"This doesn't bode well,"
we said. Alas,
"I told you so", they say,
is unhelpful.
Where, then, do we go from here?
Critical thought slain,
cretins at the helm
of this cartoon reality.
2016 was the year satire died
and mushrooms lost potency,
LSD the new BSc
and DMT the currency.
'A fleeting, intelligent speck,
but an unruly, ignorant mob,'
reads the obituary
of the megalomaniacal race.
I am the product of evolution,
the sum, no more, of three billion or so parts but never whole; a mirror of seven billion faces, minds, hearts, far flung places etched as faint traces, recalled as memories but never unchanged. I hear your words, I echo your thoughts, I see your smiles, I feel your joy. I touch your skin and a calcium wave courses through my finger to my brain; forever changed. I am the product of thirty one years, the sum, no more, of forty trillion or so cells but never whole; no picture reflects my troubled soul, as with the years I age each cellular replication is fraught with decay, my telomeres decline, my chromosomes fray. I will no longer recognise myself, one day. And who am I? The longest lived of all my cells, seven years, no more. What’s left of who I was before but the epigenetic imprints? Etched as faint traces, recalled as memories but never unchanged. I am amorphous; my cells merely obey what’s written in my DNA, the stimuli that pass their way, yet my brain is soft as clay. I was never born this way. I am the smell of sizzling fat, the thrilling sound of a thunder crash, the fixation of a lightning flash, the desolation of a grave. I am every laugh, every tear, each and every triumph and fear; the manifestation of all I see and hear; forever changed. I am the sands of time, the drift of mutations, epigenetic methylations, a vessel for each revolution’s chance situations, certain only that I will one day decline but heartened to understand: that’s fine.