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

Our Progress Did All This To You

When you see brutal machinery gouging up the gentle land you once knew

We did this without so much as a passing thought about you

When your ears hurt from the noise and your nose burns from the stench

We drove casually by and did this to you without the slightest pretense

When the rain does not fall and the sun is too hot and it feels too crowded

We did this and We needed no help to get it all started

When the water is dirty and grows ever scarcer

We did this with kindness and you need not fear, sir

When you cast out any others at all different from you

We did this and they, our cloned brothers, were not just a few

When you soil your nests and move on without a care

We did our duty and squatted in relief before you ever got there

When you stole from your children the life from the land

We did them a favor and steadied your greedy hand

When all you can think of is escape to mass media hypnosis

We did this for you with love that you might learn via osmosis

When you sit alone behind your car's tinted windows, swallowing the smog

We did this that you all might be ground closer in their great gears and cogs

When your children learn nothing, take everything and return only scorn

We did my best to make them just like you since the day they were born

When you work for years just to be kicked away like sick old prostitutes

We did our part to import your cheap and disposable substitutes

When you used it once and flipped it away

We smiled at your bored children going off again to play

When you swilled fast food and dreamed of the days when you were slim

We laughed as you were driving your car to the gym

When you bought your new clothes for the thrill of their bright colors

We did this so that you would not notice that your life grew ever duller

When you financed new vehicles and drove around on your phone

We helped you to think that your life was your own

When you mortgaged your future to spend more today

We fooled you into thinking you’d never have to pay

When you babbled alone to your cellphone in a crowd

We reported this as well, although not quite as loud

When you always spent more and never kept anything aside

We did this so that you would have nothing to look back on with pride

When you bought all the dreams that conglomerates were pitching

We did this counting softly, laughing, not bitching

When you smoked and you drank and you ate your rich food

We wrote songs to sell you things by shaping your attitude

When you took pride in your ignorance of the ways of your brothers

We saw why you had appointed yourselves to lead all the others

When you tried to look back and make sense of your time

We did what We could to hide these empty things from your mind

When your eyes began to fail you and you could no longer touch your toes

We did this with you but you will remain very much alone

When you thought you had mastered this life and all of its fears

We smiled as you finally tried to look deeper than into a mirror

When you planned romantic adventures for your golden years

We saw someone’s life ending in embarrassment and irrational fears

When you envisioned a time in which you grew old with grace

We smell your stale bedpans in an inhuman place

When you at last sat alone and planned a death with true dignity

We see it in millions and chuckle at the absurdity

When you finally saw these few things that others let slip

We mumbled this sadly through your barely moving lips

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