Collapse
by Kevin Tucker

The needle moves inside the vein,piercing the skin, sliding into the artery.
 
The blood flows around it,and is extracted into the tube
filled with the boiled down mixture:
part escapism, part desperation,
the mixture of misery
and loneliness,
the search.
 
The finger pushes down,releasing full force into the lifeblood
what takes the place of
broken dreams.
 
His eyes roll back,the relief is moving through her body,
the lust for life subsides
this is the death of dreams.
 
*** 
Around this body,this frightened and confused soul,
is a box:
four walls, a ceiling and a floor.
 
The box is a box within a box.The whole world of this soul
is enslaved: without bars,
without knowing. 
But the soul knows something is there.Bars surround, and the soul knows.
 
The box within a box within a boxis a distraction: a contortion.
This is what the soul knows
without knowing. 
The soul searches for a way out,But is misguided by what
it is told,
buried in the Future
of the box builders.
           
***I can’t say I know
what he felt,
as she injected
a syringe full of lost hope
into the desperate veins,
of the tattered soul.
 
I know the box,I know the builders,
I know what the soul
was told,
 
for the message iseverywhere.
It seeks to destroy
dreams, hopes:
possibilities.
 
The boiled downmixture of crying,
fear, confusion, lust,
desire, angst, and love,
is just what
happens to those who
don’t share the
(implanted)“Future”
-in the eyes of the builders. 
*** 
The message is built intoour minds,
from birth
to death.
 
To the builders,death is to be eliminated.
The builders build
so that they will exist
forever.
 
It pushes downthe dreamers,
so that they will
build for the builders.
It destroys the dreamers
by creating “Forever”.
 
*** 
The builders thinkonly of “Futures.”
They fear life,
because life has
beauty in the moment,
and all moments end.
 
The dreamers dream,but the dream is not
separate. It is
lived.
The dreamers find a
world of possibilities,
and exist as is.
 
The builders havelost their ability
to dream, and so
they search the
“Universe” for
“Answers”.
 
The search does notend at thought, but
is carried out.
It builds space ships,
satellites, pyramids,
Twin Towers.
 
*** 
He is in anotherworld now, searching
through a field of
pills, sitcoms,
ten-point programs, school,
excess… 
She is hopingto find something,
anything,
to believe in,
because, to them, there is
nothing left in
this world.
(now covered with concrete, towers, steel, plastic….) 
The escape flowsthrough the veins,
the sacred body,
soul,has been violated.
 
The eyes roll back,the body convulses,
desperately
seekingsomething.
 
*** 
The storieshe was once told, moved
through healthy forests,
(thicker than imaginable)under a sky full of passenger pigeons,
surrounded by thick herds of bison,
air that never hurt to breathe,
water that didn’t destroy your
insides as you drank it.
 
To her, this worldis only a tale,
a Disney movie at best.
 
He was never that hunterand she never that gatherer.
Their world is much smaller
than that.
 
The world they hadheard of, read about,
dreamed of:that place of
possibilities and life
is not here for them.
 
The builders have convinced themthat there is no place for
dreams in “real life.”
 
*** 
The builders buried their chance,long ago.
They started building by
pushing tools into the soil
(the flesh of the earth)manipulating, altering,
taming…
 
The builders came frommillions of years
of being an evolutionary,
ecological being:
a part of the community of life
(dreamers). 
It’s hard to saywhy they began digging,
pushing, developing,
owning, enslaving…but we are left with
this, their legacy,
their Future.
 
***The search for life, dreams,
ends in tragedy,
only to be mockedby the professional destroyers.
 
They make movies, sitcoms,internets, entertainment.
 
Our pain, our death,is all potential profit.
We bond to share an
experience, this experience.
We desperately seekeach other,
and with all the high tech gadgets,
we grab nothing but emptiness
with the mild sense of hope… 
*** 
The eyes roll back,the fists move,
the anger is unleashed,
the stranger has just leftthe scene, leaving only a
body count…
the professionals are left to piece together the ‘real life’ tragedy. 
they are only a part of the problem 
***The builders start a new thing:
work.They are now engineers, leaders,
politicians, bosses, owners.To build an efficient Future,
they must dedicate themselves full time.
 
They start thinking further ahead,“If not now, when?”
anything is possible, so they will do
anythingto ensure that they aren’t effected:
removed, secluded, untouchable: Immortal.
 
What they build are pyramids,monuments to themselves.
And they crown themselves
and each other, craft
  Ideologies, Empires, Philosophy.All things, all distractions.
 
The dreamers are apotential for labor.
There’s no benefit in
“allowing”
them to carry on as they were.
 
They create slavery, they create slaves,they justify slavery,
they convince us that it is good,
except this time they call it:individualism, freedom, quality of life,
they call this dreams.
 
