Breaking Out The Box

by David SmartKnight, UK

Hypnotised.
 
Mesmerised,
Desensitised to the sickening smell of rain-forest logs burning
and human sparks blurring in a blazing dance of long knives, televised and globalised
by mechanised computerised cogs
turning wheels
whirring,
the machines advance.
 
The pinnacle of human achievement.
 
Thousands of generations of ancestral relations spanning the nations of man-made construction
We witness the final hours of these empires hell-bent on empirical destruction.
 
Warfare today is neither chemical, nor nuclear,
youth no longer cannon-fodder in the killing fields of old.
Our fate is willing sealed and our souls willing sold at the merest whiff
of a fistful of gold.
 
Superpowers dissolved to evolved supermarkets,
Whilst common folks cower, knowing they are the targets.
If you have no land you have no say
for land is wealth and at the end of the day it’s an economic war,
and the bubble’s fit to burst:
work, spend, accumulate
work, spend and spend some more
and when the work ends, and it’s too late,
material wealth will leave you poor,
for you’re now retired,
you’re sixty four wondering “what on earth was it all for?”
Now that your youth is spent from keeping pace with the rest,
in that seductive quest to line the nest
and you’ve woken to find that you are past your best,
and where did all your energy go?
 
Did you never stand back and watch the years flow?
or were you too involved keeping afloat in the torrent
to witness your life being swept away in the current?
 
Meantime
More and more, disillusion is rife
As growing numbers escape that rat-life emerging bruised and battered
yet that hardly matters when the illusion is shattered
And life is seen as it truly is:
Perfectly woven
of our joys and our fears.