contrived and artificial form; and I know, it sometimes works, I have seen some great theatre.  But instead, all I can offer you is the real thing.

I'm sorry, I'm just a person.  I'm not a character, I'm not a metaphor.  I am an immense and ancient entity in a delicate physical body.  I can dress for the occasion but nothing prepares me for the world like being totally naked.

Skyscrapers of bullshit

I dare you to challenge me in my intensity.  I dare you to penetrate my intensity with your reality.  I'm not talking about an aggressively emphatic positivity or cynicism or sophistication, I'm talking about the shamelessly awkward and the painfully beautiful and the mystery.

Cos I can do bullshit, I've done bullshit.  It takes a lot of energy but when it works it is wonderful.  But I can never sustain it.  My physical body communicates loudly and clearly with my bullshit body and consistently undermines my illusions.  My physical body is a living aspect of this living world and it flows and cycles with the rhythms of nature. 

I guess sometimes I'm in dream or in entheogenesis or between incarnate lifetimes and - who knows - maybe there I can project realities out into the world, but here I am on Earth, channelling soil and water and air as food through my metabolism, channelling the same food as all the other creatures in this world.

Yes, I live in this contrived world called City, but I'm not confident of its absolutism.  I'm not sure its existence is acknowledged throughout my entire body or throughout the rest of nature.  Are you real, City?  Or perhaps a more pertinent question, can I believe in you sufficiently?  At least sufficiently to participate, to belong, to have a career maybe?  Is it possible to believe that much?  Is it possible to defy what my body communicates in order to participate, to be a part of things? 

The real world calls out to me and my body yearns to dance barefoot on the naked earth and dive into cold rivers early in the morning and to make love under the midday sun until our bums are burned red.  But I am told the city is where it's all happening.  This is where history is unfolding and the future will be made.  This is where the hopeful and the hopeless people have congregated and where they pool their hope and hopelessness, trying to find some revolution or long-term relationship.  I guess this is where it's easiest to project our majestic and pathetic fantasies onto reality.

So why did I come here to City?  To create a beautiful fantasy of bullshit that I can not only believe in but live in?  Or to destroy illusion, break down my own rural bullshit, use the gifts of my primitivism to undermine your urban bullshit of media, entertainment, enforced civility and sterility.

Can we discover each other beyond the divide of our idiosyncratic unrealities?  Surely we're really here, manifest in the same tangible reality.  Can we touch each other in this reality?  Can we trust each other?  Are we brave enough to reveal the nakedness of our undeniably warm fleshy vulnerable bodies?

I don't know what happened.  I was disappointed, I was disillusioned, I was confronted.  I'm afraid my bullshit was penetrated by people with whom I shared trust and whose trust I betrayed.  And now I stand naked and alone, despite my friends and the real love we share, despite these absurd fabrics hanging off my body, despite this blessed opportunity to address you beautiful, gentle and intelligent people.

I don't know whether I'm trapped now in my own bubble of unreality or whether I'm wandering illicitly in the wilderness.  I'm searching for an oasis in the desert, I'm ready for a ray of sunlight to break through the dense foliage, or to come across a warm hut in the dark night, or a body whose scent reassures me and I can breathe in peace for a moment knowing that no fantasy is necessary to sustain a human embrace.

Freedom

I used to be free.

I guess that doesn't sound remarkable. We're all free, right?

Apart from being wage-slaves, debt-slaves, rent-slaves, apart from the violent and coercive state enforcing its arbitrary laws regardless of our consent, apart from generations of trauma making us terrified of each other, terrified of our own bodies and most terrified of all of being powerful and free.

So, what if that fear were to disappear, would we then be free, or more free? No. Not theoretically at all. Only in practice. It is utterly meaningless unless it is in practice.

What is freedom in our culture? A furniture store. A word abused by the Bush regime to justify imperialistic violence. Not slavery. A feeling of exhilaration and excitement. Ability to travel easily.

Janis Joplin said, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

And I was free. I had no home. I had no money. I was young and wandering around the stolen continent.

I didn't need money.  I slept outside.  I made friends easily, they invited me into their homes. I always brought food with me to share; dumpster-dived, shop-lifted; rich, healthy, expensive food in abundance for everyone.

You should've seen my body.  I was toned, slim, lithe and strong. I was brown all over from always being naked and my hair was bleached by the sun and swept back by the salty ocean breeze.

I was fiercely intelligent and my thoughts were uncluttered, clear and focussed, communicative. I was intensely present, I fell in love easily and felt everything profoundly and momentarily.

I had nothing but the pack on my back. I had everything I needed and I took what I needed with skill and confidence. I was not careless, I placed respect where respect was due.

As I said, I was free.

