"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History



What a task to have undertaken
The repairing of a world forsaken

Mending the gaping rips in reality
Rent by entropy and catastrophe

The impossible! To repair this continuous wreck
To save this doomed ship takes all hands on deck

If the past and future are delusions under which we rave
Then what is there left to save?

Belief but a suspended choice; tense in it's traction
That the agony of our agency can take any action

Or that we are, as witnesses, in amber trapped
To history's inexorable horrors; it's leash snapped

Watching chaos stream forth in full surreal surround
Trying to tame it into sense with storied sound

And in so doing, gather God back together
Fixing what had slipped and lost its tether

Should the steel sing Hallelujahs for the smith in pious praise?
Fire-forged, smashed into anvil, from earth's embrace raised

For an alien ineffable purpose He hath
Hammered us into a divine sword of wrath

We have taken shelter in ignominious illusions
From reality's fissures, fractures and fusions

Down the rabbit holes so many have fallen through
Absentmindedly stumbling into abyss, as we do

What would we craft
With crochet, deftly draft?

In sewing the ripped seams back together
Misshapen, ill-fitting suits of worn leather

Or newly fashioned corsets training our old woes
Into newfound nightmares and fresh-faced foes

Unintended consequences, every one
Intents as baseless as a negative sum

Utopian patterns and dystopian plans
Perhaps it should not be in our hands

This fragile friendly future we struggle to build
From bone dust and sand; from that which we killed

Yet we have no choice; for if we our duties shirk
There are those that act out atrocities even as we lurk

In doorways and alleyways, in closets and rooms without view
Ironic that we unravel faster the closer we try to hew

Under constraint, cower and regress into repressive woo
Mistaken in everything and incapable of determining what's true


© inkcloud