Not by ending the stories (they never end)
Or running out of similes (they never do)
Or growing tired of style or rhyme or some-such
Contrivance to keep one within the leaves --
No they are destroyed entire, their reason
For being exposed, built on lies that can't
Disguise their corruption any longer.
Oh how they served us back in the day,
Such wisdom given to hold in our hearts,
Of progress made against superstition,
How iconoclasts inherit the earth
And spread dogma like light to the dark burghs
Where being different is still a crime.
It thrilled us to see the black curtains torn,
To experience wars won vicariously;
It brought new flowerings with their whiz-bang
Trust in the consensus lie, the factual
Fantasy, how that made the story simple
But sophisticated, in the sense that
Being skeptical of hope is sophisticated.
This sufficed as the means of our coping
When there was Jesus, and all the Jesus
Wanna-be's and never-was's, the Stalins,
J P Morgans, the Louis Quatorzes,
When the powerful could be blamed
When no longer powerful, and the meek
Extolled when they are no more -- how carefully
The real power was excised from the story,
How skillfully the victims erased --
It was all to forget oneself --
But now there's
Nothing else, no mar on the tabula rasa
To signal a martyrs blood, for the show
Only starts when the audience sits down,
The figures move when the spotlights turn on,
Lines memorized, positions marked with tape,
And one must rely on the empathy of actors
To catapult the moral of the plot,
Which offers no lifeline
Now that we know
Its purpose was to coerce innocent blood
-- The entertainment just had to be good
Enough -- but now that we've put the stake through
The vampire's heart the stage is empty and grey,
The backlit lamp has died away, the stories
Are within -- formerly taken, now returned
With the rest of the universe you carry
In every cell.
As the light now expands
There's no more paper world to set aflame.
