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It isn't what we thought it would be,
this world we have slipped into
like a coma...

Where even the elders are not so wise
and childhood has little innocence
and animals make ghost images
where they used to be.

Open a textbook and expect
blood to seep from the pages,
a litany of the dead and dispossessed,
the underbelly of Civilisation

Open a news app and expect
not to want your breakfast next
forgotten, the tea goes cold

Your daily dose of depression
rolls across the screen
scroll down, and see...

             This is the rising tide
             that will take all ships down---

Voting feels like shouting into the wind,
a million people jamming thumbs into
the holes in Civilisation,
staring at their phones
while storms and seas rise
behind the walls

Our children have not deserved it;
less capable and less prosperous than their parents
they will inherit promissory notes
and exist in the echo of things gone by

We made great beauty, at times,
but it is sinking like Venice,
proud poster child for all our
glittering, top-heavy, rotten at the base
Civilisation

Marching toward dystopia
with a case-full of patent nostrums
and duct tape and dreams
and bright screens of things to buy...

                But still
                I have not given up---

History is a long sad song
of things that rose and fell
We may fall in a slow unspooling
or a resounding crash of what was wrong,
and rise again

Wearing a patch-pied coat perhaps,
knapsack in hand,
striking out across a greening field
whistling up a dog,
or, dare I hope---a wolf---
to wander with us
on our way to that new world.