I
Ashes fall from the sky like the entrails of spirits lynched from gods. Fires burn their melting tentacles into a destructive omnipotence, the science wrath of death, the crimson clouds painted with the blood of the earth, the great storms of turf wars built up into a sky of effervescent hate, the knowledge of centuries dwindling to the ground like forgotten lovers.
Alexandria burned much the same way, with a Caesarian wit to light the wick, the words of humanity unravelled and composted like ordinary garbage, the experience of humanity deconstructed into ember magic of disappearing fates, erasing the livelihood of history.
There aren't enough synonyms for smoke. Fumes of effort evaporate like exhaust in the traffic sun where the work of billions vaporizes into one day after another day and another day in the any other ways and means in which nature's greatest mistake fries itself.
Gasoline is the cocktail of happy hours across the planet, the stripped blood and plasma nourishment of a planet set alight. Cheers to the martinis and cosmopolitans! Great speech writers take the stage to highlight their concern, outside the bodies smolder and stench, foul death in the air like fresh flesh on the grate of qn unclean grill.
Spending hours and upon hours contemplating the nature of fission is like staring into the sun - when fusion explosion traps grab hold of the senses and say, like sickness in the halls of the morgue, that enough is enough. Blind elders explaining that the end is nigh, the world collapses on the cots of refugees, while spires of infernos are only symptoms of a much greater illness.
The sickly might of a sickly child coughing into the bosom of a fearful mother, the escape makes no sense other than death. To flee, to breathe, to sleep, to rub... perchance to dream. These weaponized hopes of escapism are nothing more than the illusory reality, the fabricated truth, the rested exhaustion of a people on the verge of death.
No sugar, no candy, no confection, no sweet relief. None of these little treats will replace the bounty of grapes and bread where the mother and milk nourished the mind for unending days, the careful maternal careers of matriarchs who wanted only to survive to see the smiles - their laughing child safe at home.
Candy is but a luxury... and candy everybody wants. Lust and hate, is that the candy? Blood and love decidedly taste so sweet. Stealing from others the brilliance that they offer and in hopes of keeping it for themselves? A sharing economy should be redundant and still the halls are packed with the coughing and the lame - rusted off limbs and rubbed out eyes, the blind, deaf and otherwise senselessness that condemns everyone to the same fate.
But why rush? What is the rush? Why is there need to hurry? Run to windows, stare at the heavens, listen to their shrieks... the clouds are still red, the sun does not shine, the light spreads across the injured land and the world begs to return to a moment when it could breathe, turning about in space, spinning around a jubilant sun, the radioactive explosions of a central light lifting everyone.
II
Time is gone and lost. Death is mere breaths away.
The fools of forever, they thrive in the now.
They school yard taunts of bullies
Smash against the mind; the cranium
Where forgotten assignments are swatted away
With illiterate anger
Unwillingness to learn
The human experience stunted on its own
Eroticism only just a jerk
To tug at the hearts of hollow men
Those bangs and whimpers all cry out the same
The pained forgetfulness of abused childhoods
Trauma upon trauma overwhelming any hope
Panic stretching the valley thin
The tempest of emotions, retching
Refuse colliding in midstream
Animals on hind-legs
Burnt dreams to the bottom of the basin
Nothing will grow here.
Fallow fields in shallow dirt
Roots do not stretch
Petals do not climb to the sky
Nothingness reaching for the heavens
Plants fight each other merely for survival
Twisting their stems and stalks
Pushing down anything that cannot grow
So that life alone is a laddered climb
To fight your neighbors
On the backs of kin
Thrusting those closest to you
To the ground beneath
So that they fertilize
The earth which might've nourished them.
Calculating the patterns is never difficult
The life on earth has been growing in the same way
For millions of years
Where the dead feed the living
Where the living die
And the earth spins on
Its axis no more than a titled turn
To and from the stars in heaven
The concern for one's self no more important
No more of value
Than the genocides of humanity
There is no right to care
When there is only selfishness
In a hell of ignorant greed.
The men that think their gods,
Making weather and storms
Complaining of the rain
When the fault is not supernatural,
Nor the fault even natural
The answers have been there for years
As simple as it was to rape the ground
The answers as simple as paralysis,
Cessation, finding the way for others
Making a world that thrived in balance
Still the scales are tipped
The balances pressed to the side of the masters
The weights a fiction
The burden overwhelming
The starving are sick
The sick are burning
The hellacious wrath of a celestial bodies
On fire in heaven
Descending piecemeal like some evil confetti
To celebrate a the burning sphere
Of man's own greedful enterprise
Deflated balloons and millions on the move
While the blood flees the flesh
And the richest masticate the tendons between their teeth
Gulping down the carnage like blue ribbon pie
Prize winning garbage nourishing their souls.
