Urban Apocrypha

We disemboweled the village,
Castrated the community,
Flocked to the cities
Once the rivers ran dry,
Tasting emptiness on a concrete meridian.
The village was our mother,
Protecting our children,
Justifying belongingness,
Enhancing our ethics,
An inheritance the city transformed
With desensitized codes of law,
Morphing empathy into morality,
Community into individuality.
The city is a mass of me's,
Competing for the eternal
In boxes of bits, cubes of cults,

Social groups that tie commercial knots,

Bleeding purpose, breeding inequality.

Primitive as we were,

We'd reached a fine balance

Between nature and our unnatural needs,

Lost to madness after insectivization,

The city compounding our broken dreams.

Men became the specialists

Who erected its systems,

Trade networks and minarets,

Phallic symbols of power

The village hunters inherited,

The killing of other men in place of beasts.

Womb of the earth severed,

We disconnected from the soil.

Built monuments to new sky gods,

Future towers reaching for their psalms,

Blessing of tyrants who imitated terror.

Urban revolution the garden surrendered,
All her plants theirs for the taking,

To exploit, capitalize, feed their children,

Safer now from the threats abroad,

Primed for learning, educated by bureaucrats,

Documentation segregating the ritual.

From the center imploded kingship,

A gravitational mandate

Forged from the elements of productivity

That shaped expediencies engineered,

Leadership inevitably necessary

From the colony's first pulse.

God and king became one,

The peasantry inverted skyward,

Raising temples to mimic serenity,

Only possible through the allowance of surplus,

Magnificent architecture fed by awe.

In turn, the god-thing-figment

Carried the burden of nature,

Sacrifice an original sin

To appease the affronted magicians,

Wielding divine tricks on the powerful,

Normalizing violence in regions sparse,

Whence came the rolling thunder of war.

New vices were cast,

Mistaken for the original, of the noble savage,

Whom we assumed more barbaric

To disconnect from an irony

Separating municipal freedom from restrictive castes,

Collective interest from communal bloodlust,

Mantras of invasion when monopolies crumble.

We burned our brothers,

The bridges that connected us,

Disdain of writers beseeched

In iconographies of cataclysm,

Flood, fire, destruction, drought,

The anxious masses turned to stone,

Rural redeemers taking their place.