Hungry Landscapers
Sylvia Shawcross
Some days we wake up in dream memory of a Gainsborough landscape with the soft light promise of a sweet warm day in the sun and the green fields with the majesty of trees and faraway mountains and the gentle lowing of cows in the distance and we’re draped in silk and flowers and feathers and jewels glittering and we feel the lush of love’s longing lingering…
And other days we wake up in a dream memory of an Hieronymus Bosch painting and it appears as though some wee human-like creatures have built a torture chamber in our abdomen and rabbits and horned creatures have run away with our legs and some kind of green reptile is trying to bob for apples in a barrel except one of those apples is our head and we wonder if we can scream for help on account of the fact that we have no lungs anymore because heaven only knows where that giant black beetle with a knife has taken those. On those days, hit the snooze button and try again.
There is always hope.
Now, I know the world has gone crazy but it hasn’t really. It’s just humans being human as they have always been. The good, the bad, the ugly, the other ones and stuff. We’re being moody now. On account of how the privileged class have become too big for their britches. Again. And we who scrounge our way through the days have to remind the bastards that they too are only human and quite possibly on the wrong side of right. Again.
You’d think they’d have figured it all out by now. They are always on the wrong side of right and they pretty much know this from the beginning but that doesn’t seem to stop them. It’s like they need refresher courses every fifty years or so to reteach them what happens when you presume what you can’t presume with the rabble. The rabble knows. The rabble always knows. The rabble always wins. In the end. Eventually. How has it ever really been any different?
Yes, yes I know. We must extend compassion even to those who are basically attempting to dismantle, destroy and decommission the entire world in order to build their utopia even though the suffering for the masses is and will be enormous. Even these types need compassion. They must be living in a different Hieronymus Bosch painting if you think about it. It has to be.
Who would think of all these types of horrible things to do to people if not surrounded by evil things?
In their dream-walking world a blue-skinned black-eyed giant amphibian is making vaccines and an army of bloodied stump-nosed trolls are chasing people and poking them. And a giant computer chip is being used as grazing material for metallic fartless cows and drones, like pigeons, are evacuating bombs all over the grey 15-minute city where they live and crickets.
The crickets are huge things. They are HUGE like elephants and they’re chirping as they catch and grind up humans in an effort to feed themselves and great genderless beings are clapping and singing except they can’t sing anymore and are croaking like the purple frogs that are harvesting organs from the pale broken bits of humanity. So they can live forever.
And the greed over it all. It is a black hungry landscape spewing out passionless creatures that thirst for more but there is never enough and yet they thirst. And still they dream. They have no snooze button. In a 15-minute city there is only every 15 minutes. Over and over again. They are simply voracious hollow dreamers searching their dark landscape in the boxes, and cubes and mazes and bubbles, searching for what they do not know but only that they need more of what they do not know and do not know how to ask for what they do not know.
“Just ask,” you think. But no…they have to build it themselves with the bits of their dark and hungry and lonely and angry. The furiously righteous children stomping into a Utopia with a rage disguised as progress.
They know not what they do. They really don’t. They wanted perfect but do not know how to get it so they, from their dystopian world, pillage rape and rampage in tidy little packages of bureaucratic noise that sound like promises and hope. But it is from their world. In what world is their world any kind of world?
“Just ask,” you think. Before we all end up in their broken dreams.
The world has not gone crazy. They have. The End.
Earworm:
Sylvia Shawcross is a writer from Canada. Visit her SubStack if you’re so inclined.
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