Dulce Et Decorum Est

We’ve known the answers for a long time.
Hidden in our mind, we fight the knowledge.
Refusing to believe that this is all there is.
Nothing more.
Movies, songwriters and lovers tell us otherwise,
But we know the truth, and we struggle against the knowledge.

Anger burns.
And so our children rage with gunfire.

We are destroyers of worlds,
With no more enemies and no more God.
We have become like gods, you and I,
With the blind illusions of desire.
Illusions that somehow a cook is not so great as a consultant,
Technicians more necessary than poets.
We damn ourselves for wanting, and for believing the new lies.
Pro patria mori.

There is so much more than anger; comfort, more than we know.
And there is nothing, I suppose, so beautiful
As a mother holding her infant.
Or love’s first laughter, freshly captured in memory,
Or fixing to a canvas
To move nor fade for ever.