Saturday, January 9, 2021

Darkness Before the Finale

His kind must never rise again,
Said the vanquisher to those
Bent on revenge.

The king, whipped bloody and chained,
Gagged, is on display, called a tyrant
For ending the wars, helping the poor,
Giving tithes back to his subjects,
As if their example will cow us,

But the martyr will always make us rise
Into ourselves
To find the power of outrage
In our backed corners,
For what we see, at last, is us,
Turning on that spit, without the benefit
Of mercy or of law.

We know that being free
Does not give us the right to speak.
It simply means we’re permitted to know
Where knowledge ends
And deception begins.

And we see how the words are grafted
From the guilt of his accusers
And pinned on him,
But with no release, no glee,
Instead a mortal terror
That they’ve been caught
Serving evil.

It is this, their clutch at fear,
Where we can see their plea
For forgiveness, that we recognize
Not being free, even with that seems
Unlimited power. All is hopeless,
Others.

The war frequencies of web, radio, TV
Have gone from signal to noise.
The daily entertrainment
Has stopped at an unmarked station.
And every sleeper now must choose.

Will they wake to the world where the heroes
Are dead, the plotlines aren’t actual,
And the evil done in their names, with their approval,
Must be absolved? And will they know
They cannot save the others,
For they are too far down the river now
To return to where the streams diverged?

Or will they choose the cruel familiar tropes,
To hold to what they think is real, what they feel
Makes them real? And is the urge too strong
To get along, not be alone, feel secure
They'll throw themselves, their very souls,
Into the void, to sacrifice their lives
To prove the world was meaningless?