Us & Them

[Lambert]

"The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it."
-- Voltaire

I

We were in torpor, silent and shuffling,
Our ordinary woes were only relevant to us,
Clasped firmly to our bodies, and we were secure,
Knowing our leaders sat behind those wide wooden tables,
Drumming their assiduous fingers in placid patience.
They were content with their privilege.
Societal pruning requires steady hands and fixed minds.
Once we were diligent, sometimes we erred on occasion,
But things were set right.

But as Time operates, things expand.
Clockworks became circuits.
Nations became powers.
Powers became allies.
Allies became Enemies.

II
It was the flux of history,
Trundling through our towers,
a centurial collapsing,
Conspiring to bring it down with us.
Through the twisted dreck and mire,
Discoloured desires and memories,
We found a cracked mirror,
a splinter of it’s light led us a corner:
Shades hunched and hovering,
Puppeteers and plotters,
Conspirators and confidence men.
Their motives were irrelevant.
We knew their plans.
Sketches, outlines, margins: always faint and indistinct,
But we kept our faith.

Time wore me down,
The mob and it’s shrieking,
Demanding the impossible,
Unappeasable and impenetrable.
Those shades had no substance.
They were the robes of the elders, departed,
But their voices echoed between walls of time,
Voices at first misshapen, but gradually, set into Reason.

III
History had given us the staff,
Held aloft it could reveal, rule, release.
But it’s wedged in the banks of the river.
Decays in the trembling wind.
Few have the strength to retrieve it.
Ground down by indecision, we,
The disillusioned of the delirious,
Ruminate on the path before us,
The dry road, cracked and anfractuous.

A blood red sun glints
On the sinewy membrane of the water’s surface.
They, who were once Us,
Now row furiously towards the radiance,
Blinded and imprudent,
They are relentless.
They seek only the paranoiac’s providence,
Pulsating in the periphery.