The Wasteland

Monolith (1997) by Michael Chelich

I wandered once the waste of a wasteland.

Cluttered yet utterly vacuous.

Clogged gutters, dead-end allies, and cavernous holes for streets.

Standing was hard, crawling harder, walking impossible;

To slither was all there was.

A monolith of uniformity in total disarray;

One direction of traffic without destination.

Weakened by blindness and blinded by weakness;

A slothful society frantically progressing backward.

Air polluted with noise, yet silence abounded.

Good music was substantially wicked,

Substantial music was wickedly bad,

And everything but nature was natural to hear.

“Facts” were factors of fiction

Fabricated to fact-check farcical facades.

Secrets and slander were spoken loud,

While truth was whispered in shadows and shame.

Organizations without companionship and companies without organization

Listened without hearing and heard without listening

While talking without communicating and communicating without talking

On topics without topicality using words without meaning.

Seeing race was declared racist by those who saw only race.

Talk of politics and religion was censored by politicians and priests.

Cowards were brave for complying with the cowardly majority’s idea of bravery.

The intolerant declared tolerance to be tolerance of the intolerant.

Family matters never mattered to families,

So boy went girl and girl went boy so boy could love boy and girl could love girl,

But there is no boy, and there is no girl, only fucks

Loving fucks to find a fuck or fucking fucks to find a love. For the love of fuck.

Sex was merely “procreation”, yet procreation from sex was merely a mistake.

If procreation produced progeny, progenitors proclaimed pro-abortion progress.

Murder was healthcare, killers doctors, and family avoidance family planning.

Bastards slaughtering bastards for being bastards. Bastards.

“Good” people were good at using goods void of good to avoid the Good for good.

Paint and plaster without beauty or structure,

Stretchy spandex that strangled the soul,

And no-names with nameless faces renamed by name brands.

The food never nourished, and the medicine always sickened.

Everyone grew thinner and fatter, more and more shapeless;

Empty canvases for surgical slicing, subcutaneous suction, or silicone shells

More human, still, than their heart or head.

Mass-produced machines of productivity massively distracted the productivity of the masses,

A vast network of information designed for misinformation, bias, and conformity.

Videos for child education six clicks away from videos of child rape.

An industry of lies with a currency of attention inside a bankrupt society.

Each home its own hell,

Each child their own parent,

Each woman their own man,

Each man their own god.