Let Us So Virtuously Abide

and so my dear brothers let us go forth to pollute and to destroy

let us slash and let us burn, let us shop and let us drive giant vehicles all alone

let us consume without care for time everlasting, amen

let us worry not for tomorrow nor for any affairs of the future

yes, my dear brothers let us despoil, let us ruin

let us propagate our own and teach them our ways

and woe unto him who would speak a word to oppose us

verily, my dear brothers, the One True God we have created remains upon our side

let us use him to retain a strict certitude in all of our decisions

go forth my brothers, may you remain ever righteous and angry

and see only what you will in just the way you wish to see it

let us despoil and waste and remain blissfully unaware

let us ignore and rationalize, cast blind eyes and turn deaf ears

let us have no regrets and fear no retribution

let us sow wide aspersions and offend quickly at the smallest slight

let us take dominion over the plants and the animals, the water and the air

let us foul and move on, defile and leave, waste and cynically smirk

let us take our jet skis upon the water, our ATVs over the land,

our snowmobiles on the snow and our SUVs upon the highways

let us call upon the strength and morality

of the forefathers we do not know

let us extol the glories and seek guidance from

the history that we have no need to study

let us contend that our self-centered actions are necessary

for those future generations whose potentials we daily shrink

let us extol our virtues and beat upon our chests

let us trumpet those same self-evidences time and time again

let us be kind to the foreigners though they be simple and abide in darkness

remembering always that we only obey the higher authority we have created

let us reach out our hands for subsidies and dole out expensive favors

while reminding the less fortunate of their personal responsibilities

let us slickly repackage issues into sound bites using clever slogans

but demand concrete certitude of scientists before taking any action

oh, yes, my dear brothers let us recite these catechisms as one

yes, and those who are not with us are most surely our enemies

let us ape and let us parrot, let us not see lest we shame

let us take for ourselves and preach to others of the Golden Rule

Breaking Ground Most Toxically

Breaking ground, creating jobs and making progress towards self-destruction

Clawing the face right off of the earth even though it has always nurtured and sustained us

Improving farmlands and meadows with apartments and convenience stores

Moving society nobly forward with bulldozers, graders and excavators

Buy out, build fast and cheap, sell them off quickly, then go do it somewhere else

Breaking ground, this phrase makes so much sense through and through

Shrubs and grasses bulldozed, trees chain-sawed and stumps dynamited

The very living soil abraded, punctured and crudely lacerated

Left open to bleed out without a second thought - into the already-polluted streams

Keep the fuck back now, this is how real men earn the beer that sustains them

Breaking ground it’s called, but it really breaks far more than that

Their belched smoke and noise pollution a mere byproduct of their rending

Their useless bluegrass merely an expensive and poisonous outdoor floor covering

The wastes they generate in so-called construction requires giant dumpsters

We use our big old 4WDs to get into the manly sty we create with our work

Smashing, shattering and breaking the ground so very apt given our lifestyle

The microbial web of life in the soil pulverized, scattered and lateralized

The ground, left naked to crack and gasp, beckons only to weeds and litter

This gospel of development a patriotic offshoot of our biblical interpretation

Take your whining, tree-hugging ass off and go try and live in them woods

Rending and ripping and tearing the ground takes noise and smoke and dust

No more homes for worms or bunnies and ain’t that just too goddamn bad

Our civilization is built upon this lawful and refined scorched earth policy

Then we break more ground for our pickled bodies in those pathetic caskets

How about this, maybe you should just get the fuck out, if you don’t like it

Turning the soil inside out, burying some litter and bringing in rolls of sod

Patriotically shattering the ecosystem with righteous, all-consuming greed

Breaking ground for the real estate speculators and corporate investors

Advancing society today via single-minded scheming to get rich by tomorrow

What the fuck you gonna’ do? Go off and live in some goddamn cave?

Tearing up and selling off the floodplains, fault zones and hurricane paths

Breaking ground on exciting new developments which all look just the same

Making flattened little squares on which the semis can plop the pre-fabs

Excreting sterile geometric wastelands and walking away with lots of money

Hiring the rough and tumble, calloused and hard-edged veterans of destruction

Saving money by cutting corners and burning and burying poisonous debris

Conquering, taming, subduing, subdividing into pathetic uniform little cells

Breaking ground in a struggle to grow rich which destroys that which had sustained us

Consecrating in our dirty clothes with wrappers, power tools and loud radios

Get out of the way or we’ll fuck you up for there’s men's work to be done here

Making ongoing, licensed, protected and sanctified war against the earth

The cunningly greedy hire the hapless Orcs to do their evil, foolish bidding

Breaking ground for the future and leaving vast wastelands for your children

Waltzing off with the big bucks to a life of tasteless, strip-mined so-called luxury