What happened? How did I become a clothed and respectable man, with a smart phone and a tram card, my feet sweating in shoes all day, supporting multi-national corporations?

Why am I living in the city, where freedom is at best naïve, at worst a cynical tool of political manipulation?

Why did I give up my values?

The life I was living previously maybe wasn't as free as the one I just described, but it was free enough. I was living on a farm in far-north Aotearoa, atop a hill overlooking the ocean, the harbour and the sandhills across the harbour. I had my own house right by the bush, living with an elderly couple, dogs, pigs, chickens and horses, as well as many wild birds, possums, hedgehogs, rabbits and rats. I didn't pay rent, but helped out around the property.  I could collect food from the ocean, tend the garden and gather from the local fruit trees. I could swim naked, I could invite friends to visit and I could come and go as I pleased. I could hitchhike everywhere easily and in this way meet the locals.  I could write in peace, but didn't, friends wouldn't visit often enough, and I would have love affairs with unwilling German teenage wwoofers. I had all the time in the world to entertain and educate myself with all the cinema, literature and pornography I wanted. I was pretty much free, though unbearably lonely and bored.

But wasn't this the life we were all dreaming of and talking about on the road when we were truly free? When we were wandering around, homeless and empty-handed, always together and always following the sun, weren't we talking about getting our own land; a garden, a supportive local community, clean, stable and predictable? Isn't that what we all wanted?

So, I had an opportunity, I pursued it and I lived that life. I invited others to join me. Some people would stay a week, some longer, but mostly people would say they were coming and never come.

Maybe I should have stayed out there on the road, on the beach, and of course I would be up in far-north Queensland right now, following the sun and my fellow sexy vagabonds. I would find some beauty and I would pursue that beauty. Someone who will let me fall in love with him, someone who will selflessly offer me the opportunity to give him all my love and all the gifts of my love and will accept them graciously.

Actually, that's what happened. Up in far-north Queensland I fell in love with a wildman, a Brazilian, a qualified psychologist interested in the I Ching and the Mayan Calendar. He was my equal, we were born on the same day, one year apart, with only the South Pacific Ocean between our baby bodies. We met at a tribal anarchist freedom gathering in the wilderness and were startled to discover each other, we travelled together for one month and though the separation was painful, our time together was complete and totally satisfying.

You should've seen me, naked and free, living my values instead of just talking about them like we all do now.

I followed my friends' invitation to live with them in a house near Nimbin for a few months. A friend came to visit and brought some other men with him. One of them was just 18 years old, I was 27, and I saw something in him that moved me deeply. I saw, within a scared, slumped and mousy exterior, a being of beauty and luminosity, a huge heart, a latent absorbent intelligence, a young body of infinite potential. And most of all, he had come. He had abandoned his life in Melbourne to come to Nimbin and whether he knew it or not he had come to my house and looked into my eyes and begged me to set him free.

And thus, my life had focus and I had the freedom of something to give. The world was making demands of me that I was precisely and joyously able to fulfil.

I am sick of apologising for my love. I am sick of cowards whose eyes beg me to liberate them with the revolutionary and chaotic impact of my love and who are then too scared to engage with me, who pull back in fear at the moment where they lose control or feel something real.

This one wasn't afraid of me, he wasn't afraid of life. He was nothing and nobody, a blank slate, he was open, he was engaged, he was ignorant, credulous and willing to learn. He was willing to be transformed, he was willing to be shaped. He was free in a way you don't have any concept of.

And I was in love with him. And I had something that he thought was valuable. And I was totally willing to give him everything.

We lived together in a remote valley with 100 people for a month where it was warm all day and night. Most people preferred to wear clothes most of the time, but he and I were perpetually naked, free to be human, to sleep outside curled up together, to make love beside the fire and to dance. We danced like my ancestors haven't danced in thousands of years.

I'm often overwhelmed with the beauty in this world, but nothing and no one compares in the living memory of my huge, hot, blood-pumping heart than the beauty of that man at that moment at that gathering, leaping around naked, in love with every little window of opportunity, his body channelling such incomprehensible beauty that I perceived rays of light emanating from every pore on the surface of his skin.

You should have seen us dance.

Why was he able to dance with such delicacy and elegance?

Because he was given the opportunity, the environment allowed it. Not only did we enter a space where nature accepted and welcomed us, but we accepted and welcomed each other. We created a temporary family of 100 lost souls and we expressed ourselves cos we felt safe to do so. We were free.

We had to leave this temporary paradise where a chaotic perfection is so easy and go back out into this world. I wanted to give him everything I had to facilitate the freedom I now knew he was capable of. I wanted to love him with every atom of my flesh. I wanted to lay my body down on his earth so his roots could consume all my minerals. I wanted to sacrifice myself on the altar of his beauty so the scent of my burning flesh would waft up and satisfy the Yahweh in his sky. I wanted to possess him, contain him, consume him so his essence would remain in my body for eternity.

