YESTERDAY

From the moment my head crowned

until right now, so much happened,

there is no way keep up with it all.

I remember “We like Ike,” and JFK talking

deadly domino effects that turned into

sixty-thousand of my brothers, and three

million of our neighbors, the enemy, 

dead and gone, so we went all the way  

to the moon. Our infested minds sent us to

Viet Nam, Panama, Granada, Afghanistan, Iraq,

I’ve said before, war is the human university,

where we spend our treasure to learn our worth.

It doesn’t matter though, because that was

yesterday, and we already knew yesterday was

gone. No more unwashed hippies, arms raised,

singing the best songs ever written, swaying

in the sun. They tried to tell us over and over and

over again we weren’t on  The Eve of Destruction.

But here we are, and our Morte Grande might just

be a fait accompli. We were born for the end of things...

Honor, integrity, civil discourse, Ha! They say Betelgeuse

is about to blow and Yellowstone, too…

 

When I look around at our vast knowledge, our

quantum computed, ordained, suicidal hubris splayed

across this quantum AI, our soaring Tower of Babel,

there is no evidence we’ve learned to do better. At least,

This isn’t our first rodeo, so ring the Ma Bell, look back,

and with your confused tongue, ask one last time:

“What hath God wrought?”

Reviews

[Lorry]

Maybe those ten commandments should have been eleven Vol. Dont declare war or you'll really piss me off! But would we listen! Those same kids we used to be could start war on anyone...ANYONE.
"Yeah, he's exactly the same as us but he wears Puma when we wear Adidas, so kill him now! And we wonder why little kids grow into delusional presidents who have a temper tantrum every two minutes because someone said he was fake news. And ours are no better. Here, labour... the workers party are acting like the Tories, shutting schools and raising taxes, while that chinless wonder Farage is the new kid on the block despite being a complete racist and bigot in his last manifestation.
Ps... sorry for giving you news you shouldn't care about. I only done it in case they somehow use the excuse that Trump is a despot as reason for me to be removed physically from my next stateside holiday.
I mean, he even grew up in the days where you could belt kids ffs! 😀

[Vol]

Lorry,
From what I've read, he grew up a neglected rich kid whose father never gave him any affection, and it shows. I personally have no problem with him I don't have with every other denezin of New York City... If I lived there, I'd probably be just like they are. inside concrete canyons living in tiny apartments with walls and floors backed by other apartments on four sides! No wonder he acts exactly like every eighth-grade bully I've ever seen. I have NO problems with any of his policies, though.
Vol

[John Sullivan]

AI as our tower of Babel is... maybe the most fitting image. I was reading an article the other day discussing such luminaries as Peter Thiel and the search for artificial trans-humanism... the idea that some (not the poor) will live on in some sort of digital consciousness, or artificially prolonged human life... or maybe Elon Musk will finally fly them all to Mars and the rest of us can get back to mucking around in the mud, I don't know. Strange days, but good poetry, so it all balances out, I suppose.

[Vol]

John,
Thanks
You've heard the old Irish curse? "May you live in interesting times," My aware life began in earnest when I was still in high school, but my memory goes back to seeing Eisenhower on TV telling us to beware the military-industrial complex only twenty years after WWII. It was in my Grandparents youth that things really got "interesting," and it feels like we are living in some sort of endothermal hell.
Vol

[Curly Grace]

The final question rings like a warning bell we still haven’t learned to hear.

[Vol]

Sarah,
I've done a lot of reading and a lot of thinking in my life, and one thing I have discovered is that mankind does not learn. We change the subject, come up with new sets of facts, new ways to express whatever is bothering us now, we discover whole new sciences, even, but here we are, the same as ever. We cannot get along; we hate more easily than we love, especially in Western Civilization; we have allowed ourselves, our zeitgist to be invaded and diluted, to the point that we have lost our humanitarian leadership in the world. The West has at its core a belief in the value and sanctity of every human life; nowhere else in any other culture is this true. We stand on a shaky precipice, and if we fail, all we have given to the world as a whole will fall into ruin.
Vol

[Curly Grace]

Vol,
Your words carry the weight of long memory. Yet even in that heaviness, I still see the small, stubborn light of those who keep trying. Maybe we don’t learn all at once, but something in us still reaches even at the edge.

[Vol]

Star Trek was conceived as a culture that had everything it needed, so no one had to worry about their day-to-day needs, and could channel their energies to "improving themselves." Of course, all desires for power and control would also magically disappear... Yeah, right... and the national anthem would be Kum-Ba-Yah... There is this other thing... the only way we learn is through suffering and conflict... integrity, and honor don't come cheap...

[Vol]

And Thank you for your thoughts!!!

[John the Baptist]

I can remember those same things you mention in your first verse, Vol, and I like to think we have learned some things from the domino theory, attempts at nation building, etc. But now we have a man in power who has his finger on the nuclear trigger and may also be diagnosable. I no longer say anything is a sure thing.

[Vol]

John,
I don't think humanity has ever learned ANYTHING. We will always choose bad over good in everything we do. I wrote about two hundred words to disagree with your politics, but this is a poetry site, so I'll keep those thoughts for a different venue.
Vol