Notes from a Voluntary Holocaust

Ah, the recall of fall ivy:
Hofstadter, Gibbons, Toynbee,
The warnings for posterity

From the picked-clean bones of people
Whose pasts have not aged well,
Their inexplicable docility.

And here we are now, reason unwound
For the masses on the ground
In the petri-dish of fear drowned
To divine skepticism, free choice,
Any raising of a voice
Against the trick that left them spellbound

And panicked, in pleas for relief
Through whatever motifs
Kept alive their beliefs
That they are right, in what they were told
When their souls were borrowed and sold,
Robbed of a rationale for grief,

So intent on that suicide shot
No matter what facts or what thought
They are shown, for they’re caught
In the nets coursing their veins,
Replacement parts for their brains
As each organ fails clot by clot.

They can’t question their extermination,
They war for a vaccine nation
On pariahs before condemnation,
Anything to give them relief,
Even death, the ultimate thief,
What is left at the end of the ration.

Will there be Gibbons, Hofstadter, Toynbee?
Any plum ruins left of their theories?
Or will they be disgraced too easily
As cogs in the great chain of being
That led to this great unfreeing,
As if no one present could see?

The colleges are emptied out now,
The old play of mind not allowed,
To sterilize the high-browed
Required now, to beat at the past 
Without reason or decency at last,
Every last hold-out cowed.

But a wild viral strain will survive
With the reckoning drive
Of the outlawed to revive
Their cause with the now-harmless dead,
And the light air will go to their head;
This curse to preserve: being alive.