Utopia
“If you look backward, you see a nightmare.
If you look forward, you become the nightmare.”
~
I, in arched lips,
watched passions die,
saw the beasts swallow their eyes,
justifying to the world why they’re blind
with deception that bled red smoke
digging its way into the soil,
nestling into our very existence, it coils
in our lungs like a parasitic host
so we inhaled the carbon truths until our throats were clattered,
and scraped our necks until they were bare and battered.
and the beasts still spoke, and we waged wars,
carbon-stained liquid gushing from silent cores,
marking the skin of deceived minds—
“it was for the sake of our pride” that we
traded lungs for taut drums, for eyes blanketed with pyre—
let the liar smoke to the bone, let him choke on his noose
knit from a steel-spun reel of ruse
until our souls turn skyward, set loose.
we hoped for a utopia and trusted the blind to march us through,
and mourned, with blood-caked throats, the days we lusted for a promised life, man-made.
we deserved for our ashes to be scattered on peaks
for we saw the hatred as it grew,
so we crawled, breathless, under the acid rain, hoping it would wash our souls anew.
