What is the point to the great war
that we have waged three thousand years?
Have we discovered any more
than better ways to produce gears?
The revolution that gave birth
to so-called luxury and ease —
has our great process on been worth
renouncing evolution? Please
Tell me the path we’ve named as right
that names us, humans, beyond laws
with which we learned to walk upright
and claimed as gods our noble cause:
To take for just ourselves, by right,
the entire world without remorse;
to judge what lives and what should die
and from the gods except our course.
To prove our story is not false,
the one that tells us we are kings,
we’ll turn the world to a death waltz
and put an end to living things
But those that live include us, too;
At this war’s end, we, the great hero,
must kill ourselves to see it through.
The end score – us, one, all things, zero.
03 AUG 2004
after reading Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, again