After all what are you going to do, because that’s just how progress works

Proudly pointing to jobs created for those you call the salt of the earth

Breaking ground and sipping a champagne where elk pastures disappear

Buying another ranch sold off due to taxes driven up by their speculative hype

Standing up for hands-off, local control as you move on in and buy them out

Get out of the way, this here is private property and we got a job to do

Breaking ground and overwhelming the small voice in the backs of our heads

Drawing up fairytale artist’s conceptions and surveying with Nazi precision

Calling on the hung-over to do the dirty work and checking on their progress

Corralling investors, paying off officials and complaining about government interference

We need these jobs so just you stay back away from this here equipment

Noisily fucking shit up as a bizarre Country-Western god smiles thru the dust

Sleeping well at night as a far-sighted pillar of the new west community

Breaking ground for more useless second-homes leveraged as investments

Step aside of the excavator as our illegal workers enforce traditional values

We’re looking for an excuse to violence and it may as well be a treehugger

Wise out-of-state developers will bring us local control, jobs and progress at long last

Breaking ground with all the pride taken in a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Cashing in on their major selling points even while destroying them, and then moving on

Looking back with pity on the sad state of your once-proud droppings

I drive this truck 70 miles a day cause I cain’t afford to live where I work

Crudely joking and laughing hoarsely to fill the long and empty working days

Driving potential buyers around and remembering their names all afternoon

Moving our country forward as a bloody but flag-draped jesus nods and points the ways

Let the stupid tree huggers come in later with their sissy shrubs and flowers

Hey, listen, we just don’t give a fuck where this runoff goes

Breaking ground in an ideal realization of our very best from deep down inside

Breaking ground as it grows ever hotter, dustier, noisier and more senseless

Bless us oh lord for these thy gifts which we are about to crudely mutilate in thy name

A few more of these developments and maybe even a Wal*Mart will come in, too

But there’ll be no one to break more ground in far less than a million years

Modern Tribal Wisdom

We drew scenes from our trances on cave walls and signed them with our handprints

We worship the flickering images all produced to relieve of us of our money & reason

We thanked the creator and the animals for their sacrifices on our behalf

We build factory slaughterhouses and raise our meat without any mercy or grace

We tried to orient ourselves in our small part of this vast cosmos

Our current set of one true gods set us apart from the earth and all its creatures

We painted ourselves with ochre in patterns derived from mother nature

We encase ourselves within steel and plastic SUV cocoons while spewing toxins

We lived in caves with our dogs and guarded the fire with our lives

We are caught in their artificial cycle of electronically-induced consumption

We were small in number, often moving on, and the land restored itself behind us

We remain trapped in our own wastes by the millions in squalid, unplanned cities

We carved the salmon on the cedar and tried to find our own spirit creature

Our holidays have been disinfected by religion and co-opted by marketeers

Many of us died hunting the wooly mammoth and the giant cave bear

Injured former would-be athletes lay broken on soft couches, loudly gaining weight

We clashed with other tribes and mated with their women

We kill to demonstrate the moral superiority of our own loving & merciful god

We knew the cycles of the moon and the march of the seasons

Many among us never notice the weather until we’re forced to walk to our cars in the rain

In our potlatches we strived for status by giving away as much as we could

We pass by the homeless every day with our windows up and damn their lazy poverty

We carved totem poles that told the spirit stories of our clans

They make millions on our co-opted allegiance to empty corporate sports franchises

We solemnly left mother in the snow when she could walk no more

Grandma is drugged & abused by a variety of misfits in her warehouse nursing home

Each of us knew the history and all the legends of our ancestors and tribe

We dismiss that which happened over ten years ago as irrelevant & stupid ancient history

Our innate wastefulness was safely diluted by the fact of our small numbers

Now, we can despoil even the vast oceans and upset the very climate of the earth

We cataloged the plants for food, medicine and healing for a hundred thousand years

We pick cans off shelves by their pictures since we can’t quite read their labels

Life was hard and we knew by example that we must all die quite young

We spend billions trying hopelessly to restore a youth we wasted so long ago

We cuddled up and dreamed away the long Ice Age nights in communal shelters

We are chronically tired from working by our unwavering mechanical clocks

  

Our individual survival depended upon the success of our little group

Men sit drinking all alone in cheap, tiny rooms beneath dingy naked light bulbs

Specialized knowledge was accumulated and passed down in our arts and crafts

Disposable workers are worked long hours at degrading, low-paid tasks to profit others

Everything we tossed aside was native to the landscape, in any case

We spread our exotic toxins in far greater volumes than the earth can absorb

Leadership was recognized but assumed with humility and respect

Today’s managers scale the corporate ladder by ass kissing, sucking up and kicking down

