Bonus Poem: Ground State

I can feel electricity in the air.
It clings to surfaces as electrons to their shell.
While sweat glistens on the brow,
of the back-breaker with the stained blue-collar.

There are no more heroes anymore.
We left them behind with our youth and prosperity.
Tumult is our new currency, fear our inflation,
cold death and iron hate our tax.

I wanted green fields and plains full of wild flowers.
But all that’s left are concrete jungles and steel deserts.

What is this life we live?
Fading Earth and Sun with no Moon.
The birds don’t sing anymore and the plants have all died.
Their corpses are swarmed by flies while stale excrement taints the air.

Beneath it is the electricity that charges with each moment.
If you wait long enough you can feel it upend hairs on your neck,
and in the distance, a cry of mourning.

It was our dream to sow this land as explorers.
But our arrival was greeted with strange, old faces.
The dead had long been buried so we added to them,
and in the cool, night air, we waged warfare in virulent form.

A toxic nightmare became the reality of millions.

Wives.
Mothers.
Children.
Found death in the world’s cruel embrace

And so we danced and drank beneath the moonlight,
to forget our troubles and forgive us our sorrows.
But night is the time of the raven-call and the black-winged devils.

So we sang to forgive us our trespasses,
and to emerge once more into morning,
with hope and the calculus of reason,
whose ways disintegrate existence’s illusory nature,
to wed science with metaphysics and reveal our true path.

But fate is no more a sickness than a virtue.
Change is constant; quantum flux relentless.

And so we bow our heads in prayer,
that we might forget what we know to be true,
to carry on blissful, ignorant.

But electricity still clings to the air,
and excites.

It invigorates,
energizes,
cries out for discharge
so that it, like we, may return to ground-state.