a thousand years ago, a forest of birch trees grew here. now, you have to admit, it has a kind of mechanical serenity — the snow piled up just so against the fences; the steam seeming to drift to the west just right; and the cars somehow reaching a kind of order in spite of the parking lot, once discernible as a parking lot, now resembling little more than a bumpy, white, industrial canvas smeared with ice patches and dirty tire tracks.

the universe lurks in our bourgeois bougie-beige-y dirt. humanity gazes at its wonderment reflected in its towering, faceless pseudo-monoliths, what we destroyed the world to build, what we feel far more peaceful staring at from the outside.

but you already knew that.

at night, when the streetlamps light up, blotting out the moon and the night sky; when the dark-cloaked dredges of the town we pay never to see trudge through our freshly driven snow; when we cower inside the concrete homes we clad in cloth-bound armor; “now,” we insist, “we feel safe.” and then we pay to feel safer.