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Jury Duty in the Inferno

Civilization only exists
where people take care of each other.

Social conditions of poverty and privation
breed criminality of desperation for survival.

Social conditions of exclusionary wealth and privilege
breed criminality of narcissistic rapacity.

The judicial institutions of such inequitable societies
prosecute the former to protect the latter:
preserving the Status Quo.

The only measure of Divine Retribution that exists today
is the Planetary Convulsion
that implacably burns inequity away from the bottom up,
and then drowns the ashes.

The only measure of Divine Mercy available today
lies in that which is universally reviled and scorned:
the Great Embrace.

May the Void have mercy on your souls,
but there can be no mercy for the soulless.

A thin black line between layers of mudstone
will mark the time when Men and Women lived and died,
to a Timeless Unconscious World that neither sees it nor knows it.

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And So It Is Written For None To Read

While America closes its door-to-the-future to its youth, its aspiring hotshots smash their guitars onto the impervious consciousness of the video-streaming narcoleptic herd, furiously hammering away at the portals of hipness lusting for penetration into the voluptuous folds of affluence and renown they want so badly to deserve and which are only never-to-be-achieved potentialities in their feverish imaginations.

And so they “smash fascism” in virtual print while parading their righteous revolutionary irrelevance for all to see, if all those others bothered to look as a few pseudo-intellectual armchair hobos do to help survive their consumerist boredom.

We live in the age of the gimmick in a country unmoored from reality in a world floundering in its own waste. And so we focus on the sparkly trumpeted gimmick of the moment, the never-before-heard-of outrage of the week, the rush of today’s roulette wheel-spin to nail the mega-sale by phone or publication, and the eternal obsession to polish one’s pedestal in anticipation of the yearned-for coronation.

And through it all the great gear-train of Planetary Nature just keeps turning its awesome and for-us-eternal clockwork of evolution and extinction relentlessly drawing us ever deeper into the meshing of its teeth. Ah, what bright ephemeral monkeys we all are, like babies crawling in the aisles of a theater during a fabulous and majestic spectacle, oblivious to all but the glitter and sheen of the carpet threads reflecting the panorama on stage as the thundering music of the spheres unheard vibrates our crawling frames.

We are forever victims of neglect because we are endlessly neglectful, despite our hard-won omniscience by dismissal of the past left far below us by the rocketing elevation of our pedestals, now piercing through the stratospheric clouds of the tinnitus of our electronic babble-in-tongues of pleasure, pain, pander, pathos, patriotism, puffery, panic, perfidy and pontification. Like Simon-of-the-Desert we see it all from our olympian heights of self-delusion and we exalt in our earth-shaking powerlessness to alter the course of fate as the Spectacle of Man reflects blindingly in our eyes as ourselves first as tragedy and then as farce.

Whoo-ha! Praise the Gorgon and pass the amnesia!

…And I borrow from The Master whilst drifting back to the Blissful Isles where savage indignation no longer lacerates my heart…

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

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