Decade

Time's up.
The masks have all slipped.
All evils are revealed,
smirking,
strutting openly among us
with spurious entitlement,
striding through a shattered fourth wall
and into the stalls, knee deep in punter,
proud of their egregious, indulgent trespass
upon sanity and reason.
We can no longer pretend.
They openly dare us to defeat them.

We can no longer ignore
the questions we must ask.
We can no longer tolerate petty foibles
of wealth and privilege,
now that these combine to kill us.
Eccentricity becomes aggression,
the quaint becomes a cunt,
the toff becomes a tool,
and the indifference in the world
has reached toxic levels of concentration.
Nothing is without consequence anymore.

The Earth is an ark of the damned
adrift upon a sea of fire
and we have ten years to save it.
Otherwise life is left to wither and perish
while all the wealth accumulated
over preceding millennia of civilisation,
all the regalia stolen from the Incas,
each diamond plucked from the gravel of Serendip,
every gold tooth pulled from a mouth in Auschwitz
to be turned into bullion hidden in a vault in Zurich
or London or New York,
is invested in escape routes
for those who brought this disaster on us,

this cataclysm that has overtaken us like a tsunami,
like a hurricane, like a famine, like a drought,
like a flood, like an earthquake, like a war, like a plague,
from which they imagine they are inoculated
by some magic serum distilled from their gold
and injected and smoked and swallowed and snorted
while others starve and suffocate and drown
and are caught in a crossfire of catastrophes.

But it is also a decade of radical hope,
when to resist despair becomes a revolutionary sentiment,
to refuse to give up is a rejection of impossible odds
stacked against you for centuries,
to roll dice loaded by a history of privilege and prejudice,
in defiance of our lop-sided fate.

It is the decade when the men who went to the Moon
truly return to home and find out what has become of it.
The decade when we can build a lasting future,
and finally launch the planet as Spaceship Earth,
and all be in the same boat at last.