Oh, where can it all start?

Is it all the problems our world is facing?
Is it our alleged healthcare, our filthy dung
Stinging our tongues right into our dirty lungs
Sucking our greenbacks ‘til we see green flat lines?
Is it our ways of handling our oh so happy triggers
That killers and their fingers turn lives into figures
When all we get are tissues colored delirious red wine?

Is it the countless problems our world is facing
That trusted adults say repetitive normalization
Quelling our delusions of better times ahead
With staid and stoic conservative rationalizations?

Is it the dysfunctional clockwork of our healthcare system
Gears cogs and springs spiraling out of control
Choking our wallets of their green.
Until all we have left is a flat line’s beep?

Is it the countless trigger happy fingers turning lives into figures
That incompetents and money sacks enable by the minute
While all we get is a lousy tissue colored and signed
Of the hearts and prayers of some careless funeral director?

Is it our bombs and missiles of insincere judgment
That enable our enemies and weaken our allies
Helping a few militant billionaires
While we get pennies and harder lives?

“Dream small”, recites the distant echoes of reason year after year
Sneering into our mere voids of fear with a silent cheer.
“Dhree-aaam sm-aaaaaall or noooott at aaaaaall.”

Before you beyond this glass chamber
Is an innocent collection of candy-coated abodes
A blinding yellow aurora of light
Tucked gently into the blue bed above us
Amid the cotton-like blankets
Staring as prudent as you.
This everyday main street is bustling of activity.
But not in the way you’d expect it.
The thousands of people that populate this town
Are banging the glass that envelopes your prison
Those poor little masses
Bawling, sobbing, their beautiful faces
Stained with clear trails of terror
Their helpless little facades of fear
Torturing your guardians incessantly
Without a care to anything else you see
In their pathetic little lives.

Now just watch with passionless tremble
As my steely dry purveyor of life
Depresses the circular red curse of death
Suddenly there’s another blinding flash
Overwhelming even the light above you
There’s a giant mushroom of orange and yellow
Rising above the endless horizon
With a tsunami of fiery rage barreling towards us.
Crashing into buildings monstrously
And gunning the masses mercilessly
In flooded faces of tears and screams
They all are incinerated instantly
All that’s left are ponds of blood
While you look on, the flames licking your shield.
You can pretend to weep and bawl and moan
Like those pitiful lives you laid to waste
But appreciate that you never tried
Or even bothered to challenge my bluff
It isn’t that you couldn’t have saved them all
You could have saved them all
But it was your impotent ministrations
And it was your insolent hesitations
That checkmated those precious pawns.
You never cared about
Those insignificant, diffident, insolent dirtbags
Scratch that, they’re lower that dirt to you.
In fact, they’re nothing.
They never held your future together
They’re just there for the sake of it.
Their problems are not yours to meddle in.
We have a system for a reason.
Stay in line and stick to your own problems
Instead of making things worse for others.

This is no tyranny of terrible government
Empowerment and betterment is fundament in its governance
You are not suppressed in speech or press.
Bless your First Amendment
progress isn’t on its deathbed.

But you can’t change what the world is like.
It will always be corrupt and incompetent.
You have to accept it and adapt accordingly
Before your delusions of grandeur get the better of you.
There is only so much you can do,
You can tinker with the status quo
With a limited degree of success
And perhaps that might just be the ticket.

NOOOO!!!

The allure and temptation
Of satisfying continuation
Does little but delay
An inevitable demise
Sure, you could call some retreats tactical
But to think you could just run away
From the beast when it’s wrecking your future?
Keep it up, and everything will go down.
When it all goes down,
You’ll have only yourself
And your cohorts to blame.
If it all goes down, the books and  the papers
Become nothing but ashes and ashes.
It will all go down like ashes and ashes
before all falling down and tumbling down
onto a scattered mass of inch-high forests of green blades
Gently destroyed by such towering relics.
It will all go down in flames and fire,
ashes and cinders as black as the smoke that swept it in,
a burning death that will plague us all.
Take it from the good old wise Mercutio,
if you’re ever into these Shakespearean tragedies,
those centuries old love story where the bickering
of Montague and Capulet unleashes a plague
unto both your houses.
If anyone thought a big bad bush and a big fat d-double asterisk
(I’m no fan of cursed language)-k were bad,
one take of the sinister sneer of the trump card
nestled at the decorated four legged steed
in the glittery facade of a golden brick,
rouge carpet,
bustling vault
of beeps and chimes and dizzying pastel colors
of glittery dough, ‘chips, and one pence
will fill a thousand paper bags
with everything that details them.
It’s not the British kind, thank you very much.

You’ve already sat.
Like a stupid duck
All silly little quacking garbage and no walking back
And look what it brought to those thousand or so townsfolk.
Death and disaster and reprisals of “that’s a shame.”
The watch will never rewind again.
If you continue to sit ignorantly
The mushroom cloud
That flooded this small town
Will be replicated
In every hamlet, town, city, and metropolis
Until the only thing left
Is a blue marble smoking
Into a broken husk of rotting hell and smoldering ruins
And five millennia on, the alien touristas will remember this
As the next Ozymandias that fell victim to its own pride.
But if you stand today, the naysayers will be the sitting ducks.
Quacking endless nonsense until their saliva is sucked out
Like the last of their credibility and their rationality.
And finally, the masses will really have a better life

Now is not the time to shy away
When the world is fading by the day.
Now is not the time to be fleeing and hiding
When the world is dying and dividing
Now is not the time to be a sitting duck
And expect the world to run on luck.

.
Our leaders can’t be sitting ducks.
The excuses are not the standard anymore
Any callback to them is to signify
That the leader is bereft of action.
Today, sitting is nothing.
Today, sitting is silent consent.
Sitting is a sign of content.
Standing, though, is a sign of solid dissent
Standing is a rejection of assent.
It’s the only way to stop our descent
And start a new and prosperous assent.
Do you know how people go to the extent
To go out of their way to make sure we prevent
Another catastrophe of ignorance and contempt
Where silence is strength and concern is pretend?

Make no mistake
This is no question of war, famine, or poverty
It’s about spreading the memo and rising everyone
To action.
Because, talk is cheap, but action is worth more than a bar of gold.
And louder than a bomb.