III
It's really sad to sit under precipitous ash with a red sun in the sky and act like this is something that could have never beenpredicted. Wineries that nourished drunken delight now burned, evacuees in the sickened houses of parents who risk death to avoid death, hurricanes simultaneously building like body counts on the other side of the continent. The search for words persists all night, yet that search remains as uncertain as the jumbled feelings - everything uncertain: positivity and negativity almost collide; then repulse as if this were some unescapable magnet. Pouring the world into a cup of questions and, the answers are murky, like when that first pharaoh chose to build a pyramid. A certain resolute realization, "I cannot do this all myself." Followed by the realization, "They could do it all for me." If humanity can build the world to it's end, can it not deconstruct the end back to it's genesis? Is everything so certainly finite? To a place where the finality of man's more infirm nature is his own best friend instead of his worst enemy? When will people ask how? They may never. As the cauldron boils and the fire rages in the logs beneath the pot, the last thoughts are not how to get out but how to withstand the burning, the boiling, the melting flesh as it renders into the broth, the grasses and bark and weeds and flowers - the final aromatic touches for the human consommé in which bodies dissipate, a tasty gluttony of human salt and fat fit only for the monsters of industry.
IV
Return to the cribs and cradles of our own salvos, mobs and hordes at the gates of eden pleading with their maker for a second chance, apology prayers and radioactive wails that crest the walls of the fortified paradise, gaps between the slats of bones that keep out the the underserving.
A promised Moses to a promised land where they all may enter, except the lone voice of dissent? Is this how men learn to disagree? When the apple goads the soul and the rock quenches the thirst, who run's from instinct only to hear that being made in the image of your maker is no image at all. Hypocrite ties that demand willful ignorance, mutilated obedience, logic meals that feed only the already full. How does one eat when they are too starved to sit at the table?
Raging specters of hollow worth, vengeful planets carried by a sickened Atlas, knee buckling selfishness that underpins the overwhelming weight of this thoughtless place, built logically on Newtonian and Christian principles. To each and every action is the need to treat others the same... the burning fields and slaughtered children fill the smoky sky with their ghosts and fury of howling counterpoint victims - all they do is cry on to the earth much like God's children: "Why have you forsaken me?"
Nail dagger spike bolts piercing the edges of coffins, tickling the palms of flesh, the blood trickling to the dusty terrain below. There on the hilltop for virgin mothers to watch, the humanity passed over, the compassion edicts of dictator punishments leaving the wounded to the wolves, hungry not for food but for blood, they lap up the drops before they dry in the blistering desert sun.
The hoarding mass of minority, the few overcompensated stake holders that dangle the crumbs from their windows as the gardeners tend to the inedible roses below, pricking on the stem, the hand still bleeds. Protein from the flesh, complex carbohydrates from the broken promises of the master above. Their wealth shall feed the work in the yard, while forced teat sucking at the bosom of exhausted mothers wondering why the child starves even when the mother is starving.
Milk is not for wasting, crops are not for burning, roads are not for blocking, boats are not for sinking. The effort of the experience should be shared. The most undernourished children that survive the reckoning of viscous story times do the most damage, abused lions starved in a cage, let loose upon Christians, by Christians; Christ would never forgive what you do.
The animal snarls from the classroom exhibits, where the famished fingers from the caged beast children reach out for love. They find only the fittest survive. They devour the truth of hunger and hate. They feast on the rotten flesh of their weaker siblings. These phantasmic misfits, murdered by human hunger, fall back down from the sky and onto the multitudinous silos where the grapes of wrath are stored.
Where a fig and cluster, where a tree and vine offer secured shade and thirsty nutrition, these are leaves under which the softer lessons of life are not taught. Blackboards and white boards are the evolution of technology but the lessons are null set technological advances - the answers undefinable, the methods punitive, the reason lost only to authoritarian commandments - thoughts deposited before entry in the celestial vineyards.
Machines in the sky twirl their metal rotors to the sound of fictitious humanitarian assistance, built on budgets that are meant for civic destruction. The wars of centuries only inhabit self-certainties. The traditions of people based only on murderous triumph or tear-bursting famine. The war machines that save implemented only from boredom... when there's nothing to kill... when there's nothing to kill...
What should men do in their spare time? Put children in the zoo, lock women in their homes, put the hungry in the fields and tell them not to touch, not to take... promising, "There will not be enough." The mirage of necessity is a beacon not of fools, but a hologram for the fattened calfs. Tear down the screens, the projections, the falsified mandates, and eat those lie mongering veal steakmen.
Polite society is the oxymoron. This has been said time and time and time again... and certainly bears repeating. Like the grapes that grow every fall and the barrel-aged wine of maturity, this drunken mastery of the civilian's better senses is the hardest to manufacture. How to peddle fiction with the hungry mouths of babes who cry from their cribs next their parents' bed.
Someday the rains will not moisten the roots. Someday the ash will not fall. There will be nothing left to burn. Someday the blood will not drip from the hungry souls nor will the stank flesh of unfed mothers compost the field. Someday there will be nothing left to press, nothing left to squeeze, the scorched earth nature of man's worst inclinations, inclined to leave the fields dry, empty, without minerals, without mouisture, without salvation.
When the land is burned and the earth is singed what will you drink then? What will you eat then? Your own bellies distended from hunger, your common sense vicious like a starving tiger. There will be nothing left to grow and you will look across the field and all you will see is each other: wounded prey on which to feast, hoping for one last hateful gasp into the bloodletting you've insisted on perpetually cultivating.
