Consumers

“The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population

Owns 40 per cent of the planet’s wealth.

The richest 10 per cent own over 85 per cent of the world’s assets,

With over half the world’s population

Owning barely 1 per cent of the global wealth.

This is a world in which over 800 million people

Go to bed hungry every night.”

I register the statistics then go back to my business,

The routine art of transformation,

My thoughts as luxurious and superfluous as billionaires’ yachts,

My suburban life a private Caribbean island

Designed to my own blueprint.


Spaces,lifestyles,relationships,identities,bodies,

All mutate in my hands,

As my dying flesh dreams of ever vaster sensations,

Ever greater proof of itself, of God.

Maintain, repair,improve your body, your life:

Turn yourself into a deluxe product.

A life on credit,

Overstretched.


The zero game of freedom

Snares me in machines.

Seduce me, manipulate me,

Turn me inside-out.

We are the wasters, the destroyers,

Used up as we abuse.

Excess is our damnable pleasure,

Puritan libertines.


From ecstasy to anomie,

I plot the graph.

My unimaginable death reinvents itself

As games,art,religion and war.

On with the tournament,

The carnival of fools!

Everywhere I turn I see masks and costumes:

On the streets and in the shopping centres,


I take my fantasies for a stroll,

Random memories striking like asteroids,

Battering me into a derelict Mars.

Arts become industries,

Objects become photographs,

Reality’s hallucination is screened on my solitude,

Rich in false intensity.

How could I survive without these fictions?

Under the surveillance cameras’ eyes,

I toy with self-control,

Observing without being observed,

Excited and blasé.

History means nothing to me now

And I still prefer the Old Testament to the New.

I will never be part of the Universal;

I do not have heroes any more.


Schizophrenic, can you join the dots

And call it truth? A child’s drawing,

With stick-people and massive suns.

Mysterious oppressive fragments of time

Fall from your fingers,-

Did you break your toys again?

Everything breaks down in the end;

Disappointment sets in early.

I can’t understand the world but I know it hurts.


I like to look at objects from a distance,

Without judgment or taste.

Depth and perspective are superfluous now.

The most beautiful people are actually circus freaks.

Take me to the fair, take me to the theatre,

Show me the monsters,

Let me live again!

The dandies are in charge now,

If anyone is.