Guerilla Pamphlets

Watch Towers

In the heart of a tranquil, silent, benevolent forest lies its destruction. A vast expanse of concrete and steel covers miles of earth with great monoliths and skyscrapers, humbling the proudest oaks, challenging the tallest firs, and threatening the youngest saplings. On the outskirts of the city center the dead corpses of the forest’s kin provide shelter for their world weary denizens. The graves mingle with the brothers and sisters of the deceased in a mocking gesture, taunting them as if to say “here lies your family, your future”. It is here that I watched as men regressed ten thousand years becoming beasts once again, and combating sentience with unknown ferocity.

It is the fate of all men, for we are beasts, simply more narcissistic than most, touting our accomplishments worldwide, distancing ourselves from our origins, but growing ever closer. The transformation was gradual, but violent. It began, as many of humanity’s more primal moments did, with gunshots. Through our superior intelligence we created an easy way to slay our brethren and what beasts we saw fit. The greatest minds of men pooled together brought about with science and mechanics and engineering a weapon, and over time we have gone from stones to firearms to hydrogen bombs thanks to our intellect and savagery. As men fell like trees in the past shattered glass lined the graves creating portals for the collection of worthless items. What was once a hybrid of metropolis and wilderness was now consumed by twisting, groping, indiscriminating vines, and the trees grew tall as they invaded the area, marching to the beat of rain, sun, soil, and time. The red bricks of old buildings chipped as roots penetrated them with barbaric hatred reclaiming the land that was rightfully theirs. The paint on an old Coca-Cola billboard flew like crickets from the grass as nature assimilated the relics of man. Men flew toward the metropolis with televisions in arm, pistols in hand and cash in pocket gunning down friends and family until no bullets remained, and then resorting to cruder methods of killing, so that upon their arrival in the utopia they might fare better. As the trees digested what lay in their path, grinding stone to dust and wood to mulch they reunited with their families once again. Ancestors who had once stared at each other from across the grass laden roads were together again as tar was torn and brood were bound. At the surrounding heights the advance was halted.

They peered into the city as the perverse mass of society culminated in an orgy of violence and death. Men showered in blood and continued the rampage until only a handful still travelled, hunting one another. They had given up on collection, for now all was lost and no love remained, it never really existed. I and a few other equally mad people remained in the forest, and it was now evident that the deciduous environ was displeased with our species. I wandered and after two days journey I found myself an inch into the thicket, where I found a clearing. There lived the elders among the wooden locals in a darkened circle with no openings, no exists. The council was in and the tribunal already underway. The giants opened their eyes to me, but revealed no flesh, no pupil, or iris. There was only bark, black and rigid like the hills enveloped with smoke from the smoldering pyre we toiled to build. Twisting branches and famished twigs examined me and a verdict was presented. “Guilty” uttered the largest of the

oaks. As I awaited a prison I was given an execution. Their eyes, whose locations I strove to find, stared not daggers but claymores. With the velocity of the bullets I used to slaughter my comrades the trees tore my flesh from my bone and as skin and sinew and tissue and cartilage was sprayed into the air and brought down like confetti a seed dropped into my chest. As it rested upon my heart the roots grew to dine upon it. The young, stout sapling’s mass grew from the remnants of my fetid, rotting corpse and it’s trunk grew tall and ferrous as its thirst was quenched by my blood.

-A Young Man