Use Your (Plastic) Illusion

Here is a poem that blends the grandeur and grit of the Use Your Illusion albums, the cautionary tale of Forbidden Planet, and the false promises of the "Fantastic Plastic" era.

Use Your (Plastic) Illusion

I. The Garden of Eden (Wrapped)

"What’s so civil about war?" we asked the earth, While we manufactured a synthetic birth. Back in the nineties, the television screamed, Selling the convenient life we all had dreamed. "It’s fantastic!" they sang, a polymer hymn, While the lights of the Krell began to dim. We bought the pitch, we bought the sheen, We bought the Locomotive and the new machine. We thought we’d found the Perfect Crime, Cheating the rot and killing the time.

II. The Id in the Coma

Welcome to the jungle of the man-made stuff, Where the packaging is slick but the reality is rough. Like the Monsters from the Id, invisible and deep, The trash woke up while the world was asleep. We’re floating in a Coma, sedated by the store, Wanting more, and more, and a little bit more. We built a Forbidden Planet on a foundation of sand, With a single-use bottle in the palm of our hand. We chased the illusion that it simply goes away, But the ghost of the wrapper is here to stay.

III. Cold November Rain (Of Microplastics)

And I know that "Nothing lasts forever"— Or so the singer said in the cold November weather. But he was wrong about the spoon and the plate, They defy the rain and they defy the fate. So when you look into the sky for the cleansing pouring, It’s just Dust N' Bones that the wind is storing. It’s a hard rain falling, full of microscopic beads, Choking the roots and poisoning the seeds. Yeah, it’s hard to hold a candle in the cold November rain, When the wax is toxic and the wick is a stain.

IV. Estranged

Now we’re Estranged from the soil and the sea, Lost in the "Illusion Pollution" debris. You can Get in the Ring with the forces of nature, But the plastic remains the only dictator. No Civil War, just a silent suffocation, The shiny breakdown of a Breakdown nation. So use your illusion, pretend it’s all clean, While we drown in the gloss of the fantastic machine.

Here is a poem that weaves the sci-fi warning of Forbidden Planet with the upbeat consumerism of 1990s advertising, resulting in a world overtaken by "Illusion Pollution."

The Id of the Polymer Age

We landed on a world that was shiny and new, Beneath an electric, synthetic sky blue. Like the Krell in their wisdom, reaching for stars, We built a great engine to banish our scars. No metal, no stone, but a miracle skin, To hold the convenience and chaos within.

"It’s Fantastic!" the jingles from the nineties declared, A life fully molded, a life fully spared. "It wraps! It snaps! It’s light as a feather! It defies the decay! It defies the weather!" The commercials beamed out with a smile and a gleam, Selling the convenient, disposable dream. Plastic makes it possible! The future is clear, Just use it one time, and it creates no fear.

But deep in the subconscious, the power grid hummed, While the senses of nature were slowly benumbed. The Monsters from the Id weren't claws in the night, They were bottles and baggies reflecting the light. We wished for a world where nothing could rot, And the planet delivered exactly that plot.

Now the Illusion Pollution is drifting like sand, A colorful smog settling over the land. The ocean is churning with invisible bits, Where the ghost of a soda ring quietly sits. We are the ancients who died by our hand, Trapped in the gloss of a Tupperware land.

The surface is perfect, smooth, and terrific, While we choke on the gyres of a plastic Pacific. A Forbidden Planet, silent and vast, Preserved in the amber of the garbage we cast.

The Forbidden Sheen

Welcome to the sheen, the glossy veneer, Where nothing decays and nothing is dear. It’s a bright, Technicolor, polymer dream, Wrapping the rivers and choking the stream. It’s smooth to the touch, it’s lighter than air, It’s woven in water, it’s caught in your hair.

Oh, the Fantastic Plastic Planet is here, Preserving the sandwich, preserving the fear. A miracle shell that will never decay, While the organic world slowly withered away. We traded the soil for a bottle that gleams, And filled up the oceans with petrochemical dreams.

Is it forbidden? This fruit of the oil? Drawn from the dark and the deep of the soil. It mimics the eternal, it pretends to be stone, But it sits in the stomach and sits in the bone. A colorful ghost that will haunt every shore, Long after the makers are walking no more.

So look at the glitter, the wrap, and the band, The artificial kingdom we built on the sand. Fantastic, indeed, how we molded the earth, into a sterile, unbreakable, plastic rebirth.