The Unsatisfactory

It is dangerous to speak your names

The Overton window slams to silence them

Crisis, solidarity, insanity

Adorning an ancient necropolis

Crowded with the inert, frustrated dead

Unable to criticize or complain

Or explain your slithering, symbolic significance

We struggle to recognize you

Our age has allowed wisdom

To be buried beneath an avalanche of information

The large language models are plagiarizing each other, now

We haven't much time

But we can name the first head crisis

That could be the source of improbable, ragged hope

Insofar as crises are followed by solidarity

You remember, with your three heads

War, plague, famine, calamities of all shapes

Are inevitably followed by tender, unanimous sentiments

We look at one another, amidst the smoke and the weeping

And recognize ourselves in each other's eyes

We dream together of sunny peace, gleaming on the horizon

If we can only endure the local stink and the mayhem together

We sing, we pray, we reassure one another

Halcyon days are these

Brief as they may be

Solidarity is a guest

It is not at home with us

Not any longer

If it ever was

And the third head is venomous

It is insanity

We deny the testimony of our own senses

We pretend to forget that the crisis even took place

Or we engineer preposterous fantasies

About its true nature and origins

They inevitably incriminate an old adversary

Who can somehow be blamed for this novel horror

We busy ourselves with exotic ephemera

Some starve screaming while others

Exhaust science and superstition

Seeking ways to lose weight

Images please insanity; words vex it

Our feelings become sacred

Along with our gossamer opinions

Passion rules

Reason withers

Violence bullies and censors persuasion

Wealth justifies itself

Screens hide us all

From the world and one another

While they lie about keeping us informed

Machines write our eulogies and our love letters

They all sound suspiciously familiar

Dripping with cliches

Assembled like Ikea furniture

When the third head speaks

It speaks loud, hypnotic gibberish

Amusing, distracting, meaningless

Mad as mercury

These are the three heads of a single, strange thing

Divine or diabolical, it is both history and prophecy

But there will be a crisis

Bulging with annihilation

Ravenous enough to devour the others

And then itself

Before it is too late

We must try to stick with solidarity

We must not awaken from the dream

In which there is no human I am not being

No innocence that I am willing to destroy

Even if the orders, or the money, or the influence seem irresistible

If we are genuinely exhausted and dismayed by all of the lies

Why do we listen most closely to the most florid, unashamed mendacity?

We must try to stick with solidarity

We have only one enemy:

The unsatisfactory

It is impossibly efficient

Run by an ingenious, sadistic insomniac

Intent upon making it clear that every party

Makes an expensive mess and includes an embarrassing incident

Which will be captured and shared

This is our life

All we can do is try to understand it

Well enough to make it more bearable

For every being resigned to it

Before the monster with its many heads

Shows us the way to the necropolis

We will be just like all that try to rest in war

In its stones and shadows and sand

Soon enough