Reactive

Our corrosive dreams,
Drops on the surface,
Burned our ambition
Into the earth.

Beneath our feet:
Chains of events.
Oscillations,
Change.

Our footprints remain.
The sea claims and solidifies them
Until they are fossilized
And we are the dead.
We never understood
How acid our thoughts could be.
Thinking, concentrating,
Distilling ideas to their essence,
To virulent potency.

Tomorrow dawned in a mirror
Of our designs; our reflection
So real, so vivid,
Was change achieved
But opposite and unnoticed
In our eyes.

All the good we sought to do
Etched the face of creation,
Undecipherably reversed,
Inverted, turned upon itself.

Our caustic dreams, cut deep
To the quick, for no better reason
Than the cutting,
Cut to reshape
For the sake of it,
Take for the taking,
Cut away because weakness reveals
A path for erosion.

And every thing surrounding,
All made things,
Came from dreams like those
Insistent, urgent dreams
Or ideas whose time
If not come was surely coming
Devouring our horizons
Like the sun-bitten disc of an eclipse

We built those things, all this,
Not knowing what would follow
Or who would come later
To despair.

The consequences: the sequences
Set in motion but poorly grasped
Eluded us and elude us still.

We are living with them now:
Poison in the landscape,
Stagnant rivers, swift, grey,
Full of nothing but pompous schemes
Running away to sea,
To a grim and sulphur sea.

 © BH 2014

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This is the third-last in the poem cycle, Initialising. Which is is here.

Bloody human condition! What we do, whittling away at everything. Dissolving, etching, corroding. It's all in there.