Fascism & Utopia

a poem for extremists everywhere

Utopia is just a hair’s breadth from Fascism.

Naiive idealists
lose their hearts
trying to force funnel the Promised Land
into the hard grit shit gravity ground of everyday,
driving their divine lambs across the great divide,
across the dark river,
to slaughter.

The purists are like comets flaming up on striking the atmosphere of the earth:
they buckle and twist,
pervert,
into genocide Generals cleansing the strain,
exterminating wrong thinking,
scarifying the terrain;
into militant monks barring mixolydians,
driving out demons,
sterilising the DNA.

The pure seeds are so fragile,
growing up out of the burn:
acres upon acres,
hectares upon hectares,
kilometres upon kilometres
of burn.
God the heat,
the scorching heat upon the mountains of burn,
black top mountaintops, as far as the eye can see.

Here we plant the pure seed,
the clean gene,
the clear clean code,
isolate,
and poison the rest,
and wait,
single-minded,
mono,
for the perfect shoot to grow.

* ‘the burn’ was the massive mountain range around Prince George, completely clearcut for its wood and paper.  The ‘slash’ (as we called it) that was left on the ground was incinerated, the ash believed to be the most promising conduit for future growth.  This scar could be seen clearly from space.  At the time, the largest clearcut on earth.

I spent two seasons replanting that blackened black mountain range with one species of tree selected as the most promising for the future of the forest industry at that time.  Utterly shadeless and barren, the black of the burn absorbed the heat of the sun, making it a heat sink.  The black ash would stick to our sweat soaked skin while we, blackened, and paid as we were by the tree, strained to ‘pound’ into the desolated ground as many trees of the one species as we possibly could.

Prince George, 1988