dishonorable discharge your honor...

Guy Fawkes Day photo courtesy of Docklandsboy via Flickr

after the industrial revolution, the Earth has been held hostage

there was a new religion

and Nay-Nard was its name

we sang songs at Summer camp

about the inalienable right of greed

children were sent to these camps

to disguise the school year as something

that had a start and a beginning

we of course knew this to be false

we were children of the slow silent apocalypse

and war was our birthmark

the fighting seemed an endless dream

a cycle of almost daring yourself

that a brighter future was possible

but we knew better than to succumb

right away to any or all of this

every war came with a myriad of names

one for each of the conflicts that rose from the other

one generation jailed into the next

with ebbs and flows, nation states in throes

brought to their knees to please corporate captors

there was an ease with which the public sectors

could be bled of their fortunes

tribunals were newspapers

and they became a new form of cash and torture

and everywhere you went, ornery deacons

were sermonizing on TV in their best Atlas Shrugged

railing through every turn coated moment

like anyplace you went was a Sunday

at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park in London

they would say, in brilliant cadence

it is your fault that you are pauper bought and sold

that we were merely a market derivative that measured life

as an extractable commodity and we should be proud

the deacons would thunder to speak not of blame

but to raise forth our surrender as an art form

and wait for the trickle down manna

that will explain it all to you

heaven is only after death

hell is here while you are living

here’s to your compliance or banishment

so quit your complaining and start working  

to give your first born the tools

of patricide, matricide, fratricide,

sororicide and suicide

even in a broadcast the deacons

devise ways to speak lies

in a loving manner

to all our empty inside

I always try to tune the TV out

but these days they are mandatory to own

and ever present and always on

and some days I even want

to head out into the acid rain

just to see if cancer will come

before apathy completes me

I don’t stand by windows anymore

with my hands in prayer

cupping the silent gathers of wind

there are too many lights poisoning the dark

I wouldn’t know where hope lived anymore 

so that I could begin looking

for a better way to live

EJR ©