Ashes and Glass

12 Saturday Jul 2025

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Once we revered fire, our faithful friend,
A spark to warm, a beacon through the night—
Now flames descend, and cities meet their end,
Our love for fire consumed in blinding light.

Steel towers shudder, glass melts into bone,
The sky is bruised by thunder’s iron psalm.
We built our sanctuaries, sins to atone,
But faithless walls dissolved before the storm.

A president’s hand shakes, clutching the code,
His prayers dissolve in radioactive rain.
The righteous and the ragged share the road,
All equal now in hunger, loss, and pain.

The corn stood burning in the Kansas fields,
Where missiles rose like prayers to vengeful gods,
And all our science, all our mighty shields
Became the very lightning-bearing rods.

The wheel of fortune turned its final round,
July’s sun scorched as winter’s shadow fell,
And in the cinders, some survivors found
That hope still walked from fires none could quell.

A lone soul drifts through ruins, swathed in ash,
Guarding embers against the bitter night.
She dreams of dawn beyond the poison’s flash—
Hope kindles on, defying blight’s cold bite.

Yet from the silence, laughter cracks the gloom—
A jest of fate, as weeds reclaim man’s throne.
The architects of progress meet their doom,
While children play with relics of rubble and bone.

And so we sift the ruins for a sign—
A clock that ticks, a memory out of place.
As we implore answers from a vacant sky,
Fate stares back from a mirror’s fractured face.

March of the Willfully Blind

11 Friday Jul 2025

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Beneath their banners, garish and bold, they march in ordered lines,
Their shepherds stumble—falsehoods sold as wisdom’s grand designs.
One goat, misled, will break away and shun the hand once known—
Yet humans, trained to avert their gaze, make every lie their own.

The flock is praised for blind loyalty, for silence tightly kept,
While questions—branded mutiny—are banished, swiftly swept.
Each blunder, crowned as “lesson learned,” ascends to sacred law,
Every warning, once discerned, is drowned out by rapt applause.

The wolves wear suits and speak in codes, their errors redefined,
While those who see the twisted roads are labeled as maligned.
The herd applauds the empty speech, the slogans, and the show,
For comfort lies in what they preach, not in the truths we know.

The animals, with wiser hearts, refuse a second fall,
But humans, bound to scripted parts, will heed the tyrant’s call.
Obedience, a velvet chain, is fastened to the mind,
And those who fight to break the links are left to lead the blind.

The shepherd’s staff is passed along, from fool to greater fool,
And every time the path goes wrong, they praise the broken rule.
The goats would turn and walk away, but people form a line,
To follow where the lost ones stray, dismissing every danger sign.

So let us write with tongues of fire, and let our verses sting,
Expose the lies that men admire, the puppets on a string.
For in the mirror, if we dare, the stark truth will appear:
The emperor stands naked now—his folly plain and clear.

Let language be our barricade, our protest and our plea,
Against the games of masquerade, the cult of apathy.
For only those who break the spell, and question what they’re shown,
Can lift the veil the world has sewn, and see with eyes their own.

A Knot of Plenty

10 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Mental Health

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In the kingdom of surplus, milk and honey drown the land,
Yet children curl in backseats, mothers bargain with the night;
Towers of opulence glitter, unmoved by an outstretched hand,
As millions fade into silence, erased by prosperity’s might.

A father barters hope for the graveyard shift,
His children’s laughter mortgaged for an hour’s sleep;
Triumph is clinging to one child as dreams drift—
Signed in silence, a contract only poverty keeps.

We marvel at gadgets, screen-lit faces aglow,
Cell phones in every palm, but futures already gone;
The blue shimmer of progress, a comfort so shallow,
While rent devours bread, and the darkness drags on.

Landlords reap double where the desperate sleep,
Slumlords flourish as justice averts its gaze;
A lease inked in hardship, a promise they never keep,
Eviction’s cold verdict, the market’s cruel praise.

At dawn in Appalachia, a girl hugs her knees for heat,
Her breath ghosts the air, lips cracked and turning blue;
She knots a fraying shoelace, no crumbs left to eat,
And dreams of a warm home, a world she never knew.

Pleas for fair treatment drowned in the factory’s roar;
Unions dismantled, wages vanish in thin air;
We bankroll the giants, trembling at their door,
And cheer the same systems grinding us into despair.

The poor pay more for everything they need—
A fee for their hunger, a toll for their pain;
Bankers and lenders in a carnival of greed,
Siphon hope from the many, enriching their reign.

Shame is a currency, minted by the state,
A welfare office, a cold bureaucrat’s glare;
The indigent made invisible, erased by debate,
Cast out from all nations, unwelcomed everywhere.

Liberty’s pulse flickers in the chill of profit’s chain,
Justice auctions virtue to the highest cutthroat bid;
The privileged weld their ramparts from dividends and disdain,
And bury the poor’s last gasp beneath progress’s gilded lid.

