quintessence

 

By Haiden DeShong

 

 

if one

takes time to understand what is

in the shape of

multichromatic, fragmented crystalline bacteria

clinging to the side of a petri dish,

they might realize

the texture of

a silver-sheen spiderweb blanketing the earth with the

metallic buzzing of technological sustenance,

a crumbling ground overwhelmed by a swarm of

endlessly tumultuous marauders cast on stone.

 

if one

peers into the abyss of

suffering mania and caustic desperation which

wears down the glass-scope of vision

laid across a bunsen burner,

they can find a tense fascination with

aggressive flames licking at the edge of a paradise

while utopia eats away at itself.

 

you cannot perceive the inside of a spinning dial

or what it means to caress a clock’s pendulum

hug tight to it with your legs and swing

[tick tock

tick tock]

as our hours narrow.

mankind dilutes the purity of nature with

textbook definitions

inventions and

science

that they do not even wish to observe.

 

War is the domain of our

 

(Homo sapiens sapiens breeding men into monsters and

breaking each other with metal husks, sending a barrage of artillery into the bleeding heart of)

 

faith

itself.

 

so observe your own undoing,

brainwashed citizens, desperate civilians,

martyred civilizations

scorched beneath the magnifying glass of

 

(wasted time, wasted thoughts,

passing decades into millenia,

observing our Melancholia and

orchestrating our Apocalypse)

 

aggression.

 

adrenaline in your planet, blood pumping at

two-thousand--ten-thousand--two hundred thousand gallons per day

until the body ruptures and is no more.

What is the species

but a cesspool of misinterpreted pragmatism?