--- B R E N D A N   L O R B E R

                 The cure for food
      for the visible for untouched
mountains the well-spoken cure for liberty
The 25 second               Per capita cure for
the precision of                    column inches
abstraction                    for a continent's twilight
Statistics cure                   a fraction of
   another                       diamonds are
      uninfected                forever
         conscience

        The cure for 25 seconds?  For new roads
    where the trees were                & migrant drivers
The cure for brightly               Inside a closed system with
Diesel trucks                                           no language
in the place of townships                for the origin of things
                                                        Why disease?
Why road?
              Anonymous              The unspoken
        one-family                   source for all
      cardboard box                      sequence      The initial
decision
      in the name of survival              that renders all else a given
          No enslaved people because slaves aren't people
      Soon no one's poor because          Economics on a wire
    nobody's left to be poor            The wire on a pole
                                                     The pole through
the ground
                                                   & the ground filled
with bodies

                  Buried inside
         the system is abstract & infinite
   The comfort    The unselected
              you-are-here-dot to the horizon
         Illness makes profit possible
     & obscures that very fact
Suffering transformed into
necessity behind flush times
until autonomy's become treason
compassion becomes venom
AIDS becomes arbitrary as      The necessity of
any element                     a jackknifed truck
in the landscape                The impulse
The natural world of        abandon
half enough to eat            every
   Year of funerals              one
         in orphan city       close to you

                     The luxury unavailable to investors
              unthinkable to the invisible
If there's a slow death to be had       Let the invisible
the wealthy few                       search locally
discover                              for culprits
   & exploit it                          or put faith
        for even more           in divine punishment

            Let the astute believe sex is the      new
      real problem                             systemic forests
but look no further                between diamond &
Let them fear                   cardboard
each other                         No one
Let no one see                  out of the crash
      the invisible                    Let no one find other
             few                                               causes
         that good business is good for               behind the visible
world