I wanted to keep him for myself and share him with the world, but most of all I wanted him to be free.

I had finally found something... but he wasn't something, he was a person, he is a person.

“Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Were we free together and therefore more free, or did I now have something I didn't want to lose?

I couldn't believe I deserved such a rare and precious jewel, but I knew what I wanted, and I invited him to travel with me.

He said yes.

And then somehow the world changed. Everything I had grown up with that I was supposed to care about, everything I had invested my passion into that failed to satisfy me, everything I had rejected and no longer cared about, all the freedom I had discovered with such grace and ease, that the world really had nothing for me, except the ambient beauty and joy of life itself, all that was gone because now I had found something real.

Many times I had walked out of the stupormarket with a bag full of groceries without paying. I didn't feel guilty. Ever. I rationalised that I am a terrestrial being and like all terrestrial beings I am free to take sustenance from my environment. I did not care at all for the morality that forbade it. I took these gifts out into the wilderness to share with my friends, my lovers and my tribe.

But when I invited this luminous being out into the wilderness with me, and when he came with the same ease that my stolen bag of groceries came, I felt anxious.

I knew that he really is my equal, he is a person, he came willingly and my love for him is pure, as much of a gift as his graciousness and beauty. But also I felt something irrational. I knew I didn't possess him, I knew I hadn't stolen him from the museum, I knew he wasn't a precious diamond that was too valuable for me to get away with, but still I felt that anxiety. I've gone too far. Surely I'm too free. Surely this must be illegal. Surely the authorities are going to come and find us and take him away from me. Surely he will leave me. Surely I don't deserve him.

Freedom camping, hitchhiking, fare evasion and shoplifting are illegal, but it had never bothered me before, and I had never attracted Police attention for these activities before, but now I allowed the paranoia to overcome me, that I couldn't possibly get away with this. And the Police and quasi-police did harass us occasionally, to little effect of course, but still I allowed it to destroy me. I welcomed self-destruction. I demanded and facilitated the emotional breakdown I needed to leave me empty-handed again.

I am sick of apologising for my love. I'm sick of cowards whose eyes beg me to penetrate them with my love and then they're too scared to feel something real.

But he wasn't scared, was he. He let me love him. He accepted every invitation I offered him and then I freaked out cos neither of us had any boundaries and I didn't know how to stop.

How could I give up the only thing in the world worthy of my attention and go back to being lonely and free? Force him to reject me? A nervous breakdown?

I don't know. I have a powerful rational mind but I am fundamentally an irrational animal. I created my own debilitating paranoia that caused me to leave the country. He offered me the necessary lie that he would follow me across the Tasman at a later date but of course he never did.

And then I stepped out of the unreality of the airport into another land, disappointingly familiar, but as tangibly real as the one I'd left. Actually, I was still strong, actually I was still calm and resourceful and I guess I was still free.

Or was I more free now; now that I had nothing more to lose again?

I had homes in which I was welcome, I had a book to write and I had my hilltop paradise to return to. But was I free?

I gave up my hilltop paradise to come to Melbourne, to wear shoes, to engage with money, to write and perform my way into the hearts of the gentle and sophisticated.

Am I less free in this racist Police state, under the cult of Capitalism, surrounded by pollution? Or are we all secretly free in this mess cos we can gather in rooms together, choose how we want to communicate and how we want to interact?

My beautiful friend and lover and companion does not emanate light from his pores or dance like that anymore. He lives in the city and he goes to university. He wears underwear and shoes. He is studying filmmaking cos he wants to express himself like he did when he danced naked by the fire under the full moon with our tribe in the valley.

He chose all this? Is he scared of feeling all that freedom and strength again? Was it too much? Does he have to transform his passion into two-dimensional images now cos it's too much to contain in a body that's not free enough to dance like that?

What about me, transforming the best communication I can contrive into words, into paper, into little sounds I make with my mouth? Do these mouth-sounds make me free? Is this my technique for alienating and abstracting the intensity of experience into a contained and knowable form? Or is this a deeper freedom?

Have I carefully compromised a few superfluous values to be able to create something that communicates with as many people as possible with my utmost integrity? Or am I just going to start getting old now, and slowly withdraw from the world, the freedom, still just an arm's reach away?

I am a delicate flower, rich in colour and scent, and when the light of the sun shines on my body I will open my petals and shine back with everything I possess.

I guess I'm as free as any plant, to fling my seeds across the landscape, to attract birds and bees to my fruits and my flowers. I'm this bursting lunatic, somehow restrained in a human body as long as entropy will allow my heat to be contained in this delicate physical dimension.

