by Ryan P. Kinney and Aaron Shinkle
With additional content assembled from Eli Williams and Lennart Lundh
The fall of man
It was the end of monsters
The end of mothers
The end of haters
Of lovers
Of pain and suffering
Of bliss and ecstasy
Nothing to hide under the bed
No terror floating in your head
Just the buzzing and swarming of insects
There was just the animalistic need to survive
And Gaia had decided
It was best for her survival
If we did not
Truth be told
We did it to ourselves
Some future digger after truth,
alien or human, kneeling with
trowel and brush at this grave,
will note in clear, careful script
the wonder that a people would
be so deliberate with the smallest
of their gods' creatures,
and so careless of themselves.
One never sees the monster
Hiding in the open
No one ever suspects that we are hiding something
When they are staring it in the face
We walked upon the new Earth
Like we did on the Old
Tugging along our gravel hearts
On broken asphalt
Our eyes slowly
Moving towards the new sky
The clouds, like curtains, unfolded
Our feet freshly cleansed of old
Traditions and assumptions that we
would never make it to this moment
But no one knew what was past
That port of no return
The ship sailed away,
Faded out of view
Another layer chipped away like
Hardened clay
The people here aspire to be
Nothing more than alive
The lives of the New World
In the hands of strangers
Coexisting within each other
For fear of never existing again
This is their lifeline, their blood
They are all in this repopulation
Together
we see others as they are
we see ourselves at every age
and all at once
supplicants, praying for tomorrow.
Everything from nothing.
And to nothing we return.
To the whole of the way,
We hastened our downfall through an illusion of control.
Only through letting this run its course
And stepping to the center could we hope for survival
The lights one by one dim
The music softens
The actors bow,
We close the curtain on this world