this silicon stone age

I'd like to write about happy things
like Southern Oregon hills rolling and green,
like bizarre Thai instruments that with wondrous melody sing,
or peaceful, pretty hippie girls
wearing trippy glass rings

and though such sights I've oft seen,
this is not the time, for me,
to write of such things

It's not just how the arctic's rapidly melting,
how pigs around the world have from
the frightful school of modern war learned nothing,
or how the yankee halls of congress
with vapid platitudes ring...
for into such things I've no unique insight

But lately I've taken truly horrid trips
(without shrooms, absinthe, or LSD)
and as memory from my distracted globe easily slips,
this night I'll hold forth
from these virtual lips...
so things in some small way
might be set to right

Should you drive along an American Freeway
(pretty much anyone on any day)
you'll see many displays of our civilization's decay:
prisons full of folk arrested and tried
by a system as rational as a roll of the die,
chain restaurants serving fare toxic and deep fried,
thriving forest eco-systems clear-cut in a single day,
and countless other sights to sadden the eye

And the hawks perched on the electric wires
would with cold horror freeze
if they knew they were a symbol
of what's going on overseas,

for Sumeria's museum is lost to frivolous war
and this is nothing to the accompanying gore,
while fat first-worlders hear of it in oil-guzzling planes
(during breaks between violent NFL games)
and wonder what it's all possibly for

But not in one young nation did this evil begin;
one must look far deeper for its origin,
twas born before the Egyptian monuments
and lives even in The Titanics' rust;
It was not created by primitive pride,
by true scholars, or by unbridled lust

No, it sprouted from seeds of greed
was fertilized by rampant technology,
was watered by the worship of science
unnaturally hacked apart from art, history, philosophy,
and all other branches of scholarship

Perhaps the core of the problem is the box,
the square,
and the omni-present straight line,
shallow laws in place of fair and profound principles,
the booths with crowd most "Christian" temples,
these serf-made elixirs to ward off pimples,
deep sympathy with the Spanish bull
alongside indifference about whole enslaved human races...

Sorry to weigh you down with troubles,
and not give you simple solutions,
but that isn't really the case;

Actually, the time is prime for resolutions:
the anarchic spree of war crimes has stopped
for plenty long enough
for humanity to see what's happened
and resoundingly refuse another round

I hate to contradict the talented Billy Idol
but "!!be afraid of this world we've made!!:"
It's like an Albino Hades,
(so pleasant in the shade)
but destined to fade as quickly as poor Nagasaki
with the inevitable rise of Apollo

But though Gaia still suffers from the modern disease
we're speeding faster than many dream
toward a possible glorious cure

However dangerous this 2008 may seem,
it's an illusion caused by the bursting seams
of countless society's vulgar
yet somehow "aristocratic" fabrics,
which have far too long harshly constricted
civilized and free humanity

There's much more I'd like to say
but this'll have to do today,
for my wounded soul is full of tall hurdles
and though I've insight I'd speed to you,
I clench my pen with all my might:

it can't quite seem to catch the light