*** 
The builders did more thanjust plant instead of forage.
They created a new being,
they tried to stop the world in its tracks and create a new thing. hierarchies form, property is created, linear is emerging, life is being pushed aside for Future.lines are put across the planet, and militaries are created to enforce them. we stop being one, and the world is against us. we fear, we make laws, we enforce them, we go to war, we make steel tools, weapons, and we don’t stop. we don’t learn, we tear apart this planet, our home. it starts here.
           
it continues: nations are drawn up and invaded, peoples trying to live are buried up to their head in the sand, and a game is made of kicking them off. whole tribes are torn from each other and their home, they are overcrowded on ships and sent over to be cheaper slaves, auctioned off, legalized, illegalized (read: renamed), and sacrificed. cities are built, people pushed together so close that they have nothing left of them-selves anymore. it drives a dreamer crazy, but the craziness is actually considered sanity and all the “loose ends” are tidied up. it is gift wrapped and sold and exchanged and taught to say “thank you” and “appreciate” when something “good” is done.morals, manners, lessons, ethics: all fancy names for obedience, law and order.
 
Never mind millions of years,never mind the millions of years humans have:
co-existed and dreamed and embraced chaos without annihilating each other, or enslaving, or oppressing, or creating systems, governments, cities, agriculture, fences, schools, roads, railroads, bikes, jobs, factories, and all that other “greatness” that comes with civilization.
 
nevermind the dreams… 
*** 
He injects the hope,she snorts her dreams,
he stops eating
because he thinks he looks fat,
she is suffering from liver damage,
he collapsed coming home from work,
she has breast cancer,
he can’t sleep anymore,
she can’t take it,
and he beat her
because he can’t take it either.
She is locked up
because her searching wasn’t
the right option
…in the eyes of the builders. 
She knows he is dying,and she doesn’t know what to do about it.
He is confident that her options
are the best.
 
They are convinced that theyare happy.
So they roll their joy
up and burn it into their lungs,
while their dream world is
burned into their brain,
through their eyes, ears, veins…
 
He doesn’t even hearthe hum of machines any more,
and she plays music full blast
because it’s too quiet.
 
they grasp on and ride full speed, searching…. 
*** 
The fate of the builders’ Futureis not hard to imagine.
They can erode our
dreams, and push us into History,
but we can see where their
story (the anti-myth) ends.
 
It has happened before,and it will happen again,
because the builders
aren’t capable of stopping,
or wondering, or being,they push along,
pushing all of us along.
 
there is an inherent flaw in civilization, and that has brought it down before and will again. the builders think that they can remove themselves from wildness, our true being. they think because they are capable of manipulation, that it will last. they put up fences, maintain roads, rake leaves, mow laws, put up buildings, pull out weeds…but wildness does not stop. it knows no Time, no Future, no Boundaries, and it will continue to seep through the cracks and destroy the monuments and empires. 
the silt that brought life tothe (once) Fertile Crescent
  (cradle of civilization)sustained in ways that
no Science or ‘Management’
could ever reproduce.
 
the Mesopotamians thoughtit could last forever,
and so they built, dammed,
ordered and directedthe flow of the tributaries of the great Nile,
just as the hundreds of dams
infecting the veins of the earth
do now.
Their empires grew and fell,
and the soil gave way.
It seems Science and Reason
can never replicate ‘Nature,’
because it has lost the
sacred understanding of life. 
The domesticated animalsinject their hooves
onto depraved and overgrazed fields.
 
Their diseasesmultiply through their confinement,
carrying on throughout the water
and infect all of us.
(depraved of all immunity by eating chemicals and antibiotics, wiping out our ability to cleanse and balance) 
The cancer spreads rampantly and blindly,Destroying anything in
its path.
 
The forests are clearedfor more grazing land,
the water is destroyed,
the soil no longer produces,
the people starve and revolt,
power changes hands, tightens the leash, and eventually crumbles. 
This fate is inherent in Civilization,in the attempt to move from wildness.
 
The collapse is comingthrough the ecological excess
through the depravation
and destruction. 
*** 
I have felt theirloss and confusion,
been on their search,
seen through their Future.
 
I have been thereas the search for dreams
has ended in another box,
the coffin. 
I have seen the dreamers crushed,for they are around
me, and I am of them,
and I too still search.
 
I am among generations of potential dreamers,lost to the grinding noise
of civilizations’ death.
And those who are injecting, watching, masturbating, plugging in, shooting off, drinking and eating it,are my brother, my sister, my friend,
family, lover, stranger,
our planet, our love:my dreams : my life.
 
I breathe the toxinsof (union, eco-friendly)
factories,I drink the (piss and shit) water
of industry,I eat the (organic) filth
of agriculture, 
I live the death of civilization,while it devours itself
around and of me.
 
This world, this burden pushed upon me,is eating me alive.
Killing the dreams of
children.
Sucking the hope of
all of us. 
*** 
This world,which has taken my birthright,
my dreams, my life,and the community my
true being once knew.
 
I see the slavesthemselves trying to
fix it,
while it can never
be fixed, only
eliminated. 
*** 
I see a world of dreams, possibilities,that await outside its
gates.
 
I see millions ofdreamers, waiting:
dying,for just that one chance
to live. 
I see this world crumblingand I am told to maintain it,
it is my inheritance.(it : Future, Legacy, Progress, Civilization).
 
I feel the chance (again) to bethe human-animal,
to open the gates,
and I say to the builders, to their slow, painful death, to their nightmare: 
burn motherfucker, burn. 

-Kevin Tucker
For mike.