"We call it progress son..."

Remember who went before?
Implacable swarm,
emptying a thousand prisons,
asylum stench in the breeze?

Strange beasts and walls,
gnawing tooth on undraped bone,
unknown tongues hollow and chittering,
rolley polley pyramids before the gates of silent cities.

Saw tooth tide ripping in from beyond the wastelands,
sweeping across all that is sacred,
liberating the holy from those to whom it was given,
red calves for the beginning of the end.

Cross the firmament,
their destiny manifest,
booted heal and blood of the lamb,
rape and razing of Eden.

Of gifts from the new world,
corn, potatoes, coffee and democracy.
In return, of the old world,
small pox, sin, syphilis and God.

Loadstone of progress,
drawing us toward some inevitable,
unknown and terrible,
marvelous and profane.

Minor misunderstanding,
ancient tactics and modern weapons,
sweeping the last vestige of honor,
neath the blanket of unbridled ambition.

Again the swarm,
lockstep and jackbooted.
Testament to purest efficiency,
sanitary detached metallic clicks.

In darkness cried, "Never again!!!",
eyes averted, ears muffled against screams,
bonfires beneath the canopy.
Landmarks in another green hell.

Demented mantra, "the needs of the many",
LSD in water mains,
draw the curtain Jimmy, save your classmates,
volunteer or be volunteered.

Facedown in mud,
awakened a normal day,
took a corn knife to four million neighbors,
bloated and corpulent in the noonday sun.

Again it takes shape
birthing a million eyes and a million ears,
censoring, stifling, twisting and restricting,
caging the lucky free to protect them from themselves.

With the fading light we see smokestacks on the horizon,
dogs, concertina wire, gun towers and sirens.
Incinerators churning out effluvial midnight,
obscuring the dawn of our great potential.



The man said, "History doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes."