When there is nothing left
When the culture of bullets,
And bombs,
And blood,
And Jordans
And McDonald's,
And distraction,
And unconsciousness,
And disconnectedness through connectedness
Has been blown up
When your body has been separated in two,
Not by the burning bullet-shells of some foreign-invader
wielding a gun or machete,
But by the overhead blast of drones dropping the profits of big business
right on our own fucking heads,
When shrapnel has ripped the bones from the legs of your favorite pet,
And he lays whimpering in a cracked pool of red,
lifeless, and broken in your own backyard grass,
under a tree you've known all your life
When your eyes have been stained with gore,
When your neighbors have fled,
When your family has been torn apart,
Your best friend's family torn apart
and the best friend
murdered,
When the advertisements stop,
When the price of gas has finally met the physical limitations of the ceiling,
When the people become focused on fear,
Focused on warfare,
Focused on the kill,
Focused on winning,
Focused on escaping,
and finding food,
Focused on being together
For survival
Only then will we look at the scared children
And ask
Why?
Where has the docile clumsy smile of a child gone?
Why did we begin the infanticide
that brought us to scrape our fingernails at the brick walls of the new millennium?
How will we evade the will of the harbingers when there are no real stairs to climb out of the grey-
The cement entrapment?
Why did we fill in the blank slate with endless videos of cute,
of pranks,
of fights,
of unfactual facts,
of TV shows,
and clips of hope-not?
Why did we break our backs raising the gluton atop the column?
How did we not see the value in the baby?
Whose only golden desire is to learn, and to ask the question "why?"
(The question why itself?)
When the air smells only of sulfur, and tastes only of turned up soil
when it is warm to the touch,
Unbreathable from burning suburbs and blackened Hondas,
When target, and walmart and sam's club and k-mart and stop&shop are the only shelter from hellfire,
When it stops becoming the shelter from this present moment's hellfire,
That is when we will know
The Doom of Truth
And that the complacency in the climb
Is what brought us to the fall,
Only to lay with the dead.
The earth and trees and water and rocks will recover,
And maybe even humanity
But not the Grade-School Graduates in the early years of Two-thousand-and-something
Who will be remembered as the ash imprint,
The lesson
The wish
The goal
The hope.
We are all here for a purpose.
