Little did we realize, when it was spoken of finding the ‘Soul of America’, it would be a tortuous moment trying to find if its soul ever existed.
Which children matter?
Only them of citizen and home?
But look, those are abandoned as well.
The greed of old smiling fools, on their last inward journey,
Witnessing their long history swirled to death abounding.
A creed’s whiff coming to end,
The Managers of Mithra,
The deathless cult of joyous light.
Tasting their last sweet treats,
Pining past heroes on hallowed walls,
Resolved to temporal faiths,
Clinging to forgotten words.
The aesthetics of change,
Heaved upon them by the people.
The shadowy ending of greed,
The eager comeuppance of wrath.
Such predicaments.
Our greatest hopes cannot be sustained under cruel, determined dictators,
But our shared future will not tolerate the faith of rosy, laissez-faire ambitions.
It is between these options we turn inward and speed toward wrath.
For it is like knowing what to do without a body to move through.
I am myself, but we are a body together with many Stately parts.
We are calcified structure set to stand on earth,
As we are buildings and transitways ground upon it.
We are makers of soil and bringers of tethered light,
As we are our waste and immaculate creative productions.
We are a digesting reflux and cleansing ponded wash,
As we are health systems and tribes that heal wounded souls.
We are hearts pulsing the green rhythm that we breath,
As we are our entertaining views and ways we serve them.
We are an echo that sings to define our detectable senses,
As we are tools extending the use of our visions and desires.
From within our swirling dreams we imagine ourselves a soul,
As within our contained world we try detect consciousness.
From within and out of the mind cosmic chemicals flow,
As within and out the network lives an evolving code.
But we are here, one ecology, one space, one Common Near, a single cell skinned in our exosphere. The body of a living planet, the network of a seeing mind.
But a body will be responsive to the mind, if the mind can decide on the shared existential threat, envision where it wants to go, speak its intention, serve the honesty it expresses, and embrace the shared language created by the body to unleash waiting change.
But otherwise, the body drifts to sleep and into distant nightmares soaked in crimson offerings, imagined up by old fears chasing us deep in our shadowy minds, manipulated into being by the hand of greed, placed there to make us run for its personal gain.