Futures

Taking refuge in the pages of SF today
is the best ‘contemporary malaise’
antidote I know – sure, ‘we all gonna
die’*, nobody proposes there’s a future.
Even half-brained SF writers know the
past is better left connected to its own
diseased umbilical, to wither away. Late
drastic surgery won’t save the foetus
from itself. So the way to go onward
is break free of mortal chains.

It isn’t easy; politics of power and creed
has yet to displace vestigial legacies
of our last ice age and our breeding to
extinction plan is cogent and real – naive
belief it brings its own relief in a Messiah
whom we unconditionally agree with
is a by-product of your fondest dreams.
No-one is going to appear magically,
take charge and lead us out of this mess
without some fundamental change.

So grubbers grub and leeches leech,
preachers warn catastrophes for
unbelievers, sinners stoned by stone-age
reasoning, because it’s written – in much
plagiarised pieces of didactic scripture
dictated by illiterate misanthropes to
illiterate misanthropes hiding in the hills
seeking salvation, pasting drug hazed
visions to cave wall mythologies. Hey,
what a great idea, start a movement!

They were futures that we could not
see the day we coined the phrase but
human greed is still no lesser predator,
seeking prey – aching to aggrandise and
legitimate its selfish ways. Called politicians,
minutemen, priests or thieves, they’re
always first to feed. We need to dump these
artefacts so corporeal in rubbish cans with
bodies of our human waste, vacate the
past to contemplate a promised land.
©20 March 2008, I. D. Carswell

* From: ‘Fish Cheer’ by Country Joe and The Fish