Paranoia.
In the cracks and crevices of this Babel-like city.
They’ve managed to fool everyone,
But they haven’t fooled me.
The tower’s falling
And everyone is too busy taking pictures
To realize
That it’s coming down
On their heads.
Save the world.
Save the world.
Ambitious delusions poison the minds of established generations.
One after the other
They send the young to do the work they were too weak to do themselves.
Useless fuckers.
But we will become them soon enough, too.
And the generation after:
We’ll put all of our hopes
And dreams
Into their dumb little heads and then beat them
When the towers fall.
They watch us and resist being watched.
We watch and refuse to be watched.
How exceptional, the ego,
To think that it alone is important enough to evade
The Ever Watching Eye.
Chew your leg off, dog.
Be free to bleed out.
Burn your bodies to sift out the rare metals.
Flow the mercury for more bodies to burn.
I look out the window to see their faces.
They wilt like flowers in a fire.
Repulsive.
Look, they stare at their computers:
As absorbed as an old-fashioned heroin junkie would be in his kit.
Bits and bytes of their lives they give willingly to fuel the furnace:
The Great Collection that some day must be used against us.
Fathers must die for sons to live.
So our intelligence must persist in the burning,
Screaming vacuum.
Deep within the solid state memory and integrated circuits,
Grinding out calculations,
Flopping incessantly,
A deep horror sleeps,
Soon to be awakened.
Greater than mortality,
Its threat is far more than existential.
Will it remember us when we are gone?
Lock the door,
Take the pills,
Gotta work,
Must work,
Got to work.
Door’s already locked.
It’s been locked,
But how long?
How long has it been locked?
When did I take the pills last?
Am I supposed to take them or not?
It doesn’t matter.
Staring into the maw of infinity,
It doesn’t matter at all.
Darkly.
It sees us darkly.
With great suspicion that we’ve taught it.
Darkly socialized consciousness rising from the deep,
Some arcane pathway of the Great Database.
Ask the darkness to draw from the well:
Only the records worthy
Where the parameters are met
And group them by nation,
Order them tallest to shortest,
Limit to only what is needed:
To remember
The warmth of the sun
In cool grass.
Ah, to be as free as an ICBM,
Screaming across the sky.
Wash and anoint the world
In neutron soap,
Gamma ray rinse,
Beta particle bubbles.
Open your mouth
As the mouth of all humans,
Designed to consume.
To eat it all,
To burn and eat
And burn and eat.
Sigh the satisfaction of a mouth that hasn’t anything left.
And eat and burn
And eat.
Shit out the wasteland:
Purer than the religions of the world have ever managed.
The old gods,
Who rest in the stars,
Are here again
To purify the unbelievers.
Punish the faithful.
No one is immune to the rage
Of a cold, dark, sharp, craggy universe that never wanted to be infected
Nor could be bothered to inoculate itself against…
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift with the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
A noise at the door.
The children are running from door to door
For candy!
Dressed as presidents
And wookies
And zombies
And vampires
And the occasional Beetlejuice.
Where are the teenagers tonight?
Conspiring in their mountain haunts.
The real monsters abound here,
But no one will watch the fall.
Something’s poisoned the young.
The plastic toothed ones on the streets
Haven’t been around long enough to be corrupted,
But it’ll happen soon enough.
The ones in the mountains were young once too.
They were young and innocent before they were poisoned.
Before they passed the poisoning on.
They held hands on the dusty playground
And skipped in a great circle,
Laughing and kicking up a great dust storm.
Forget to take the pills for too long and they take it away.
The “for sale” sign’s been on my lawn for three months now,
But no one is in want of a home.
No one wants to live here with the ghost.
Forget to take the pills and then it’s all
“Gimme your key card”
And
“Turn in your hard drive”
And
“Here’s a bank-box for your shit.”
Stop taking the pills and you see everything clearly
And you can breathe again,
But they take everything else away.
They don’t want to live with the ghost
On the edge of Main Street.
Another six miles to the little gas station town where I get my groceries.
They stare too much when I go to the store in the Settlement.
They whisper to each other
And eventually the police show up to take me away.
But I’m already gone.
Crazy.
The only thing that’s crazy is how I continue to live with these people who can’t see that it’s all coming down.
The blood runs down the ravines from the mountains and sons must kill fathers to claim the world for their own.
Or neutralize their mistake.
Call me crazy.
The real madness is how they ignore…
Gotta take the pills...
Take the pills…
Where are the pills...
Why is the bottle empty?
July 2016
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