And so, in this empire of abundance and want,
We wonder at poverty’s stubborn, knotted root—
Not a flaw, but a feature, a shadow that haunts:
Some throats choked silent, so others can feast on fruit.

Banquet of Shadows

09 Wednesday Jul 2025

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They raised their spires on self-serving lies,
Stole rivers and felled forests for their gain.
Each stone entombed the silence of what dies,
While restless roots below prepared to reclaim.

I drifted through the avenues of ash and dust,
Where shadows gathered in the cracks of time.
Bronze faces wept beneath a burnished crust,
And distant chimes confessed the city’s crime.

They wrote their stories in the blood of kings,
Convinced their iron edicts would never bend.
Yet rot endures, and darkness softly clings
To every golden era’s bitter end.

I learned to smile beneath a falling sky,
To raise a glass where empires fade to dust.
We danced on graves, our laughter cracked and wry,
As man’s folly decayed to regret and rust.

A thousand ghostly voices whisper in night’s gust—
Confessions, sins, and secrets no daylight could unfold.
We trade our innocence and lives for brittle trust,
And find the future tarnished, spent, and cold.

Fires flicker in forsaken halls,
Where paintings fade to shadows on the wall.
The banquet’s over; velvet silence falls—
A requiem for dreams too faint to recall.

But in the mirror, shadows twist and grin,
Reminding me the fault was always mine.
We built these walls to cage the dark within,
And crowned it progress—an elegant decline.

So let the ruins sing their lullaby,
A dirge for all the empires we became.
We sift through ashes, searching for why—
And find our shadows reveling in the flame.

Scorched Aperture

08 Tuesday Jul 2025

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Beneath a wilting elder’s shade I sit,
Camera in hand, I watch the flowers sigh.
The sun, once gentle, now hell’s furnace lit
With fossil-fueled laughter, scorching the sky.

A butterfly—its wings stained-glass despair—
Hovers, bewildered, on a leaf half-charred.
I frame the moment, knowing none will care;
No photograph redeems a world so scarred.

They gather, suit-clad, in their air-cooled halls,
Debating if Earth’s fever is truly dire.
Outside, the grass withers, the sparrow calls,
While truth and glaciers quietly expire.

I click, I sweat, I watch the garden plead,
While those in power cast shades of doubt.
The irony: we water roots of greed
With flames we fan, yet never put out.

We trade the tree of life for fleeting gain,
Composing elegies as profits call.
Each year engraved with ghosts we can’t reclaim,
We archive beauty, framing our own downfall.

Elegy for the Last Epoch

07 Monday Jul 2025

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The final fires flicker on the bones
Of cities consumed by the creeping mold.
Silent skyscrapers, stripped of flesh and phones,
Stand sentinels to stories left untold.

Forests reclaim the fractured, fallen roads,
Roots writhing through the relics of regret.
No hands remain to hoard or bear the loads—
The debt of hubris nature won’t forget.

Irony’s icy laughter licks the land,
For every engine’s cough ebbs away.
Blueprints and banners, buried in the sand,
Are artifacts for no tongue left to say.

Pale plastic petals drift in poisoned streams,
A mockery of where gardens once bloomed.
The sun sets softly on abandoned dreams,
Casting long shadows over hopes entombed.

No children chase silhouettes in the street;
Only echoes of mankind’s hope or hate.
Extinction’s elegy is cold, complete—
A planet draped in dusk, resigned to fate.

Yet in the rubble, stubborn shoots ascend,
Green tendrils threading through the ashen shade.
A sly, frail smile—life’s answer to the end—
Flourishing boldly where despair was made.

Now, only heat and gale inscribe the tale,
Their fury carved in shifting sand and waves.
The world, unburdened, breathes a barren exhale—
Freed from the species it once sheltered and saved.

Empire of Ghosts

06 Sunday Jul 2025

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We mapped the stars with trembling, ink-stained hands,
Convinced the earth would bow beneath our claim.
We carved our names on granite and drifting sands,
And raised proud cities, certain of their fame.

We crowned ourselves the autocrats of the age,
Declared all life our servant and our stage.
We subdued the rivers, caged the restless breeze,
And turned wild forests into memories.

Yet every triumph bore a hidden cost—
The birchwoods gone, the ancient rivers lost.
Now, in the ruins, silent willows weep
For worlds we vanquished—ours alone to keep,
Blind to the graves we sowed beneath our feet.

Galaxies in Dust

05 Saturday Jul 2025

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Upon the table’s quiet face,
A universe spun from past days,
Each speck a faded dream that stays,
A whisper left where sunlight plays.

Unseen, it slowly drifts and lands,
A gentle shroud on wood and glass,
Soft fingerprints from ghostly hands,
A chronicle we let amass.

It gathers where our fingers slide,
In corners where our gazes pause,
A ledger of what Time divides—
Dust scripting echoes of what was.

