The Rubicon

When events contrive to stir the emotions;

Say when touched by personal trauma

 Or deluged by a media's diet of dramatized disasters,

Impinged,

 We are,

 To thought provoked;

To take a passing glance at those things

Beyond the immediate cascade of crises

That is our lives, for most of us.

 To ponder on the future,

 Our own, mankind's, existence.

 Usually short-lived,

 Such thoughts curtailed to a fatalistic resignation

 Of things beyond our control,

 We hope for the best,

But fear for the worst,

As the more immediate crisis of;

 “What shall I cook for tea?!”

Return to absorb the mind.

But fear provoked,

 Questions remain unanswered

 To gnaw on the bones of hope;

 What is the future for my children?

 For the “Jack’s”,

Who can afford to buy enough sand,

 The answers come in self deluding optimism

 In which to bury his head, all right Jack!

And ostridge Jack in his wealthy sand dune

Can drink the blood red wine

 Of those that can't afford it

 And see the world in pink,

 And the thirsty in their powerlessness die.

So we take a peek, from time to time

 When nudged by a famine here,

 A war, there pollution everywhere,

 But in the end we stop looking,

Numbed to apathy,

 Over dosed on a media diet

 Of depressing documentaries

 And self prophesying statistics.

 We close our eyes

Lest we should see the buffers we're about to hit

 And glimpse the shame of being a destroyer;

 And with fear and guilt lose hope.

Politicians, leaders, tinkering at the edges

 As they dance their chameleon principles

 To the colour of the majority.

What blindness seals our eyes?

With what intoxication are the senses numbed

To make this Rubicund we cross unnoticed?

What sweet melody are our fiddles playing, that we care Not for burning “Rome”.

 Are our hearts and minds so un-Inclined to pay the ferry Man the price of justice?

Or is it a hidden that power stays our hand from action?

 No.

There is no beguiling temptress, no malevolent power

It is but the nature of the “beast”,

We are the fittest, the survival of.

Equipped with “selfish” traits at nature's design

 Our instincts have served us well

Too well?!

 That they bring us to our Apocalypse now.

“A poor design indeed”, you say,

If by the instruments of our success we meet our own demise. 

And yet, by this same design an intellect acquired

To mark our good, our bad.

We have, like a child played with a new toy.

Manipulating our instincts with power beyond the measured designed, to perversity.

Can man subdue his instinctual beast,

 That lies within?

To curb his “selfish” survival

 To tame it, train it

 And bend it to an intellectual will?

Unless this race has run its course,

  And I think not,

 Then

 We must work to make it true.