Byline: Brutal Detachment

Buford Youthward
stockcap@hotmail.com

All that is sold melts in the air. Solid gases liquefy aside drifting night skies.

At the graff meeting, I disregard the out-to-smash-and-grab set, sweating on Navajo sand paintings wearing Gabonese sorcerer's masks, signaling through the flames and purple moonlight over sacred doodles. I got better shit to do.

No need to get mired in minutia, marinated in misery or moped out on marijuana. Not when there's a neighborhood to kill and a can of cherry red looking to spread some democracy.

Caring about results rather than ideas and choosing economy over overstatement are the only ways to go to get beyond adventures of tonality and sheer ignorance to the system.

An administration of skulls comes together and thinks there is such a thing as modesty in graffiti expression, in this action writing. But no criticism of the livelier arts tells the total tale.

Layoffs in cultures that create people so smart they can't figure out how to ask the right questions seems just.

Emotional roller coasters complete with steep drops, swift turns and dramatic pauses syncopate with seductive yet brutal and detached rhythms.

Volcanoes erupt, fires smolder invoking meaning without constraint. Corrupt consumers gaze across the gallery, the video screen, the picture frame forgetting this is the place where art goes to fossilize.

Tolerance and love go hand and glove letting me be what I need to become.

Getting called on the large checks I'm trying to cash I dash out the door forsaking my fake ID.

Downtown graffiti kids sell their wares, price out their hearts, layaway their souls then ultimately default against their down-payment.

The air is rarefied in the cultural jet stream, where nothing solid, gaseous or liquid stands up against the sciences of capital exchanging hands.


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