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AFTERSHOCK by Vivi Baker
Was there a specific moment in time
where our worship shifted and became
worthless?
Where we started losing ourselves in infrared rays and stopped taking
an interest in the things actually stay?
How on earth did we not see these seismic shifts and seize them, how can it be - when
now we’re all living in a world of blind transparency
yet our eyes have become
opaque;
they say the eyes are the windows to the soul - maybe even souls have an
expiry date.
Because all we ever do is buy, buy, buy. Throw our paychecks at the big men and
hope in vain that they will try to fix this mess that we created
cash in and get
cremated
I sure hope you got funeral insurance cause you don’t wanna be left waiting
In the line to the morgue
. And don’t you dare think about escaping
cause we all
know how much this nation hates the “queue-jumpers”.
You know that when a bomb goes off
there’s minutes of lingering aftershock
.
Maybe it was then that our worship became senseless
in the moments between the
explosion and facing the consequences. Maybe it was during the aftershock that they
tattooed these barcodes on our wrists
When we were all still too weak to clench our hands into fists
, when we all learned
we were property in this game of Monopoly
yet no-one had even told us how to play
by the rules properly. But we were all too shellshocked to take part in the trade
and
they taught us that nobody likes damaged goods anyway. And we made the mistake
of believing them.
That was the moment our worship became mislead and our trains of thought became
warped, like tangled pieces of thread. As we balanced precariously on the edge of
insanity
and at the bottom of our list of priorities was humanity.
All our empathy
became lost in translation
as hatred is now our preferred form of communication.
We’ve stopped standing hand in hand with those who wear their heart on their sleeve
and have started falling at the feet of those wearing thousand-dollar cufflinks.
You see our worship has warped itself into falsehoods and lies and over time we’ve
learnt to become desensitised
So we stay locked in the aftershock constantly, indefinitely Wishing for something
more, but never saying anything
Because we are always told to never speak up or make a fuss. Why bother, when our
barcodes do the talking for us?