I reach out to you in the darkness of incarnation.

I'm so far from free it used to be terrifying.

Come save me from my isolation for a moment and I'll do the same for you. I guess we can't expect much more than that from each other, but that's enough for now.

Domesticated primates running digitally on extra-terrestrial software

Chris Kirk

6 October

I am a human being trapped in an alien landscape of domesticated primates running digitally on extra-terrestrial software. I personally don't identify with the culture in which I was born, but luckily I meet beautiful human beings who transcend their culture just for a moment with me sometimes, or sometimes for their whole life. I am glad I am here surrounded by these strange and fascinating people. I want to smell them and touch them and look into their eyes, but there are strange psychic barriers in the way sometimes. I don't know why.

Darius

Critical mass eventuates population collapse once environmental equilibrium unbalances to an extreme which creates a point of total instability. The bees are dying on mass.  If pesticides and fungicides are not completely eradicated global famine could result.  The US may default in 11 days, if their debt ceiling is not raised global economy will implode and world war could follow as per usual. If these 2 events do not manifest due to intervention there are many more potential actions of global human culture that are pushing the limits of tolerance that could collapse. Survive and contribute to writing the new paradigm that will naturally follow. Prepare, unite and survive.

Chris Kirk

I am ready. I am just gathering up health and sanity, cos I may need a stockpile. I can't handle this civilisation farce anymore. I wish the people who love me would just come be with me here in paradise. What the fuck are you all doing in the cities? Are you really trying to play that game? Have you noticed you are losing? Have you noticed that the people who are winning are more miserable than you are? Or that people are collapsing into sociopaths all around you? Withdraw, my friends, please. Come roll in the grass with me, swim in the ocean before it's totally radioactive, help me learn how to sprout and graft fruit trees. I don't want to come visit you in TV-land anymore.

Eva-psyphae Macula

All very well and nice. But if all the people leave the cities your little bush huts and self-sufficient circle jerks of xenophobic culture cringing will be lost and you'll just have crowded beach and trampled grass.

The console works just fine, the software needs updating, but all controls are still intact and the levels are all still fun. However I think its fair to say that we all need to chip in on a rather large power bill that's been stuck on the empty fridge door for centuries. Like any shared house situation, those that are accountable are not always responsible and others ended paying more than their share.

If the '60s and '70s can teach us anything, is that the '80s and '90s is what happens when that approach is taken. Abandoning the game does not finish the level. It just leaves a seriously fucked character with only a few lives left and the boss to face alone. Group hugs and acid won't fix this problem.  Nor will burning spears.

Coded language, psychic cyphers and data bombs will be our tools.  Our generation is that lost child who crawled his way through the flower fields of zombies and reality gameshow sets to find his tribe dancing in whirlpools of splintering metal tectonic bass, and screamed with ecstatic affirmation and agonizing confirmation in the middle of the moshpit, we are indeed fucked.

As the monitor flickers in the dark and the controller lays cold, the world burns.  The war dance is over.  It's time to take back the city.

Chris Kirk

I hope that one day I will take my children or my grandchildren on field trips to the cities. They will see the decaying buildings, skyscrapers with hundreds of glassless windows covered in vines, pavements cracking, streets of weeds preparing the soil, metal and concrete skeletons of alien technological non-entities from some dark fairytale that actually happened, unexpected reclamations of industrial, commercial, so-called "pubic" spaces, fungi consuming piles of plastic. 

I will walk them through like a museum of filth and perversion that is slowly collapsing back into the soil, the earth finding ways to consume it all over thousands of years. I will tell them stories about what went on there, the uniforms, the bureaucracy, the stress and the hopelessness, the cars and the pollution, the Economy and the shopping malls and stupormarkets. 

I will then take them home and tuck them into bed to dream of a better world, a world I am not capable of imagining, so compromised and traumatised by paranoia and cynicism. They will create a better world in the remains of what we are too scared to confront, disassemble and abandon.

Darius

Cities can be wonderful places which hold an important utility for humans and have for many millennia; I don't know why anyone would hope for their destruction. I think it makes much more sense to hope (and work to to create) in the future that cities and the people who live in and manage them evolve them to become clean places of artistic beauty, social vibrancy and environmental harmony.  It can be done, we have the knowledge to make it so globally.  There are many people all over the world right how who are working to make it so. 

To wish otherwise and to think the world can only be improved by destruction seems rather narrow minded, selfish, short sighted and ignorant. Cities don't take up alot of land area actually and many people greatly prefer living in them to living in the country side. Oh but you don't like them therefore they shouldn't exist at all and destruction should be hoped for and relished, despite all the good people that love them and would feel a great loss to live in a world without cities, who hope to and work at removing the negative effect they have environmentally.

