Bury your heads dear humans,
Bury them in sands,
As chain saws gobble up
Water catchment areas
Encroach forests, build timber houses
Plant cash crops all around
For when the last drop of rain is a tear
Generations after will eat currency
Brother, cut that damn tree
Yes, that one. Cut it down
You mean birds live there
No, who gives a damn, just cut it
The Sahara is hauntingly beautiful
Think about the sand dunes
How about the far apart oasis
Isn’t the entire world worth a Sahara?
Thick black smoke dances to the sky
A song of destruction emanates, noisily
From the tireless turbines, turning
Churning effluents on Mother Nature’s belly
Without guns, and not so much of intelligence
The effluents have a dictatorial grip in water sources
Choking life as well as the aesthetic appeal
And we sit by and wonder what went wrong
Our ancestors succumbed to industrial sludge
For it is the only form of libation on the menu
As people seek new ways to earn a living
Yet unknowingly killing the living
Did God advocate destruction? When He gave man
the power to conquer earth, did He?
Did God give man power to pursue currency?
With boundless energy,
A cocktail of childish glee and invention,
We chased butterflies that painted the place
With a cornucopia of colors
They lithely flew away, darting our tiny hands
Before we knew it, they’d be gone
Leaving us tired and wasted
But we knew seasons were about to change
Now the butterflies are gone
To a world unknown
Sulking and throwing useless tantrums
We’d troop to the river to fetch water
Mother’s warning ringing in our ears
‘Pay attention lest you drown’
Now the river
trickles like a child’s piss
Black rocks stare at us as if in deep shame
For having their nakedness exposed
The banks have receded tremendously
Like a bald man’s receding hair
Days gone, the area was blanketed by trees
And stories of ogres were way too real
The rustling leaves, dancing in the wind
Made us think of the ogres’ whispers
But not anymore. The land is barren
You can see the horizon
The land has been stripped bare
Leaving it as alluring a witch’s nakedness
The future is one big fat lie
It is a large neon sign in the sky
That human ignore as they toil
Investing in a day they may not see
The future is one big illusion
One that has been accepted in every station
A bright future awaits you, the lie
And an innocent kid's soul is lost in a mundane pursuit
The future is an unfathomable lie
Your employer wants you to work first - sigh
Your landlord wants your rent first
The landlord is right. He accepts the futility of the future
What is a future if not mere accumulation of seconds?
And the past one is gone forever
The succeeding one so fleeting
And when all these are combined together
You will realise that we are barely alive more than a second each
The bright days drips its seconds
At the same rate it did thousand years ago
The dreamers bake their souls in the sun
The doers drain themselves in the sun
And time wills itself, effortlessly away,
As it is wont when one desires it still
Mocking the dreamer expertly weaving excuses
For the day he made excuses his mantra
He had long since stopped living
Except because it takes too much effort
To stop breathing – to stop breathing while poor
Even though we were united by love
It seemed as though each of us
In their own love cocoon
Created parallel universes
Cemented by an occasional call
An occasional I love you
And even though we saw each other
Travelling in the same direction
Hoping to meet at an unknown destination
Yet content knowing we are headed the same direction
Content in not knowing we are headed to different places
And when we break down along the way
And we try to reach out to one another
We realize there is a huge gap between us
We realize we were never going to meet again
