They have flattened us,
pressed our wild desires
into the assembly line of needs,
and they whisper this is all there is,
while the machine hums its one note
through shopping malls and office towers,
in all their goddam concrete spaces.

But inside this administered life,
something elementary in us stirs:
the aesthetic rebel, the dissident,
who refuses the given world,
who sees in every sunset
and feels in nature’s call
a critique of one dimension life,
and who hears in music and poetry
a polyphonic aria of resistence,
and a yearning for the denied, the impossible.

Imagine this utopia: a world where
breathing bodies move to their own rhythms,
in pulses natural and erotic,
where work becomes play
and play begets creation
in more than form, in substance,
and where the corralled senses open
like flowers at the dawning.

Not this plastic paradise
of endless consumption and alienation,
but another, one authentic,
joyful, where each person unfurls
their individual genius without pretending
or being injected into the rigid mould
of production, where beauty is not commodity
but nature’s offering,
where freedom means
the courage to become
magnificently, irreducibly,
radically, yourself, and not reification.

for Herbert Marcuse

20/6/2025