You think, what, twenty, thirty million and chaos and pollution reigns but the sky is blue, the trains follow each other like migrating ants and google map is precise enough to indicate the best car to hop on for the fastest exit through the underground city, or other cities, as far north as snow, or as south as palm trees by orange beaches. Your gaze scans the silent population all on their phones typing thrice for a shape that somehow evokes a nature left behind long ago. Simplicity, that sigh, is replaced by the roccocco of Italian design and French golden chains, stores racking up floors and pretty girls, more puppet and less woman, but you look anyways at the shaved eyebrows in their morphed vanity and deference.

The room is tidy but the bidet is warm and the rug heated like a Korsee under the low table. The bars too are small enough for a dozen salary men, the poorer the better to gesticulate while getting a buzz from rice. I said before to compare. This is what's possible in defeat. You put your Namoos elsewhere. You take your time, sure, mechanically at first but in the long run as a student of foreign ways. Your history and an awful lot of hierarchy will manifest. I don't know if it's intelligence, but as luck has it, the Asian ancestor worship (more on that later) preserves the past as a stepping stone. For without history you are as shallow as a meme. Even in consumerism at this scale. I'm happy not to be able to read, or understand what's being said. It clears the mind like a silent retreat, albeit with a lot of background imagery.

The hills are devoid of structures, superstition dictates that only evil spirits roam above. I suspect this mimics more a stone age village making its living mostly from the sea. The forests have almost been full of menace, giant hornets, wild boars with razor tusks and bears that are to this day on television killing away. The spirits that linger are those with unfulfilled lust, and being immaterial are unaffected by gravity. They float upward through ceilings to corners of buildings lifted like a skirt to vent this gas out. They come to rest in the high and thick forest. Only cemeteries present a vista of the city below. And why do they not float to the stratosphere? Lust. All that remains. The living huddle together for emotional protection. Everything is always destroyed. There is no shortages of evil agents, earthquakes, volcano, tsunami, Little Boy and Fat Man. Everything needs to be rebuilt over and over like the circle of reincarnation. With each iteration the city inhales nature and exhales concrete and steel to the forbidden height. The corners are now sharp enough to keep the trapped within.


Jam25