Graveyards! Wonderful havens of respite & nature-cosm’s in the shit-sty that is London. Few people, & a proclivity towards quite as well, just to heap cherries on the icing-wads. Old architecture heaving with character from decades (perhaps even centuries?) of elemental embellishing & beautification, ancient tilting stones, lop-sided from expanding soils wreathed in briars & festooned in ivy all choca’ with wild flowers. Basically, places of peace, beauty & solace amidst the soul braying contagion of this insane car-centric metropolis mishap.  Many a book & many a bijin bounced in such enclaves. Let’s obviously not neglect the fact that these spaces are marvellous carbon sinks, micro-nature reserves, clean air zones & excuse for trees to grow. In an increasingly constricting urban shit-hole, with less & less escape, these havens become more vital than ever along with parks & any other decent green space.

I pass through many graveyards each year. Spring & summer are always ideal periods as shit just erupts into fresh graminaceous abandon in splendid floral dalliance, a riot of life. Unfortunately, after the initial glorious tumult of growth & splendour, the dicks with their dreadful machines come in & inflict mutilation & maiming on the same stupid green-death-squad waste-haste. Control, flaw & order & the excuse to burn more fossil fuels for flagrances fortuity. Luckily, it does not take too long for life to bounce back, especially given the weather conditions & spring compulsion. If ya’ lucky, they won’t bother again for the rest of the year & former resplendence will be restored for the remainder of the summer. If your unfortunate, the death dolts will be back with strimmer’s & motorized saws once again for more ruinous ignorance impelled squander & plant based bellicosity.

Anyways, this year something explicitly fucked-up (perhaps for the first time ever?) occurred in Paddington Old Cemetery. This is a nice large cemetery with some great trees, but this year a new iniquity initiative was decreed with horrific results. Some toxic shit-head with a death fetish decided that all the graves (the center & their flanks) would be doused in poison! Seriously? Yes! Seriously! The entire cemetery? Yes! The entire fucking cemetery! Presumably “Round Up Ready” the liquid toxin developed by one of the most malignant corporations of all time – the GM arch villain Monsanto (recently brought up & subsumed into Bayer) was applied individually to each grave. Progressive measures. I assume it was cheaper/faster than using a guy with a strimmer? Also, one saturation annihilates & contaminates the soil for, at the very’ very least the whole year (the top soil has been & continues to be completely dead up until the publication of this article). In terms of environmental legislation & precaution as well as the general bonfire of civilizational & social rudimentaries that have been incinerated under the Tories deranged, sub-human nihilistic spree of anti-life sadism & immeasurable venality – anything now goes & nobody cares.

The effects on the graves are awful. It’s a dead zone. Bare, discoloured poisoned soil. Xerophilous, bleached dead grass that won’t decompose, presumably because it’s now so toxic, chemically embalmed to remind us all of the fatal bane administered. Some of the saplings on/around the graves managed to survive due to their roots being deep enough to escape the poison. They all mutated though (some have since shaken these mutations off) – their leaves warped & evaginated. Monsanto also devolved & manufactured Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant used in Vietnam (& now they make your food – from chemical warfare to the dinner plate), sprayed from war planes over thousands of miles of jungle. It caused major birth defects, genetic mutation, cancer & chronic neurological impairment in thousands of Vietnamese children born after their parents were exposed to the chemical. A much smaller number of American GI’s that were doused whilst in the field also suffered the same fate after returning home. The fauna & flora must have got it worse than either.

• Back to the cemetery, it’s a grotesque. I wonder if any of the families of those inured where consulted? It’s considered a profound insult to “piss on” some one’s grave. urine is great for the soil & plants – that considered, how much more of an insult/profanity is spraying poison on to somebody’s grave? I wonder if the pretty much universal custom of laying flowers on a grave is also about the symbolism of a living organism? A token of/that – “life goes on” & is capable of great beauty (the flowers innit’). I am completely non-religious, & i don’t really give a shit about the whole “respect for the dead” protocol, but I think soaking someone’s grave & it’s circumference in long lasting poison is frankly straight up sacrilegious & insanely insulting on a deep level. The laziness, harmfulness & shitness is just abject.

Left to their natural devices, the graves would sprout forth with long slender wild grasses topped with frizzante head-pieces that would ambulate in the breeze, tons of wild flowers that would team with insects & bumble bees. The rest of the cemetery would be mown, but the graves would be like these exotic head-pieces billowing viridescent extravagance. The previous year I took some photos at the cemetery in June that I am including with this article (if i had known what would follow next year, i would of taken many more of the graves specifically). As you can see, it’s lush & beautiful, much like the goddamn girl is as well (that chick is part of a mad Neko-Neko-Noyzcore band called Bollock Swine). That’s how beautiful it is when nature is just left to work it’s magic. There was absolutely none of that this year. You had severe chemical sterility, with at best – mutated saplings or a few extremely hardy stunted weeds struggling through the null.

I think we are far too accepting & tolerant with major mismanagement in pretty much every sphere of our society, but mass poisoning in a public space because your too lazy or cheap to cut them nicely (when they don’t even require cutting), this is a major degradation. Poisoning soil, any soil, is also one of the stupidest & most ultra short-termist inveterate ignoramus initiatives a motherfucker can take, anywhere.