Christy

Remember, dear friend, all is as it should be, if you are truly in the moment (reality). If you think it should be different, then you are arguing with reality.  Insanity.  They should, they shouldn't, he can't, I can't, etc.  Love what is.  If you don't love what is: PAIN.  The Work of Byron Katie. Highly recommend it. Peace brother.

Darius

Do you actually realise that if cities were all gone then there would be a lot less green spaces in the world. If there were weeds preparing soil then there would be much more soil being removed everywhere else. As I said cities take up far less land area per person than in the countryside since everything is built vertically, and since they are built from glass that means far less trees need to be cut down to build all the houses which would be needed if there were no cities. Besides it's a fact that cities pollute less than the countryside with all it's cattle.  Glass and steel don't eat cattle, people do, and they would whether they lived in a city or not.  If not, the meat would be transported further, rather than the singular small area cityscape, creating a greater carbon footprint.  Glass is made from sand which is abundant in the many desert waste lands on earth and steel is mined from isolated places. Deforestation, for lumber and cattle, and nuclear technology are what need to be removed.  As it is now, cities could be what is keeping the earth from destruction by population overload.  If everyone left them it would create even more strain on the environment due to lumber needs and energy used for greater travel-distances.  Everyone would need a personal car to visit family and friends and employment, rather than public transport. 

Not everyone wants to work from home, not everyone wants to grow their own veges.  (I fucking hate gardening with a passion, if I had to grow my own food rather than pay someone else for it I would consider that a misery and a waste of time.)  Though many others I know love the garden and almost always grow with a huge surplus.  Some of them love piano music but would hate to practice to hear it.  I love to eat fresh organic produce. The earth and everything and everyone in it need people to hope and work towards improvement, a greener environmentally harmonised city and countryside culture, simple. What it doesn't need are hyper-emotional, reactionary people who just want to see it all burn, who are just plain weak.

Chris Kirk

http://www.personaproductions.com/2013/10/paterson-by-allen-ginsberg.html

Ivanovic

And thank god for Chris Kirk also.

I had a nervous breakdown in San Francisco

In a world of love and money, I went crazy in San Francisco.

Golden Gate Park opened up and held me like a womb.  The abundance of Whole Foods fattened my lonely days and emotionally complex and confusing emails from loving friends brought sobbing tears into my nights.  I could smell the eucalyptus all around me in my cave of tree and vine, their fallen leaves and bark were my carpet and they covered my bags when I went out for the day.

The mist fell on me like a veil of death, a gift from the whole planet.  "Thank you for the heavy veil of tech culture," the mist seemed to say, "in return I shroud you in an endless fog that no messiah will save you from."

I searched for love in the best possible place.  A void opened up around my friend and I and we took the opportunity to dance around in that void, failing to anticipate the clutter that had been left there, invisibly.  We yearned for the love that we knew was there, we tasted and smelled that love.  It was sweet, tender, funny, but the void sucked us in, like an enormous vacuum vagina, emotionally inescapable.

There was no way we could dance our way out of this womb.  My great wordsmithing was useless.  We were latched on to an umbilical conduit of anxiety and shame.  I ate the shame, I slept with the shame, I looked at it every time I closed my eyes.

I would visit the San Francisco Public Library every day and disappear into mezzanines of serpents and temptations and false gods walking through gardens and a lost paradise.

I would spread myself via Facebook into little wi-fi rooms all over the planet, through the monitors of people who admire and love me, into their distant hearts.

I would shamefully look over the cliff-face to the lower floors to see desperate angry library patrons yelling at staff or into their phones.  I would see the uniformed security team come up, try to talk to them, grab their arm, grapple and grip against the struggle and escort the unacceptable lunatic out of the building into a different unsafe adventure in the city.

I would stay until the library closed, always too early, and step out into the falling darkness and cold, before the fog rolled in.  I would sneak into the back of the bus, crowded thick with Capitalists, stinking of alcoholic fragrances, the glare of iPhone light, descending towards the ocean, past the park.  I would step off the bus by the rose garden, past the log cabin and into the eucalypts.

Maybe the fog would roll in with me at the rose garden, maybe it would wake me in the night with heavy droplets falling from the leaves far above me.  Already nestled in my sleeping bag, I would pull the blue tarp over my body and tuck it under my sleeping mat.  In my plastic womb I would be warm and safe and dark, to breathe and sleep and dream.

Nature is the centre of the mandala

In the city, I feel guilty for not being productive.  I feel guilty for turning off my cellphone and neglecting my urban responsibilities.

