( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Prisms on ashes. She stepped over the broken reflection like a living thing. It was familiar act, she had stepped over moonbeams and shadows long before this.
It was surprise to run into Charlie. She remembered how he had thought the Tea-Party was a good thing, “They want to restore the Constitution. Forget the one or two crazies in the front, the movement is good!” He had been sure Obama killed National Prayer day, then went to a Mosque to pray the same day, and that the recession started because of Pelosi not Bush. He claimed the Democrats had been in charge the whole time Bush was in Power, and that while Bush was a dolt, it wasn’t his fault. No amount of convincing could prove otherwise back then. So many bought it. He was a good man with his own demons.
She didn’t mention it. He looked pretty rough. She had to go to work, and didn’t want to be late, the gas station line had taken too much time.
The apocalypse hadn’t come as a wolf, it was just another starving mongrel scrounging and making do. Gradual. Boring. Work called as always.
The curve by Winans Lake made her grin. Everyone always rolled their eyes at her parable about the morning mist.
Just look at them rising, striving, jumping yearning in little peaked groups to be free of the trap of the pond. They want to travel the skies. They want to join the Rivers, fly in the skies with the cloud, flow to the Ocean, see the World… they hear the stories of the old ones, and it is not enough. They want desperately to be free. Ten billion million molecules of water, and they are the ones to reach for the sky! From the ripples they yell, don’t do it, the unknown is suicide, it could be much worse… look at those fools leaving this, our Garden of Eden on some fools errand that will surely lead to ruin. Yet every time she felt kindred and pride for those who broke free. This one would know the unknowns.
She couldn’t see the mist without hearing the stories, wondering what made one molecule stay, and the other look to be reaching desperately for the morning light. It was her art, and her insanity, to feel the world around her like extensions of her skin. How could you be separate from anything, when to the ancient stars you were but a molecule of rising mist? How could you be important when the Redwoods you would never get to sit under began when Algebra was created?
Humans are laughable fools.
There was no chipping the people, no riots, no…well anything she predicted.
Her refuge was that guitars still sounded like God, and her voice recovered from cigarettes. It was only a matter of longer hours, doing without things, scaling way back.
But there are still ashes, ashes everywhere… and prisms of light on broken glass. So much is empty, broken now; yet everyone just moves on. She tries not to think too hard about what could have been. Yeah, its reeks and wrecks, and haves and have nots… but everyone seems to have adjusted. And almost everything is the same.
But no one speaks about the obvious.
We had a chance, in the beginning.
She dreams, still about rising with the mist, getting free, and thinks about the people she knew who thought somehow, some way, could band together and make a difference. In the end, they all were just like her… or more like that part of her than she could admit. In the end, they all disappeared to their own shit, their own jobs, surviving the slow boil.
Nothing happened.
Life just got harder.
The rich got richer, and we all made do.
But, there it is
You see, it’s all clear
You were meant to be here from the beginning
History is long, we are short. I guess this is just our time.
That’s how we have always survived, this pathetic species… by living in our times, and telling the stories.
It doesn’t matter at all
You see, it’s all clear
You were meant to be here from the beginning
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blazing in the palm of our hands.
We, the people who now turn trash into treasure for the corporations, to survive from paycheck to paycheck, wait for you.
We are still here. Waiting, to help. To save. All you have to do is say “Let’s do it”.
I trip across a string of words that make me regret I gave up stringing them together so long ago.
This is one of those times.
I barely remember some of the words now, it was almost 20 years ago. “The Years of Breaking Glass”. Back in my songwriting days my objective was to write words that worked both literally and metaphorically. It was a song of the near future, written yesterday about tomorrow, today. And so much broken glass there indeed has been, both the literal physical broken glass of OKC and 9-11 and Shock and Awe, and the metaphoircal kind to, the shattered illusions, e.g. America now the nation that openly tortures, and the open torturers walk away scot-free to prestigious academic posts and rich corporate directorships, and the breaking of looking glasses, no one willing to look in the mirror for the hows and whys of what is happening, and it is that last broken glass that ensures the prolongation of this national spiritual and moral collapse.