The track of dancing lights shown boldly and without reservation
It was programmed by the technician, who fought to keep his job
Amidst the pressures of modern day Rome.

Inward were these pressures cast
Bombarding the natural tranquility of his mind
With grotesque and deformed impressions
Of stress and illusion

The result of strain and fractured remedies
That society prescribed to keep the cogs of the machine well-lubricated
There was nowhere to turn, except back to the work day

The assembly line was unjustly wicked
Carving out bodies like meat
Every rivet had its place
And the connectors must perform without hesitation
Again and again, without fail

September happenings spoke of the clarity of frosted panes
The cold was creeping in fast, all around
And he knew that he was alone in making it through the night

Watchful wanderers sent the evil eye his way
It was a hall of broken mirrors
Deflected light shattering perception

His hands burned of limitless tools
Each one primed to do its job
All combining in unison
To weather away the quorum of sanity

Slipping into the meticulous plan
The consensus of atrophy turned to stone
Toxic ruminations circled around heretical belief
That there was another way to get through this life

Collective justification enshrined misery
And the altar of sadness appeared before his eyes
It was everywhere that light colonized
A manifest destiny of hypocritical vexation

Whether or not the reality appeared did not matter
For the droves of contractors performed best under veils of deceit

Secondary misfortune:
Sleep was in tune with this denial and restored only the necessary indentations
The integrity of the machine was unsustainable, precisely as designed

Unfit for work
Seven undertows claimed passersby who wallowed in halcyon drifting
Expectations that sovereign luck would save them
However, this was merely an apparatus of visual, beleaguered idealism
Succumbed to surrender and usurped for the purpose of additional grief

Steel arms and inlaid sockets fought with furious force against conspirators
Who motioned silently with signals, gesturing defeat
To gain higher ground against the juggernauts of progress

Hieroglyphics volunteered ancient meaning to rattle the cause
But all had been consumed ages ago
And there was nothing left to rectify destiny nor callous friction

Misfortune!
Tinkering with all of us
Finds its way, regardless of unified front

Hidden passageways, canaled beneath the surface
Like fossils of ancestral effort: arrows, sharper than death
In violently calcuated suggestions

Echoing footsteps
Appealing to the younger folk
So soon to transform riddles into epithets
And eulogies unwritten by a disgusting mind
That conquered entire cities without remorse
Far along its journey toward the stars

Technological evolution heaved constructions
Uniform causeways that furthered the hiatus of reason
Philosophically invalid fallacies, the currency of standard trade

Motioning onward, beneath the salty, dusted plume
The threshold’s knee revealed vulnerability
Questions of volcanic debris undermined the cyclops
Whose behemoth yawn swallowing ships sailed
Creating the winds that we know today

All of this said, the seed of majestic correction lay buried for a million years, unmoved
Futuristic fantasies are the bourgeosie commodities of speculating teens, vaping in the metaverse

What’s real is not a fixed proposal
But rather a shifting orb of foggy gradients
Unlocked by the tokens found at a museum

The Nautilus was being constructed
Along the assembly-line, but fate would intervene
An older revision of a mechanical part was mixed in inventory
And the tensions placed upon that joint were not qualified for hyperspace

The collapse of a million stars into solitary perspective, naturally rippled out of control
And stately ceremony was postponed, as the fallout was analyzed
And its implications ascertained
Before the antecedent branch had matured
Revolutionaries seized their opportunity to deal the death blow
To capitalistic dogma and its foregone conclusions

At times of darkest dictatorship, nihilistic resolve is necessary
To restore the absence of a negative

Concrete mistakes are no better than uncertain forecasting
With something to replace it, becomes possible to grow
And change, but somehow I suspect that we’re not ready for the reins

We never were, and that is our problem
We cannot stop the march of time, nor should we
But also, we are not prepared for its responsibilities

Compassion is a simple tool, simplistic yet effective
An underrated device that has not been given the chance to prove its eventual worth
Overlooked and forgotten

We all ask, “What is wrong with the world today?”
And do not want to hear a sensible answer

Objectives remain unclear, and vision is limited at best
An avalanche of glacial proportions the poets spoke of long ago
But they were marginalized and outcast

No one asks the philosopher what he thinks about the disease
Because he is touched by it the most
And outward appearances are all that matter here
So he is blamed for his own lack of utility

And the Earth, in revolution, sails around the sun
As it will continue to do, once the skyscrapers have all settled
And the vines and ferns have reclaimed the metallic aperture
Of the crimson eye
Of humanity’s misplaced crusade