Can I see so far ahead? It could be,
but only with the magic eyes of art,
the specialized vision of artifacts to come,
or, vicariously, through my own genes
rambling on down through the future
in my offspring and theirs and theirs…
If perchance I’m proven wrong on the whole
Life-after-Death thing, then perhaps my ghost
will haunt the future of all those bastards
extant in my era, still sauntering about,
who were not punished in the here and now
for their crimes – of commission or omission or both –
all those “pillars of the community”,
who beyond doubt have done so much
to undermine community; all those
endless ranters about Law and Order
who are themselves outlaws and renegades;
the legions of treacly mouthed windbags
haranguing the rest of the world nonstop
about Freedom, Democracy, Peace! Peace!
who, smiling, send the drones and night raiders
to deprive the innocent of their very lives;
all the sly hucksters of Justice
who hand the rest of us over to be
hewers of wood and drawers of water
for false idols, those “Masters of the Universe.”
– Woefully, I doubt, even as a ghost,
I’ll see them get their comeuppance.
Yes. We must pretty much go by prior
experience, and in that case you’ll see
they too shall go to their graves, mourned
by family and friends, but eulogized
by their fellow rogues and toadies
as statesmen, patriots. And I? I’ll be
but a diffused mass of tumbling atoms
or maybe a cluster of conjoined molecules,
some floating gas borne by the searing wind,
or entombed in some unknown, poisoned place,
years forward in the vast, forlorn future.
* * *
(c) Gregory V Driscoll 2012
O'Driscoll's Take on the World 