Far Out is Doom: Chapter 2
A Sacred Epic
Harlie Radio image by Joe Haput CC BY-SA
Far Out is Doom: Chapter 2
by Cosmic Poet Simon Pole
One language once there was for all mankind,
Or so it is said, and perhaps, one day,
One language will again let us be one,
But without a turn of heart, would it work?
A savage heart, our selfishness writ large,
In disputing to outer acts drove us,
To vying, and taking of all for self,
And not just myself, the myself in each,
But the greater myself, which is all men,
Together, but with no thought but for him,
Which is the greater him, the idol man,
At least that is what I think, I the Judge.
I am a Judge, that is what they call me,
In our little village of squalid huts
Built within the bones of grander structures.
Indeed our Tower of Babel, so tall,
Has been thrown down, and the bricks fired in pride
In wrath melted, a wrath we called forth
As we climbed higher in the wrongest way.
Do you not see the clues cast everywhere?
The clues that show the past—I saw them then
In the pages of odd journals I flipped
In underground junk-shelf stores, in alleys,
Through doors that were in shadowed alcoves punched
Into rooms hollowed out for no purpose
But to house those piled accumulations
Of photocopies, old mimeographs,
The notes of high-placed committees, unknown
To the lower pop, their talkings shrouded
In bureaucratic bafflegab, same too
Their tamest names, which could be meetings
Of the layers of sewers or roadal spokes,
But really crimes of magnitude discussed;
So too charted sums of experiments,
What happened, and where, and to whom set down
In code, but deciphered with other scraps
Also found in the racks of those packed stores,
Where I bought and borrowed all my knowledge,
And learned what was to be already was.
We all learned, too late, many by dying,
In fact, most, what our betters had plotted,
A plot, which, like a snake, circled to bite,
And the rocket, which returned cratered near
Our peaceful town, in the outskirts, this caused,
Or catalyzed, being the final spark,
The byproduct almost, filings cast off
Their perverse industry, born in thought,
There tortured and risen to gaped-at heights,
Before in substance made, copying plans
Fully sketched in their collective fever,
An evil fever which gripped them world-wide
Wherever, in corp or gov, squatted they:
This was Babel and one language they spoke,
How to displace God, the God in each man,
And that emptiness thereby enthroning
On high, in the sky, the cloudy palace,
And many mansions, where we beseeched God
Through his cosmic symbols, now their rocket
There would be in one tongue, their tongue, of rule,
Of their loathsome, stealing rule, though faction
They pretended in halls of the people.
Perhaps then our distinctiveness, our way,
Our speech and custom, bonds of hope and love,
The anti-body was to this Babel,
The wrong was not solely its erection,
But imposition thereby of one rule,
One voice, one spoken truth for everyone,
That was, in essence, false, and so discord,
That is multiplicity, out of each,
In quibble and cross, would come antidote,
Each feeling what justice is, what is due
To man being man, and not a builder
Or subject of some rocket in the sky,
Our rights expressed in people local too.
Of such people I am Judge, dispenser
Of what the great counsels abdicated,
That is the finding of right, with wisdom,
And it impose, but sometimes I wonder:
Are our hearts, the hearts of those who crave life,
And its flower, not themselves Babel too,
Like rubble, from the straight way fallen crook?