Microbes In The Archives

Create to live forever, so they say

Heedless of the mortal wounds of fads, trends, tastes

(And the certainty of offending tomorrow with your yesterday)

Words endure, pictures a thousand times more

Don't be dissuaded by unpopularity

Produce for its own reward;

Someday, somewhere, someone will get It.

And the frozen shards of You within

Will rouse and rise again

Like cryogenics without the runoff

Hail, the returned Creator,

Without the grotesqueries of life to mar their divine name!

But a bitter irony blocks the way:

You will never be immortalized

If your mummifiers are mortals

Intent on their own extinction.

And a lone, gnarled pine

Twisting sedately in millennia of morning breezes,

Will long outlive the fools who buried themselves

Without first learning to breathe.

Better create for amoeba instead!

The Sandbox

The desert breeds prophets, it seems.

For lack and desolation

Demand austerity and fatalism

Offering space for belief in return

Provided there is only one.

Henotheism is silent in its solitude

Talking to the One and Only

Becomes an internal debate

An endless war against Self.

A peace treaty demands witness

And companions cry for more for less

Divine laws are carved into sun-bleached rock

Unmalleable at birth, made to be broken

Or eroded until indistinct in interpretation

Like a mirage, simmering in the raging heat

Only to reveal a reflection of an empty bowl

When approached in hopeful anticipation.

Only the great Shadow and its castings

On the sterile earth

Under a blank sky

Waiting to die

And become fuel

For the Chosen

To strangle the air

And broil the land

(Why should the Sun have all the fun?)

Lift Hell from the holy books

And sear it into Life,

Where it ought to be.

Slow-roast it all, ash and concrete and sand

Spin this globe to a glassy eye

Its dark pupil fixed firmly on heaven

Its cornea reflecting weary faces from below

Its hard shell bearing no footsteps to follow

Just the etched sayings of the prophets,

Too loudly prophesying

To hear the here and now. 

Staring longingly at an imagined past

While the future shrivels in mute neglect

And what could have been

Becomes what was, before

You burned the Garden.

Carbon scattered and swept away,

Tracing its passage with elemental progeny

Burning bright silicon

Its eternal playlist looped to endless repeat:

History.

A Three-Line Refutation (Of Politics)

Don't like you.

Won't agree with you.

Not on your side.