FOR SOME reason, impenetrable to any German leftist, there seems to be the strange US-American liberal assumption that Germany is a lederhosen-wearing, beer-sipping liberal paradise, where we hug refugees all the day, care for mother nature, and organize a perfect ‘socialist’ (in the liberal use of the term, meaning social-democratic) society, and with the guidance of a dear and democratic government, we care for our people and the world. While it will forever be a mystery for me how anyone could believe this in the first place, I am going to debunk this assumption in this article. My wager is that, by observing the current situation in Germany, we might find tendencies and latencies that elide developments within capitalist realism that are elsewhere still not fully feasible.

JAMES HAD a problem. He had no face.

Actually, he had a face and he knew he had a face. He could see it in the mirror. Eyes, nose and mouth were there where they were supposed to be; on the front of his head. He could see it but nobody else could. They saw through his face, around his face and everything but his face. There was nothing there, just visual ambience.

In December 2019 the Born Again Labor Museum and Locust Review issued our first “Irrealist Worker Survey” as part of our quixotic attempt to map the gravedigger’s multiverse. A selection of responses from you — our dear comrade readers — along with the survey questions, as printed in Locust #2, is posted here.

I had two epiphanies during my artistic development. One was that our current political/social system was unjust and the second was those systems had always been unjust. I, like so many, had been conditioned to be obedient and not rock the boat. Sadly, it took the upheaval of the perceived status quo to open my eyes. Seeing that the mass media had replaced our subconscious, I wanted to subvert that in my work.

BY ONE in the morning, the largest vice house in the Theta District was closed. Most Silver Palms patrons were either long gone or passed out in a dark corner.

I pushed the broom across the black resin floor of Acid Room #2. My workphones played their slow pulsing tone just slightly faster than the ambient pulse back home in the Delta District, what we call Slate Town. Its ambient sound was soothing and slow. Workphones were designed to produce methodical drones. I wouldn’t have admitted it, but part of me was thankful for them. When paired with a time dilating energy drink, work went quickly. It was like turning your brain off.

MARK MILLER is the author of The Librarian at the End of the World (Montag Press, 2019). Adam Turl interviewed Mark Miller for Locust Review in early 2020.

Somewhere poetry shot itself.