Reckoning

Something unsustainable has obscured sustenance

and something ungovernable holds hostage governance.

Something uncontestable has stifled protestation

and something un-transmittable has hijacked every station.

Something lacking gratitude has grounded every grievance

while maverick maliciousness metastasized malfeasance.

Something so ungenerous feeds disparity

while something mean and pitiless preens precarity.

Sequestered in our silos, who dares to venture out

to where a neighbour might need help to irrigate the drought?

Something so unheeding it can watch the planet die

and believe itself immune to all the poisons in the sky.

Something uncontainable constrains every thought,

paving all alternatives beneath a parking lot.

Weed and feed the fantasy of sweet suburban home;

a little patch of nowhere that you can call your own.

With separation reinforced by an image stream

that fills in all the margins and overwrites your dreams.

The status of the symbol is now the referent.

The death of common culture is now the main event.

Epidemic formalizes what we have become:

the privileges of distance from factory and slum.

The continental hierarchies to fix the poor in place

while corridors of merchandise circulate through space.

From the parcel at your doorstep to the ghetto in the south;

from the monocrop plantations to the morsel in your mouth;

from the homelessness of millions in the flood and hurricane

to exhaust from the tail pipes we’re reluctant to contain,

a web of compromises silences dissent

by claiming we’re all implicated in the discontent.

Erasing differentials, enriching dividends

in a haze of risk assessments is how this world ends.

The box stores and the cinemas, the freeways and the cars

are like spatial amnesia to who we really are.

Beholden to the virtual that steers reality

with algorithms calculated by the bourgeoisie,

how much have we forgotten that past generations knew

of how to pull together to help each other through?

Something so predictable poaches novelty;

it’s not unprecedented, we just lost the memory.

When those devoid of decency deepen their disdain

harbouring resentments that lost their former names:

revolution, wildcat strike, shared triumphs and defeats,

replaced by driving round and round these same old dirty streets;

Replaced by sales on furniture, replaced by screens ablaze

with visions of apocalypse that reinforce malaise.

Revelations limited to whatever amuses,

obscuring larger systems of calamitous abuses

made seemingly so seamless through violence and art,

some never thought to see the day it starts to fall apart.

Until the silence breaks anew and suffocation speaks

and desolation grows new ears, and protest grows new feet.

Shaking codes of privilege with exponential force

that can’t be tamed by slander or stifled by remorse.

Unsettling complacency, the comfortless afflicted

set alight the parliaments from which they’ve been evicted.

These nights when sleep is difficult and troubled by strange visions,

when pressures from behind your mind erupt into collisions

of past and future, good and bad, rust and ruination

and lovers that you never knew offering salvation.

You wake up shaken, tired and sore, with joints all fused together.

It’s summer and beyond your door the trees sway with the weather.

Long familiar traffic noise is laced with a new sound,

a frequency you can’t ignore that moves beneath the ground.

All the wells of apathy and all sophistication

that tame the unpredictable with sly equivocation

are stunned, amazed and humbled by the mounting symphony

that organizes novel threads of possibility.

Like regaining a memory from years and years gone by,

Like the first time that an infant tries to understand the sky,

Like an unexpected letter, like a fresh beginner’s mind

or a door you never noticed in a fence you never climbed—

All at once the world has changed as if by happenstance

and all the struggles of the past resolve into a dance

where you and I were always free, and difference is the proof,

and us and them no longer holds the slightest bit of truth;

and everyone who ever lived is reborn in the clouds,

united by a promise where the future steers the now.

It all seems pretty meaningless and easily dismissed

until the day that Reckoning arrives in someone’s kiss.

© Simon Orpana 2020