Manifesto

 

 

(1)

The first snow fell these days. Always a low pressure system moving in from Russia, how the announcer put it, as if winter was some sort of communist plot. Now I’m counting my coal and potatoes. Well, no potatoes, am counting the carbs, so there goes that image, true survivalists shaking their heads. I dropped in weight to where I probably haven’t been since my early twenties, but I never set foot on a scale at that time,

so I wouldn’t know.

Lenin went to Russia in a sealed train from Switzerland, where he was exiled to, therefore it’s more like the plot was reversed, but Switzerland has a winter vibe, too, with all that snow, cheese and chocolate. I’m not eating the chocolate.

It was a hundred years ago. He died a few years later and though a lot of people want to bury him now, the government still finances a whole laboratory, trying to keep his mummy intact, drained of all liquids and frozen, lying in a glass coffin like a balding Snow White, that no prince would ever go for. Not much else left for pilgrimage purposes, once you got rid of all Saints. Sugarlike snow on the roofs

and branches today. I sure wouldn’t eat from all the dworfs plates.

Living in a world that’s better, because you saved it, isn’t the same as living

in a better world. Saving is its own branch. I heard that birdseeds are bad for the birds somehow, so you don’t see those grease-balls in the trees anymore these days, same as your clothing donation might hurt a local industry. Maybe knitting sweaters for birds will do the trick, or rather just take off and save yourself. Eat the birdseeds yourself. Make a snow angel in the shape of your carbon footprint.

It’s like walking on eggshells. No breadcrumbs for the birds I view. It’s like walking on water out there. The snow’s like the icing on cakes. I am not gonna eat that. I am radiocarbon dating, so I don’t fall for mummies in a pyramid scheme. Maybe there’s just no right timing for us to ever bury the past. As if it sleeps with the eyes open. A frozen glance. So we keep reading into it.

 

 

(2)

 

Maybe the birds forget to go south, if you feed them, and at some point, it just gets too cold, but it’s too late, and now they’re stuck with that grease-ball. And then they rub that grease all over themselves in one last attempt, until they can’t even fly anymore, like waterbirds after an oilspill, hoping that Greenpeace will clean them up when spring comes. Poor birds, looking like dipped in cheese.

I am not eating that.

Think of all the banks in Switzerland. Now isn’t that ironic? Imagine how Lenin wrote his manifesto in that Zurich library, thinking: I am not having that. He had so much on his plate already. Imagine how it must feel to be dead and in some glass coffin. We keep overhead projecting, so we don’t have to dig any deeper. The stratifications of soil and society. Nothing is set in stone. Unless it calcifies. Some dinosaurs did. Others became the oil that we burn. They just didn’t make it.

No need to rub it in. They’re now the saturated fumes in the air that we breathe.

I remember standing at the roadside once, when I was in my early twenties, counting the passengers in cars during rush-hour traffic, yelling out the number whenever it was more than one. I should have done it in reverse, but I wasn’t angry enough.

At least I stood for something. I never set foot on a scale. I heard that bees die out at rapid rates. They can’t even migrate. They just go south. I remember, I almost swallowed a bee in my soda once, when I was a kid. So we’d both be dead.

Now I’m not drinking that. I’m dramatizing, it was not even close. It just flew

out of my can. The pollen are polluted or maybe it’s the radiation. I heard that bees can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, but that can’t be the problem. I guess, they’ll see red at some point.