As We Now Do - Poem by Beautiful Death (Narrated by Jon Brattin)

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Song: Where We Walked:
Narrator: Jon Brattin ()
Poem: As We Do Now (Beautiful Death)


Men veil themselves in sad illusions,
until their eyes grow dim in the sameness of it all.
In the dank echoes of their typing.
In the verdure of their lawns.
In the emblems of their virtualism
and in the virtue of their emblems.
In the dull comfort of their unknowing,
and in the familiarity of their contentment.
Finally, in the will to transcend all this,
and in the freedom of that will.

The scientist is a kind of god.
His sacred arithmetic is his bolster,
and its rigor his apocryphal gospel.
But his is a beggar’s salvation.
It cannot exempt him from his humanity,
or snuff the soul that burns wretched within him
while he beats his brothers into limp surrender
and carves of the remnants a creature of paradox.
An automaton in his likeness.

The writer is a peculiar species.
Possessed by amoral wit,
he regards the abomination.
That cynical Frankenstein,
a simulacrum of abject design.
Then with a neurosurgeon’s wink,
he fashions an emptier re-imagination,
and the audience roars at his miscreation.
Theirs is a television laughter,
infinitely replicable and perfectly hollow.
It trades the satanic for the sardonic,
and the bronze serpent for the ironic.
Naivety for subway numbness,
and hope for a cynic’s glumness.
And when it subsides,
and while it is still going,
they are desperately alone.

Beware the transcendence of sentiment,
it defines the human as such:
a perverse configuration of atomic flux.
Wisdom is his greatest affliction,
and consciousness his accursed share.
But these that render insatiable his whims,
can sow within him a fear bolder than war.
Not of the looming shadow of death,
but what dies within while he still draws breath.

If death were a tunnel at the end of a light,
or a stream flowing to the womb,
at the end of a thousand lifetimes,
would we choose to live as we now do?