Loot

What's mine is yours.

The Kiss (1927) by Max Ernst

Stay at home, clean everything up, make everything match, keep everyone safe. Get back to normal, get out there, make everything better, make everything great again. Go back home by 1 p.m., stay there, never leave again. You’re not powerless, you only feel that way right now. You’re in complete control. This is only temporary.

I miss you and I hardly knew you in the first place. I want you to be better than you are. I want to be better than I am. Feel my liquid cells surrender to chance. Hold my hand while everything slides out of place.

Retreat to rigid bunkers. Decry the criming. Lament the desecration of sacred temples from Anthropologie to Apple. Every theft feels personal to you personally. Fill your shopping carts again and again to make it better. The curfew order came down just as your order was shipped. Retail therapy. Take solace in the way these needless things match the needless things you already own. Build a barricade out of worthless stuff.

Masked men stole sneakers stitched by babies continents away. The audacity! Who dares to defile this temple, this most divine of spaces? These stitching babies match crying mothers thousands of miles away. Whatever you do, don’t start making connections. Stay right where you are. Stay right where you’ve been for centuries. Some things are as simple as right and wrong. Money makes it even simpler: There is no wrong.

Get your stuff the legal way: Sell your soul early and often. Knowingly empower bad actors and racist thugs. Quietly embrace the status quo. Take what’s yours and then some. Avert your eyes from corporate looting in broad daylight. Shrug at white collar crime sprees. That’s just the way the world works. That’s just how things have always been. These needless principles match the needless principles you already have. These dreams you stole match the stolen dreams of people around the globe.

Let’s meet on an island in the middle of the ocean, masked and subdued. We’ll never speak. Words can only make things worse. Hold my hand as the water rushes up to greet us. Hold your breath as our cells rush up to greet each other. Let’s rise above all conditioned responses and invent a new reality together, out of silence.

This car matches my wife. These shoes match my house. This numbness matches my skin. This plastic matches my mind. This new dress matches your cage. Get your worthless junk the legal way. Learn to play nicely. Keep your distance. Learn to sleepwalk in sync. This death keeps me safe. Pack up my purchases in a body bag, it looks classier that way. Otherwise, someone might think I’m stealing.