Autogeddon - poem

In 1885 Karl Benz construct the first automobile.

It had three wheels, like an invalid car,

And ran on alcohol, like many drivers.

Since then about seventeen million people have been killed by them

In an undeclared war;

And the whole of the rest of the world is in danger of being run over

Due to squabbles about their oil.

If an alien was to hover a few hundred yards above the planet

It could be forgiven for thinking

That cars were the dominant life-form,

And that human beings were a kind of ambulatory fuel cell: Injected when the car wished to move off,

And ejected when they were spent.

Not one huckstering copy-writer--

And they're only a sheet of Letraset away

From badlands ballyhoo merchants spiking sugar with silver-sand

Or dying sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries--

Ever sees fit to mention that the automobile,

Even that moving Pantheon, the Rolls,

Doubles your heart-beat on entry,

And transforms your psycho-galvanic skin response

To set the needles shivering on any lie detector.

From the moment you settle comfortably behind the wheel--

Your pelvis fondled by replica flesh panting with static--

It increases stress readings, poultices the ductless glands, Slowly marinates the body of even the most 'experienced' driver with adreno-toxins,

Noisily generates a wide range of cardio-vascular pressures,

As well as doubling up as a dinky orgone-accumulator stimulating trash sexuality.

Tides of blood and water in the body

Are magi-mixed, as if there was a permanent full moon.

The car is a portable mistral

Whipping up sumps of duff ions,

And moving them along in a packet of pre-storm tension.

'Oh we had such an awful journey,

I feel completely drained.

Now what did you want to talk to us about?

My concentration's utterly shot.

Why did we come?

Further specifications:

The machine re-vamps the energy patterns of the driver,

Bearing only a scanty relation to the work put into it:

'Whoops, did we do something then?

Couldn't have. We'd have felt it.

Like television,

The peculiar rhythm of the car

Sucks the brain-waves into an artificial resonance--

A managed and manageable attention span

The TV of travel.

Every car's vibration

Magnifies an all-pervading impregnation of information-free sound-porn,

A universal base line, whatever the tune,

Transforming the brains of its audience into double-glazed mulch, Their attention span whittled down to the length of a passing car.

The infra-sound,

Exuded by compressors in 'air-conditioned' (and air conditioning) models

Will deal with those who shruggingly claim to be unaffected,

As their cerebral pre-capillaries silently pop,

And turn into varicose veins.

Look out of any city window:

Cars will slice through your thoughts and take them away

For nothing.

Stand in any street

Bristling with painted piranhas

Playing the flatulent, whining muzak

And be forced to absorb their every wilful manoeuvre--

A mass-produced multiple sword of Damocles

Inexhaustibly hovers over every action.

Streets that were open universities,

Are now the open sewers of the car-cult.

But, if all this proves too overwhelming,

You have permission

To take it out on anyone you wish

Including yourself--

With a relaxing impunity...

The Visitor follows up the court reports:

Hit someone over the head with a chrome fender and kill them-

Life.

Take the precaution of attaching the chrome fender to a car,

Hit someone over the head with it, and kill them--

Six months suspended. Licence briefly withheld.

I'm going to democratise the automobile,' said Henry Ford,

And when I'm through everybody will be able to afford one,

And about everybody will have one...

This is half-way house.

Half the world's paychecks are auto-related,

Half the world's resources are auto-devoted,

And half the world will be involved in an auto-accident

At some time during their life.

Interconnecting roads, laid out like lattice-work,

Might sometimes strike a moderately subtle viewer

As a predatory web.

Skin-head architecture

Spawned by the dream of Autopia,

Edges in on no-man's land,

Like short-life gravestones.

From time to time,

On the outskirts of cities,

Wreckers' yards erect massive mausoleums of mouldering cars,

No longer worth requisitioning,

Picked fairly clean of their inhabitants,

Like Parsee Towers of Silence.

Oil.

From the Sanskrit root -il, light, illumination,

And petr, Peter, the rock.

Thus, petrol is--remarkably--light from the Oil,

Which, if the Chinese geomantics are right,

And this earth is a living organism

(And the atmosphere is obviously its own breath,

Could be its digestive juices,

Its cerebro-spinal fluid--

Or even its bile--

And it may one day over-react

To being caricatured as a handy Molotov cocktail,

Needled with two million bore-holes

By oil spivs.

Oil,

The liquefied,

If not spiritualised,