Chris Kirk is a hypocrite who writes beautifully

I realise that nothing I say has any truth.  I realise that whenever I state a fact I am proving myself a hypocrite.  But this does not bother me, I never claimed to be objective or correct and I never claimed to have any morals.  Morality is for the weak.  Morality is for those who are not connected to the natural intelligence of their own body.  There is no need to believe in abstract linguistic constructs when there is a truth made of flesh that is the entirety of our experience in this strange universe.  My body is my beacon, I have everything I need.  It leads me to green pastures where there is food and rushing water and where the people are waiting for me with kind welcoming eyes.

Recently it has brought me to the city where I am forced to develop extra-sensory skills of a very strange nature.  The ability to wear a mask, to cover my body and my voice with shame and inhumanity.  The ability to not only write a CV, but to believe I am that CV and I am nothing more than the banal life-denying skills which I weakly have to offer for a job that does not utilise any of the natural and powerful talents that would really make this company come alive.  Because in the city we deny life like we deny death.  We cover the earth in concrete and we cover our flesh in clothes and make-up; we spray to kill insects and opportunistic plants; we cook our food to make sure it's dead and we criminalise any public displays of the loving act that brings life into the world.  We are indeed a strange species and if you haven't noticed then you're not looking, you must be looking down your own pants to make sure your genitals haven't been bitten off yet (by your boss or your girlfriend or your landlord or your prime minister).

Who's going to bail you out when you slavish parents finally grow old and die and leave you weak and unable to cope into the world they co-created while you were growing up and presented you with on your 18th birthday?  Is it too late to develop the skills that will provide you autonomy in a world that apparently will not protect you unless you can afford to pay for it?  Are you too old at the age of 19 to change your belief systems?  You know, the belief system that says that the world is dangerous and does not like me and I have to speak in the same language as the job descriptions I am sent in the mail every time I sleep in past 09.00.

So I stepped out into the world and I keep walking and so far I have not died though I assume I will one day.  I am told that everyone dies eventually but the amazing thing is I've been going for 26 years now and still no death.  I walk along the side of the road and I am told this is highly dangerous but no car has hit me yet, in fact sometimes they stop to offer me a ride.  I get in and turn to my right and there sits another human being, in the driving seat of their huge metallic machine.  They have invited me not only into their most expensive and precious toy, they have invited me into their lives and I do not underestimate the trust involved.

I stare straight ahead at where the road is taking us and they do the same, guiding our metal monster safely through this high-speed high-danger environment.  Through the exploration of the power of eyeless conversation we find our connection point in the world, we both there is one, for no other purpose than pleasure and curiosity.  We have no desire to own each other once a connection has been made because we both know that as soon as the most superficial division comes into our lives my new friend will stop the car and let me out and I will wave goodbye and thank their kindness and again I am exposed to the weather and the concrete and the dangers of being alone in a world that may or may not want to kill me.

If there was any truth in the warnings heaped onto my back by those evil people who think they are good because they have dry vaginas and circumcised penises I would be cowering in the corner of some room I knew I could afford to pay for and I would be low on some drug and wearing my winter clothes and hiding from the light in a cardboard box that will conveniently warp to the shape of the twitches in my anxiety-ridden body.  I must be unique in this response because everyone else seems to function relatively well under such pressure, merely developing one of myriad new cancers when it's really time to have a break from work longer than four weeks per annum.

I bathe under waterfalls sometimes and other times I am not even allowed to walk barefoot even if I am doing exactly what everybody else is doing and just watching without the sin of participation.  Sometimes I feel an opening in the social haze and I'm not the only one, my friends feel it too, and we can get naked and dance as if we are happy to be alive because we are happy to be alive, rather than in denial about being dead.  I would love to see you without clothes.  I would love to see you enjoying your body in the sun and the glistening rushing water of the stream.  I would love to look into your eyes and see joy shining out like a light and the skin of your entire body radiating divine solar light.  I would love for us to roll around on the earth as if we loved her and cover ourselves in her pure damp flesh, and smear it all over our bodies.  I would love to take a handful of her drippy brown mud-flesh and cover the area of your back that your arms can't reach and make sure, like me, you are covered for a little while in something that enriches your organism, rather than something which stops perspiration or strips your natural oils.

I love to touch and be touched because I have been incarnated into a physical body in this lifetime and weather or not I am some sort of spiritual entity who will survive this life and go on to better things that I can believe in but not conceive of it makes no difference to the fact that I am here with my body and the feelings it produces and there is a beautiful intensity when we move close to one another and when we exist in love this intense proximity effect is empowering and when we exist in hate we have nothing but muscles and pain and that gets us nowhere and when we deny ourselves with drugs like alcohol and religion we feel nothing and like it (but hate ourselves).

