The World We Live In

What sort of world do we live in--

When mother’s lose their limbs to systems that crush them;
When rape is sneered at and rapists uplifted because
"Poor boy, his future was so bright, he didn't know better
Now his life is over, his future ruined,” with nary a question

What of the survivor?
The violated and the ignored
What of the warriors that fight
An uphill battle against assembly lines,
The cold of metal pressed into their veins
Extracting that which should never be touched?

The soul
of our society
flies away in streams

What sort of world do we live in"

Where we have progressed so far yet learned so little,
Where justice and wealth go hand in hand, and instead
Wealth and prosperity like justice are holograms held up
Above the heads of the people, the Forms we never touch.

What of the self-made?
What of the pride they feel
For riches accumulated by the selfish
Families that spawn them and leave little
In their wake but destruction of the earth, lips
Stained red with wine and blood, untouchables everywhere,

Nothing to bar them or their greed, and all of this
False pride; the organic harps won’t sing anymore,
The savior never comes, too drunk on his own bravado
Too proud of nuking imaginary enemies across the sea
And desert sands"the world will soon join to form
A wasteland, and no one will listen to the song
The martyr sings, the cries of Cassandra calling
To the deaf eagles above that never swoop

Will never stoop to save the weak
And strong made weak alike.

That is the world we live in,
One where hope fades
Behind tirades of fear
And pleasure cloaking
Anesthesia to take away
Our brains.

These words may at once offend
And be drowned out among all the rest
For I am not the only one that hates what
We’re becoming, that sees short catchy phrases
As honey meant to cover the rancid cover of the lies
We’re being fed, distractions, ignorance and hope misled

And everything we read that we can’t tag or save
Inevitably gets forgotten in the milieu of the news
From the next day, and always something more shocking
Unexpected, lacking sense except the Straw Men that we build
To knock down in hopes of constructing our own common sense.

Let us not forget history, or else history, it will haunt us,
For history will never forget us, unless we write a new one
But only after we dispel and illuminate the lies of this world
Only then can we hope for a new one, when the poet
Lifts again the pen of Social Justice and the activist
Does more than idly sips a Starbucks latte at a computer
Unable to do more than dream of something better;

When architecture becomes more than a futile pursuit skyward
But builds something strong to the roots that no wind
Could ever knock down, no Empire uproot and imitate,
When we find more pleasure in growth than explosions--

Then, and beyond my humble imagination, the crude words I can pen,
Will the world we live in become the world that also lives within,
A world that all can thrive in, a world beyond sin,
A world of women and men and all that lies within.