Are we going to destroy ourselves? Timothy Victor Richardson's poem, "Sans End", sums up the endless delusions we've shared that have gotten us into so much trouble. Television is the symbol of how we employ distraction to close off our conscious mind from our own destructive tendencies and the misery we create. Interpretation by Jeff Flint. Graphic courtesy, bigfoto.com

SANS END

by

Timothy Richardson

Smiles at our paralyzing cares come out

at night. The beaming, little screen

injects bright bites pretending satisfaction

in streams of psychic gauze and I think:

Succeeding empires rake the sky in heaps

of sense with towering ideas,

forget the marble carcasses of Rome.

When cultures sink beneath the crust,

they only hope to rest in cases of glass.

Will we leave rows of plastic relics

once they have had their dream who wash the swollen

flows of thought through cubes of light

or a poisoned planet, life from other spheres—

ruined much as ours— rejects?

Perhaps all earths breed fallen, toxic creatures

whose scientific drives undress

old flesh to thwart the shadow of God’s wish

as if life without end is not the end;

who give up on the place their parents lost

to play with rockets on the stairs

and scratch the dome of air over which God broods

while thorns, wrapped in the news, lay faceless;

who mine pride’s rich deposits till they hold

a nuclear gun to the global head

and threaten to have their way or blow it off.

Perhaps that would be a natural end.

What is a human heart: ventriloquist’s hand

or cache for freedoms we feed time?

Do years of original thought line aging faces

or does He paint on our skin plaster?

Are we a necessary plague God takes

worlds with or stewards who can save

His languishing creation and keep it whole

like innocent tribes who never junked

their primal grounds, never tore the tail

from a serpent’s maw, never listened?

Then, the astounded teeth of stars come on,

replay until a thrilled crescendo

floods things that change your active life, forever.

How long will they electrify?