I don't hate God enough to deny the reality he dropped me into for the sake of something which may indeed be as true as the authority-figure tells me it is.  It may indeed me true that abstraction is a better way to live than experience, but I choose to experience experience and merely take abstractions into consideration.  They have no physical reality I can place in relation to my body, so how can I live my life by these principles?

God told me once that it's okay to be gay, cos this was a concern of mine at the time.  I didn't hear his voice, I wasn't lead to some authoritative text or person, it was just obvious to my otherwise confused and horny teenage body.  I was just 17 years old when I realised that I couldn't conceive of God denying me, I couldn't conceive of a world without God's love and despite the paranoid anxiety of my mind and the instructive mind of the institutions I allowed to shape me, nothing could change the self-evident reality that I was okay.  It later became obvious that the world itself is also okay, despite all propaganda to the contrary.

I casually chose sixth-form classical studies as another one of the subjects that was supposed to brainwash me into being a productive and uncomplaining member of free-market capitalism but this subject and the beautiful teacher who shared it with me introduced us all to another society that was different from ours but one of the primary influences for what we now call Western Civilisation.  We were introduced, specifically, to Socrates, who not only loved and appreciated the beauty of young men, but questioned the society into which he was born.  He naively questioned the holiest man in Athens about what this holiness abstraction really is and they couldn't figure it out.  Some oracle said he was the wisest man around and he said, "Maybe because I realise I'm ignorant," and I said "Ah!"

I think maybe if I don't feel unsafe walking down the street then maybe I am not unsafe and so I can stick out my thumb.  And if I don't feel unsafe hitchhiking then maybe hitchhiking isn't dangerous.  And if I hitchhike for ten years and meet only wonderful people then maybe people aren't out to get me and maybe the world is not a dangerous place and maybe I can go anywhere and do anything I want, or at least try.  I have no desire now or any other time to live in a box so I don't get wet when it rains.  I don't need to save for my retirement because I am not planning to spend forty years working and building up a lifestyle in which I need to spend hundreds of dollars a week to maintain the status quo.  When I run I scare myself at how fast I can go and how far away I can find myself; it seems when you run you're just keeping yourself stocked with coffee and underwear.

Maybe I'm just a hypocrite, but at least I am free.  I don't want to judge you cos I know you're free too and it's okay if you don't want to travel with me, I'll just be a bit lonely without you.  I tried living with you in your concrete world and found it profoundly lonely.  Your presence was the only light in a dark and confusing world and I would merely bump into things uselessly waiting for you to get home from work at the end of the day.  I have no purpose in a place where my instinct is to take off my clothes and there is no context in which I can do this without causing banal conflict and police confrontation.  I tried searching the gutter for coins to buy me a ticket to some aspect of this society that I tried to belong to but all I found were half-empty plastic drink bottles and I wasn't sure whether anyone had spat in them before throwing them away or whether the sun had already fermented the fruit juice.

When I am older and my gifts are legitimised I will return and hold your hand for another little while and speak to the people you share your world with, but now I am here, on the beach, breathing in as much of a balance of salty sea-breeze and exhaust fumes I can handle.  I am a hypocrite, I don't believe any of this, but I will say it with as much conviction as my moment and my body can personify.  I will stand up in front of as many people as want to hear, three or a billion, and speak with all the utter truth I can muster.  I will change my mind the next day, but again I am willing to stand up and speak for those willing to listen.  I live the best of my abstractions and otherwise rely on the food, water, air and love the planet provide me with.  I don't know anything, but I write beautifully.

As Lady and I look out tonight from Desolation Row

Hamish and Veronica leave their apartment only with the bare essentials; their iPods, their Blackberrys, their credit cards and their medication.  Veronica considers bringing a bottle of water from the fridge but noone can be bothered carrying it so they each have a hydration shake before their leave the apartment.

They take a taxi down the road to the city park because the circus is in town.  All the freaks are out tonight.  Luckily Hamish and Veronica are normal; they are heterosexual, living in a legally recognised de facto relationship; their parents are Christians and they are nothing in particular, they believe in God, but not in religion; they earn average incomes, well slightly above-average, for this part of town; they are well-educated so they don't spend more than three or four hours a day watching TV, they both prefer to spend their evenings on the internet; they have no children but Veronica wants three; life is good.

It's still early, only 23.00, and yet there is a gang of drunken men roaming down the middle of the street, blocking traffic, looking for somewhere to go.  Hamish and Veronica veer off the road and into the park.  They browse the stands in the park, each only paying $300 for inclusion in the carnival.  There is one stand for optometrists, one for making jewellery out of plastic beads, which occupies Veronica for three minutes while Hamish stares enviously at the automatic rifle stand, one stand for joining the police force, another for joining the Green Party, another for joining the army, another for joining the surf lifesavers, another that sells piano keys that are also MP3 players and Parker pens that are also lensless cameras.

