We suspected it different, the incoming century. The 21st turn was to embody our vision, change our lives and the course of history. Yet twenty one months saw it step unsteady, its lungs aching, breath short. From beneath burnt ash we saw hope in unity, in love for our neighbor. But with a frown and a sigh the bystander's life went on.
And so again it has arrived. The time of black hearts, the time of monetary stipends stapled to our spines. We have become snail paced, caring enough to not do anything. Years have passed and, just as expected, the lessons were learned and lost, proving again that history is doomed to repetition. Today we crash unprepared into a terrifying abyss of uncertainty. We wield a cold scepter and pray for protection from a misguided sense of spirituality. We spew our phrases of intolerance and greed while moaning upon a bed of commercialized tragedy.
Our calamity of dreams has long been shattered, yet still we claw at the illusions of a world we had hoped to build. There are no thoughts of tomorrow for the victims of our senseless fight, just misunderstood questions with fabricated answers, excuses, camouflaged atrocities. The seemingly eternal struggle endures, the quest to keep the hooded stranger away from our door. Visions of war, disease, starvation, hatred, division, apathy, misunderstanding. And a twisted corpse of our sense of humanity.
Yes, humanity. Humanity has lost, stuck inside the dirge of machinery, bastardized in a fleeting meditation where internal growth is frozen, shivering like a dove with clipped wings. World, oh world that contains all things, from enemy warriors to angels dressed in archetypal attire, teach us to behold the lowest branch of heaven so that we may sip from the wine of change. Let us sing a song of impermanence, for the avalanche of mothers weeping behind the clouds of dead flowers, for the broken flood of history that washes ghost soldiers with ambivalent hands, for the ache of millions buried beneath the blistering sands of disease and poverty, for the treachery of the executioner with his political sky of hurricaned greed, for the agony of the seraphim, for the atrocious sciences of murder and debauchery, for burning mosques and kingdoms of despair, for the sorrowful soliloquy of 2,000 poets, 2,000 historians, their fingers and souls staining their scrolls with society's blood and anguish.
We limp with burnt feet upon the red coals we have placed upon the road before us, watching buildings burn, turn molten, and fall, watching the heartbreak of mothers left in the wake of their children’s destruction, watching nations clash and streets run red, watching skin melt into cages of ribs, watching machetes fall, watching bullets tear flesh from the innocent, watching the destruction we've created, not caring to do anything. For so long this cauldron has smoldered, and the inevitable eruption of flame has burst forth, uttering phrases of apocalyptic possibilities. And if we cast our half-veiled eyes toward the nearest horizon, we see not gentle murals of color, but instead bear witness to an absurdity inherited from accepted miscalculations, and ignorance breeding hate.
While the sage warned us that our magic was obscured, while the humpback moaned beneath salty waters of pollution, we moved in callus formations, hell bent to obliterate the majestic beauty before us. And sometimes it all becomes too much knowing that infants are born into death because they find their mother's breasts milkless, ravaged by a hunger that is economically inherited and easily solved.
As I sit here this evening, scribbling down the words of my dark and diminishing globe, I can't help but wonder why it is that this conflict between the beauty of the human spirit and the execution of human actions has been allowed to take place. We must turn from this page and redeem the essence of the purest souls, an essences that has been swept under a frayed rug of conformity. It observes the cruel silence that envelopes the mind and finds itself mourning the suppression of the beauty we all inherit.
So to you who have come to assassinate civilizations, to you whose fingerprints of darkness and plague provide the irrepressible evidence of a humanity gone mad, to you I sing a song of impermanence. For the world I pray. I pray that the Celestial Gardener can pry apart the sightless eyes and that we can rectify our primitive and exterminating principles of accepted ignorance and blind compliance.
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