Man’s end ever fading
How it must once have felt to be alive
When life was struggle and mankind strived
To gather, to hunt, ergo to feed,
Existing within the boundaries of essential need.
Fashioning spear from flint and cloth from hide
To hunt, to kill, to feed the tribe
To have purpose, biological, knowing no existential doubt
To never ask the question; ‘What is it all about?’
But with diminished threat, and limited room
Man fought not to feed, or protect, but to consume.
And as human societies began to thrive
We lost the imperative to merely survive.
Unaware perhaps that the traps of greed would force
Man into a costly and unseemly divorce
From reason pure, animalistic and free,
Replaced with aspiration; servitude, in perpetuity.
And now, tribally estranged, with the system full
Men live as fattened calves, awaiting the cull,
A food source for a ruptured civilisation
Bereft of purpose, of strife and inclination
Money, harnessed, brought individual success,
Succoured hierarchies and enabled, for some, excess,
Reduced man to consumer, the easier to control;
Capital conceiving the original Prole.
Now flaccid, mankind limps in line,
Footsteps fall in regimented time
To the TV’s pacifying, narcotic call
And man, dumbed-down, accepts his fall.
For, as the last lords of land and power flail
And dwindling fuel resources finally fail
We will all fall, feeble, bereft of fight
And slip, forgettable, into endless night.
By Liam Bland
