Nine months after I was born, the Twentieth Century began to collapse.
East Berlin,graffiti-mural concrete, a jutted enigma scratched
on ordinance maps, the sort found
landscaping westernized Primary School walls.
Where within, labored in real time, the television told my parents
(and everyone else given to social conservation in 1989) that a wall falling down
would bring an end to the gap between the working and the working poor.
Freedom waited for many on the other side.
But of course, History draws up different plans.
Never content to just go out with a bash, or to
fleetingly drift by leaving
in its absence an underwhelmed lull
The bloodiest century yet
left the new world entrenched
in an odyssey of hatreds
handed down from the past
right about the time human suffering became a bit dull
and the peaceful countries were too busy
tripling their money instead.
What does History really teach us and what are the real benefits
of being free, or freer than you were before?
Human ambition, which burns it way out of any oasis of calm,
which calls children out of sleeping in the night
Always seeks out the exhaustible
An inveterate Black sheep leading astray
the ever susceptible virgin lamb
Delusion’s strange bedfellows are the worthiest adversaries
to run away from, to reserve contrition for.
Unlike the inevitability of uprooted animal migration
during a monsoon swell
Can a people with an invested addiction
to the pursuit of happiness
Ever truly be prepared
for the inevitability of rapid change?