A galaxy in muted gray,
Each speck a star, each coat of time;
We sweep it out, but it will stay—
A cycle woven in dust and rhyme.

It wraps an heirloom’s fragile rim,
A photograph, a wedding ring,
A record kept when light grows dim,
Of every ordinary thing.

Yet in this ash, the cosmos hides—
The bones of stars, the breath of kin,
The universe that time divides
Returns to rest, and starts again.

A shroud for kings, a bed for seeds,
The weightless anchor of our days,
It holds the script of all our deeds,
Then lifts them on the sun’s pale rays.

So let it lie, this quiet veil,
A paradox, both grave and birth;
The dust we curse, the dust we hail—
The smallest weight that shapes the Earth.

Manifest Blindness

04 Friday Jul 2025

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We fancy ourselves the world’s anointed architects,
Drafting dominion on a self-righteous scroll—
The earth, pliant clay shaped by hands that count defects,
All else, imperfect, needing our control.

This tale: that life was made for human hands,
That mountains, rivers, wolves, and skies exist
As mere tools to serve our vast, expanding plans—
We crown ourselves creation’s ultimate alchemist;
Heirs ordained to conquer, own, command,
On thrones of myth we cannot resist.

But who decreed this manifest design?
What god inscribed dominion in our bones?
We chase salvation’s ever-fading sign,
While trampling covenants the earth once owned:
The law that bound the fox, the tree, the bee—
To live in kinship, never to rule alone.

Our zeal to “fix” the world we’ve torn apart
Reveals the wound we cannot name aloud:
The Taker’s myth still beating in the human heart—
That nature’s chaos, unbound and proud,
Awaits human order to shape human art,
To bind the wild and force the world to bow.

We seek the cure in engines, walls, and scheming,
In grids of steel where wilderness once flowed,
Yet miss the truth inside the leopard’s eyes gleaming—
No single heart commands the gifts the earth bestowed.
The world needs no redeemer’s frantic screaming—
In fact, it needs the weight of our illusions slowed.

The cage we built for “beasts” now locks us in:
Its bars are myths of human destiny and right.
True hope stirs when we cast off the sin
Of separation, and see wisely with insight
That earth was never something we could win,
But true kinship waits in earth’s returning light.

To shed mankind’s blindfold is to start:
To hear the wind not as a foe to tame,
But as a breath from the same living art
That shaped the wolf, the soil, the comet’s flame.
The world asks not for rescuers, but for the heart
That takes its place as kin, and makes no claim.

We sought to script the world, but the ink runs dry—
Our stories fade where skeletal trees meet the sky.
Silence gathers in the questions left to die,
A fate we seem determined never to outrun.
Creation waits, indifferent to our final cry—
Its law: extinction comes for those who believe they’ve won.

Toasting Our Disease

03 Thursday Jul 2025

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He turned his gaze to the white expanse above,
Where silence pressed—a spectral shroud, unkind and cold.
The world below—a memory he once called love—
Now flickers, ghostly, in the stories he’s retold.

A fluorescent hum vibrates through sterile air,
His thoughts, like melting glaciers, drift and fracture, unseen.
The atmosphere is heavy with futures stripped bare,
A stillness where even hope forgets to dream.

Pale sunlight pools across the featureless ceiling,
Imagination’s wings lie broken at the bone.
Once, he soared high—the sky a place for dreaming—
Now, gravity’s verdict: he plummets, overthrown.

Time splinters—fractured moments vanish into tomorrow;
The future drifts, unmoored, on tides of dread and fear.
He trades his hope for comfort, veils the ache of his sorrow,
Ignoring every sign the end is near.

Truth cracks the surface—primal, raw, and searing,
Reveals the beast that wears a human face.
We burn the world and call it engineering,
While glaciers weep and forests lose their grace.

As the world outside grows quiet in reflection,
He sees a bird collapse against the glass.
Its wings beat frantic—a silent insurrection—
The cost of progress: nature’s own rejection,
A legacy of greed we can’t surpass.

The bell rings: splitting the sky with action,
A siren’s wail for those who dare to hear.
Most hearts, insulated, shrink from the distraction,
Content to let the void draw ever near.

Glory—etched in headlines, fading by the hour,
A toast to ashes swirling in the breeze.
We write our epitaphs, still drunk on power,
Raise empty glasses—toasting our disease.

And as silence settles, final and complete,
He wonders if the void will mourn defeat—
Or if, when all is lost and nothing’s left to grieve,
We’ll vanish, like the bird, with nothing more to leave.

As his breath grows shallow—measured, faint, and hollow—
He feels the hush descend across the land.
Yet in his chest, a stubborn ember follows—
A pulse that pleads for something to withstand.

His fading eyes reflect the sky’s persistence,
A fragile hope that mercy might forgive.
With one last sigh, he grants the void resistance:
A whisper—soft, enduring—“Let us live.”