RANDOM MUTTERING AT A FALSE DAWN
December 31, 1999

Entering probably the last year of my life,
I think back at all the other years and mutter. If
It is entirely appropriate than a man like me
should die in a year like this.
The false start of a new century,
the ending of a false life.

A false life like all others.
No better. No worse.
For this has been a century of false lives.
This 20th-century has been filled with heroes
and villains trapped forever out of time and out of place.
Only the evil portended the future.

Like Caliban, we look to heaven and saying
to our master, "You have taught us to speak,
and what is it profited us? Now we can curse."
And we do so. Frequently.
Too frequently.
We now are the new masters of this new millennium.
But are we better people for it?

I am a self-made 19th-century man,
awash in the blood of the 20th,
waiting the start of the 21st.
The century of total war is screaming to an end
awash in self-indulgence,
and self-congratulation
for survival.

As a child, I played at war.
Always the hero, repeatedly fighting
Custer's Last Stand,
always the boy general,
a man out of place in his own time
as I have continually remained out of place in my own.

The great swordsman in a nuclear age,
I boasted and bragged to the sky,
awaiting its fall.
I rolled the runes and studied the tarot,
and ignored their prophecy.
I prayed to God and bargained with him,

and sealed my fate.
An imagined poet in a world bereft
of poetic soul.
An imagined warrior in a world where
Warriors have no glory nor honor
it is a world gone mad.

I remember reaching the moon
enduring my cousins complaint
that they would rather watch Bewitched
and Samantha's nose twitch
than what was ballyhooed
the greatest event of the past 2000 years.

We went to the moon together,
and then we forgot about it. The
It is as if Columbus came to the New World
and Queen Isabella said, "Enough".
And everyone forgot about it long enough,
that it went away, seemingly forever out of reach.

The most fitting memory of the past 100 years
may be that plaque on the moon,
forever untarnished or graffitied upon
or read again.
It was a bleak century.
Full of bleakness and blood.
The end was full of hope.

Auschwitz, Hitler, the Berlin Wall.
The trenches, the gas, the atomic bomb.
In little more than 100 years we've become so efficient
at killing that one death more or less
will never be noticed.
And I doubt man will be better for all his compliance with Y2K.

cigarlaw - 7/15/00 8:13:36 PM