Something must be done
Outside the central station amidst the Saturday throng, a cello player throbs strings to the sound of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, stopping to thank the passers by that reach down to drop coins in his instrument case. Close by, but far enough to not compete, a squat Chinese lady in a puff body warmer parades around with many signs:
“Only Jesus saves”
“Pray or be damned”
“God never meant it to be this way”
In the cat squeak of her countrymen she aims to enthuse passers-by with her own gospel rhythm: “No wife do it for you, no cigarette; only Jesus, hear me!”
With each ignoring glance her pitches rises in greater thrall to the divine and the Church-speak continues – concatinations of manipulation and the misunderstood drink it like envy and sow its hot humiliating tones on the pedestrians of Amsterdam.
The rainforest is withdrawing at an unprecedented rate – half of it gone in the last thirty years. Beef and soy products – one feeding the other – clearing swathes to feed further bellies to feed grief and anger over a lost heritage we decided wasn’t there for a time. The scope of the disaster is roared out through misplaced headlines and aghast conversations at dinner party tables, consecutive lines daring to out-horror the next in grim sophisticated knowledge of just what is going on.
More species have died in the last century that at any time since humans took to the Earth. We were born into abundance and see it now as torn sacks before our eyes, breathing pity on the disaster we’re too horrified to see. This is not animals or plants or a tragedy for science. It is you and I and forgetting our nature. Of that the Chinese lady at least was aware.
The horror lies in scars as large as your Mother’s forehead, macheted across before she was raped. It lies in turnstile behaviour, the furrowing of crowds down lines others saw fit to imagine for them and have nothing whatever to do with joy. It begins in want and ends in disaster, your Mother may cry but soon she’ll be rid of you, if you turn out the same.
Teenage protestors in long flower dresses stand in hate lines before police and believe their’s is a more sophisticated hunger, a purer sense of anger than that which they are struggling to rip free. Mother weeps as the crowds struggle to defend themselves. Pepper sprayed across the face, arms whipped with batons by servants of the peace. Joanna’s gut curdling shriek that this cannot go on, reported as she peels the label back from her third bottle of the night. Flourescent lights dance across her face and she’s in rage at what she terms the ignorance of police.
She despairs that it will never be enough but knows that trying is all that she and the rest have left. Olive skin glistening on summer morning battle lines. Furious letters sent. She glows in experiences – the dancing, drinking, pleasure in colours kind – loves deeply, cares sincerely but can’t shake the hunger that shakes it all adrift.
We’re in horror at the passion play of a ball set off before our time, how our Mother’s face was ripped and pissed upon, now anxious to make things sane. The anxiety of a million screams for relief, spilling on their Mother’s face yet more guilt and anger and putrid fumes the same that they protest against, by battling the beast they confirm his existence even more.
By battling the beat they lose the rhythm that spoke them free.
If we’re looking for solutions, find a treasure chest to open or walk an unfamiliar way. Because this shattered destiny fix – this horror show make shift and all things better we’ll have ourselves drift in is a treachery of alternative, manipulated by interests we’re not wide enough to see. One empire builds itself in the ashes of another and the builders care not for us, or our Mother, or fairly traded coffee nicely but not too much because you'll bring all of us crashing down. The pillar tipped the moment we forgot that there is more than our survival or summer holidays at stake.
Obama’s smile the better to slash our Mother and waste yet another vain hope cemetery of years.
If we’re looking for solutions as to how all this was begun, please give up that desert cry – the kind that baby-boomer anxious whines dismiss and cry about. That politicians lament over as they create and crucify with cogent blood stain sweeps. And Mother cries the tears that they would torture immigrants to speak.
If we’re looking for solutions as to how all this was begun, please give up that desert cry – the kind sweltering over coloured orphans and off-shot on tourist photographs, marvelling at the intensity of experience poverty provides to our over-privileged, under cut and insufficiently satisfiable lives -
If we’re looking for solutions as to how all this was begun please let’s give up that desert cry
As all that is lost was once won
Please let’s give up that desert cry
That something must be done
Something must be done.
~~~
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