The deformed, weak, sick and crippled quickly re-entered the spirit realm

We nurture the handicapped and rush to transform the human world in their image

We named the brilliant constellations and had stories about them all

Our lights have hidden the stars and our creation myth is old and stale

Our sturdy clothing came from things that we hunted, gathered and traded

Today we wear the identical products of massive mindless far-off wage slavery

As we wandered we often grew wet, cold, tired and very dirty

A few of us enjoy unlimited hot showers but so many lack clean drinking water & toilets

Our shamans were judged by the accuracy of their wisdom and knowledge

Advertising-controlled corporate media tells smarmy spin doctors exactly what to preach

We feasted on the sweetness of wild fruits and berries in their times

We gorge daily on sugar, salt and chemical flavorings fried up in fatty industrial oils

We forded at known safe places only when the water was not too high

We’ve channelized and sucked the diverted rivers dry after removing their sheltering trees

Everyone knew the stories of each and every member of our band

We live in a sea of strangers that tosses restlessly 24x7 just outside our locked doors

The legends we passed on required the imagination and memory of the listeners

Our entertainment is mindless, violent, sexual and created just to sell us things

The smart and the strong led the hunt and made the kills

Our generals plot from boardroom safety far away from the front lines

We marked the turning of the seasons with rites unique to our sacred places

Now time passes to the rhythm of artificial corporate retail holiday hype

We had no concept of owning any of the sacred lands we walked

Patriotic developers chop up vast parcels of that heritage to sell us little pieces of implanted dreams

Each of us could detail his lineage going back many, many generations

We cannot find on maps the places where our grandparents were supposedly born

Children grew strong in lives spent outside in the untouched & pristine surroundings

We raise our offspring indoors, drugged, chemically supplemented and nurtured electronically

The West Is Dead

     As of approximately 1987

Trapped under the weight of ignorant fuckheads in SUVs with expensive fly rods, ATVs, snowmobiles, jet skis, dirt bikes, skis, snowshoes, personal water craft, mountain bikes and

fast food franchises in once-small towns.

Lost under countless thoughtless cigarette butts, beer bottles, fastfood boxes and

candy wrappers rotting in once-pristine snowbanks.

Hemmed in, cut off and run down by trophy homes, strip malls, recreation centers, bike paths, sidewalks, vanity fences and water-guzzling non-native landscaping

Flooded so that more people could arrive and have good water to waste,

flooded so that habitat could disappear and those animals...could just go away,

Filled so that the land could be developed,

Filled so that wetlands might be reclaimed

and those birds we never looked at, will not be seen again

Cut with sharp chainsaws, scraped by mighty bulldozers, dug by powerful cranes,

subdued and tied down that our families might safely come and live

Degraded by Wal-Mart, 7-Eleven, KFC, Burger King

and the smiley cheap-assed, knocked-off, use once and throw it away imports

that we demand to make our lives better

Punished by millions of thoughtless pleasure seeking units,

transformed into the exurbia from which they once provided escape;

trashed and abused, developed and sub-divided, leased, taxed,

tamed and made safe for people just like you and me

Warmed up by our exhausts, sullied by our mechanical and organic droppings,

ripped by the sick macho sounds of our great vehicles,

dammed and drilled, trailed and off-roaded,

microwave and cell phone-towered,

electrical-lined and gas distribution-routed

We wonder where what anyone ever saw here might have gone

and so we move on, to that Next Great Place.

Cleared and graded, denuded and staked, dug and poured, left to harden,

left to scattered weeds and cracking earth

left fit to have things carelessly thrown away on, and walked away from

Shamed and betrayed by the same crowd with the same shortsighted,

greedy development strategy used from coast-to-coast,

from pristine water-filtering meadow to oil-runoff-bearing asphalt,

from part of an ecosystem to packaged corporate strip mall.

Screaming in agony and sobbing with pain,

mere shadows of the perfection that Winter snow once brought,

struggling pathetically to rise once again with every Spring,

not a trace of the vast beautiful and clean empty openness that inspired the ancient ones,

just a million cars traveling past developments that weren't built to last,

places that turn the innocent child that was the West

into the diseased and dirty whore of our dreams

Then blindfolded, gang-raped, slammed to her knees,

dryly rearended while being kicked in the face.

Held without charges, convicted without trial, sentenced without wisdom,

locked up and guarded by sadists and forgotten by humans.

Offered, listed, speculated-upon, downright pimped and made available by faceless

well-groomed aliens wearing sunglasses and costly makeup,

in expensive climate-controlled cars behind closed and tinted windows,

buying zoning, cutting deals and getting in early,

coming away with more cash, moving on once again,

building out and getting over, getting theirs and getting out

And you can take it easy or you can take it hard,

but you are going to take it…for the rest of your lives.

And they will take what remains right up in your faces,

And then lock their gates behind them

and you will see them coming and they will watch you go,

safe behind their walls with lots of money and the finest views remaining