Burn-out

Those wind-tumbled birds - are they scraps of a script
That was written to guide our immoderate lives?
Is our Eden a book with its pages all ripped
From which only a memory of wisdom survives?
Around us the remnants of beauty are scattered
Like litter on roads, as if none of it mattered
Except as reflections in which we are gloriously shattered.

Look farther - those jet-riddled bundles of clouds
Might seethe with the secrets we've boiled into steam
In mass media cauldrons, the bubbling of crowds
Till all we once knew is as words in a dream.
Borne up on the heat of technology's fire
The sparkles of meaning go spiralling higher
To dazzle like fizzles of fireworks before they expire.

Beyond them the blue and beyond it the void
Whose stars mock our reach with the light of the past
An ancient Greek zodiac's motions deployed
To make us feel one with a cosmos too vast.
We've sent out some signals, some probes - will they find
A trace of some other implacable mind
Determined to daub on the heavens the name of its kind?

And are we so wrong if we use it all up
Forever enslaved by the urge to transcend?
To drain to the dregs cornucopia's cup
Because we are mortal and know we must end.
No purpose except to enhance the event
Of being alive - here we are, there we went
Another brief energy, surging towards godhood, then spent.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poems live in Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader, Spectral Realms, Aphelion, Black Petals, Grim and Gilded, Ekstasis, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Ephemeral Elegies, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Emberr, View from Atlantis, Altered Reality, The Sirens Call, The Chamber Magazine, I Become the Beast, Lovecraftiana, Awen and elsewhere.

Find more by Simon MacCulloch in the Author Index.