To Fight or Not To Fight

...that is the question.

Like a time-lapsed scene in a movie, I stand at the corner

Of Broadway and 7^th Avenue

While lights dash and drag behind me at a thousand frames per second.

The concrete jungle consumes my flesh pouring cement into my veins.

What sort of escape be this?

From the white picket fences and monopoly pieces

That fit just so, a blurb called a burb hidden under the currents

Of our futures,

 Of my future,

Of my future children’s future.

 

And at what point on the gravel road, laid by chained hands before mine,

Does this blurb submerge with the fervor of the times

To transform this urban sprawl and cross a crooked line to become

No more than a bourgeois crime fit for a king but served to the blind.

How do you escape the escape?

How do you pass from being pacified into occupied

Into satisfied.

What a tragedy and a blessing to look through crystal eyes,

To recognize that what you see is merely a prism of light,

Of refracting lies that are polished so brightly

That they blind our march into demise,

Ever so slightly spicing the pie

With arsenic,

And glory,

And Bligh.

 

So I’m left yielding a double-edged sword

That seems to leave me obsolete,

By my own accord either choice will afford

Both achievement and defeat.

Do I retract from the people’s sleep

To dream an artist’s slumber,

Alone but warm in natures home

Still poisoned by the wonder

Of what I could have done had I

Stayed and fought the being blunder.

 

Or do I vow to scourge the sandman

And stir the sleeping dogs,

To wake them from sedated states-

Perhaps it won’t be long

Before a catalyst erupts

And sings the secret song

That is enough to corrupt

All the rights made wrong.

Perhaps my fingers are the ones

To pluck those weary strings

And without me, we’ll all be

Bystanders in the fog.

Then again why should I waste

The only life I’ve got

To fight a war that I’m not sure

Is ever really fought

Because in my mind

What they define as

The have’s and the have not’s

Is a crime that steals space-time

And corrodes the human thought.

To have a shrine of the sublime

Is never what they’ve sought

And long after I’m gone from here

That too will have been bought.

Author's Note

the rhyming scheme kind of took the form of a downward spiral, just like my mind-voice does whenever i contemplate this.

Reviews

[joshua deathdealer]

I love the depth in this write, awesome work.

[Thomas Fitzgerald]

Spiraling yes, but inequivalent and relaxed, very well written, good read

[Ed Hart]

i know it looks like it, but the world is not out of balance, nor does it need correcting

[Clay Feet]

Nothing near obsolete here.
You are as timely as the universe
Close to heaven viewed from dirt

The depth of your reach
Nearly finds my feeble mind
Osmosis fills some blanks

Your waste of time
Takes much of mine
Over and over I find

Excellence!