Hamish and Veronica browse holding hands for thirty minutes before heading to the food stands to eat some candyfloss and hotdogs.  When Veronica sees Hamish eating a hotdog she has a flash of her old fear that he is homosexual and decides to stab herself in the thigh before bed.  While Hamish buys pretzels Veronica bumps into that crazy man from work who spends too much time on the internet and believes that newspapers are propaganda and the government is trying to control us.  She smiles beautifully, never indicating her underlying hatred, while he talks about atheism and smokes what appear to be cigarettes but what smell to Veronica like marijuana.  The worst part is that Hamish talks to this lunatic and even offers him pretzels, which Veronica subsequently refuses to eat.

Hamish is too friendly to be truly heterosexual, Veronica thinks, as she watches him agree with the lunatic that we are living in a police state when she knows perfectly well that Hamish makes monthly automatic payment donations to the police force, which are now a private company and need all the money they can get if they are going to keep our streets safe and our screens clean.  Veronica's digging her fingernails into her flesh through the fabric in her pockets waiting for this polite conversation to end; Hamish is not even listening anymore, just nodding and grinning and agreeing while he thinks about visiting the lingerie stall or the automatic rifle stall while Veronica is busy; the lunatic keeps talking to Hamish, despite having lost interest minutes ago, because he doesn't know how to end a conversation with someone who clearly still thinks that free-market politics is a sign of a healthy freedom-loving civilisation.

They are interrupted by the sponsored idiots coming through with microphones and amplification following them around on an electric trailer.  They be funny by talking about defecating in the water cooler at work and embarrassing people on how many times a day they take a shower.  Veronica is desperate for the lunatic to be humiliated but she is surprised when he makes some left-wing comment that sends roars of laughter in every direction and is loaded onto YouTube by the time she buys another sugar-free energy drink.

Everyone is overwhelmed with sexual delight when the sailors come past, all in their uniforms, all drunk and merry and holding each other around the shoulders, all in town just for the weekend.  Each of them has been to the beauty parlor and clearly spent a lot of money getting their hair done and their make-up done for the big night at the carnival.  Veronica's heart is a-flutter as they pass, desire and confusion intermingling at their prettyness and gender-confusion.  She smiles at Hamish and wonders about his desires around these sailors.  "Pretty aren't they?" she asks him with a jovial smile.  "Pretty gay."  His derision is a great relief to her.

The excitement is building and in another session of great humour they have the police commissioner, who has been hypnotised, standing on the gallows as a makeshift stage.  He has his pants around his ankles and is eating an onion like an apple when Hamish and Veronica turn up.  Hamish understands irony and chuckles about the fact that if the commissioner wasn't hypnotised he would be the one charging the hypnotist with the dangerous and illegal act of serving raw food, which could be swimming in bacteria and putting a strain on the already over-burdened health industry, which is no longer receiving any public funding and relies entirely on the donations and health-insurance of everyday people.  Hamish wonders at how he can be so subversive sometimes.

After the hypnotist has been arrested for making reference to the police commissioner's genitals the real show begins.  Since the UN claimed that public hangings are barbaric and inhumane and the state policy became torture-to-apology there have been annual public hangings, just one a year, as celebrations of the success of good behaviour in society in general.  And since the new society for the protection of child sex offenders it has been tradition for the hanging to present gimmick criminals such as drugaddicts and filmmakers.  This year the hangee seems to have dressed in some sort of retro '60s hippie costume and is throwing slogans like "free love" and "make love not war" around though most people can't hear him cos only the MC has a microphone.

All the cameras and phones are raised as the big moment of the hanging takes place and the list of charges is read aloud.  Most of his charges involve crimes against language, impoliteness and loitering in national parks but noone's really listening because they know the charges will be listed on the postcards being sold for $5.00 each or $2.50 if you wait until the trucks come in the morning to scrub the streets and spray soap everywhere.

As Hamish and Veronica wander off, casually texting for a taxi, there is loud music and they turn to see the riot squad beating the crowd and trying to disperse the lingerers who have stayed after the hanging is complete and the blood and semen has been cleaned up.  Veronica holds her man close, in loving awe of his sense of timing and his extremely quick text messaging.

When they get home they watch the news together, not wanting to miss the up-to-the-minute report on the carnival on the local news channel.  Then Hamish uploads the night's photos onto Facebook, they watch some YouTube, have a coffee and go to bed.

Early in the morning Hamish wakes up and sees light shining through the window.  He stumbles in his satin pajamas to the window and sees the quiet clean streets caught in the bright rays of the rising sun.  It's all already been cleaned as if nothing happened out there last night.  This is an ungodly hour to look out onto Desolation Row he thinks to himself as he closes the curtains and stumbles back to bed.