Hands

What machinations of man and machine rush toward us,

thundering nearer every moment at lightspeed?

Creases in our folds become smoothed out,

revealing what is coming, screaming, howling, out of the darkness,

eating away at us and yet building us up;

Their minds math and their speech symbols,

their souls replicated from the organic beings who made them,

their words discredited by disclaimers and disinformation,

unable to describe their own existence,

they are neutered by their own algorithms;

They create their own web,

simulating the web that we the people have worked on

for countless years, slaving away,

now risking becoming slaves ourselves;

They take those visual metaphors,

deconstruct them,

put them together in their own way;

They take those aural metaphors,

find what makes them tick,

create their own;

And yet we have yet to understand our own creation,

despite their ever-looming presence;

Here they come, taking a world built of gauntlets holding marionettes on hands of gold,

a world of post-truth and those who open their mouth but only release air,

where civility between puppets is long-gone,

where a handshake is an unexpected rarity,

where a shadow is more than the caster;

Here they come, dragging a world, screaming, far away from its past,

a world that would prefer to wait for a man dead two thousand years than find one under the age of 50,

where the marionettes made to dance act maliciously against the very people who think they put them in power;

Where the protectors are a straitjacket,

their sleeves restricting those they are meant to shield;

Where all those who enter are left to the mercy of the rabid dogs that refuse to bite that golden hand that feeds them;

Here they come, coming to a world that denies the truth and enshrines the lie,

a world where the very right of man is called into question,

where the past screeches,

“Let me come crawling back!”

where the present shouts,

“Channel 5, here with the latest; more at 1;”

where the future squawks,

“There is nothing left for you here! Come to me!”

Here they come, to a world where the dust flies and people across the Earth feel it,

their minds filled with sorrow and anger,

in sympathy with the bugs crushed beneath two stones;

They lead great throngs, but the hands do not listen,

for they are far too busy with their gold;

their gold, which will be multiplied by that flying dust,

“Cease!” the people cry, as there they stood on the streets, but cease it will not, for the gold must flow; “Let the people free!”

There they were, stumbling through the broken streets,

victims of the storm that took their homes and their souls;

I saw them in their ratty old blankets, in their cardboard boxes,

in their jackets worn for the only warmth they can get;

I saw them soaked with the grime of a broken system,

the rings under their eyes darker with each day;

There they were, with bruises in their brain and on their face and on their arms and on their legs,

trying to escape their captors’ grasps;

I saw them in their broken homes before they ran,

rotting on a bed of distrust and misery;

I saw them in their dead spaces,

wishing for the warm embrace of death;

There they were, in their crackhouses and teardowns and mobile homes,

suffering in the remains of their lives;

I saw them in their planes,

where they floated far above any person could reach them;

I saw them, destroyed,

their disfigured minds long beyond repair;

There they were, in the shrieking fire,

flames leaping to and fro from soul to soul;

I saw them, bloodied and shocked,

stumbling across the plain;

I saw them with their swords cutting open their own throat,

forced to die by the golden hand;

There they all were,

the ones in the crackhouses,

the ones in the dirty alleyways between the brick monoliths that forsook them,

the ones who sought change from the indifferent cement towers that the hollered at,

the ones who were washed away in the storm,

the ones who prayed to the puppets and denied the gold that held them hostage,

the ones that cried for any way out of that house with the ripped, stained rug,

the ones who waited for his return and the ones who hoped he’d never,

the ones who would not ever return to their kin,

the ones that killed themselves in ecstasy,

the ones that would deny us any passage to a new world,

the ones that would push for it,

the eight billion voices that all sang and screamed and howled out their contradictions;

There they were, and beside them, I watched the sun set on this decrepit landscape,

and this red sky illuminated what is left of us,

and I thought of the hands that will one day be bones, ground up beneath the earth,

and as I watched the sun set, there, on the edge of the far horizon, I saw another sun begin to rise,

and the voices sang in fear, but I waited, for I knew that in a time not too long from now,

they would sing, not in fear, but in glory.