Inkspot Term 2 2017

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”. 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. You know that when a bomb goes off there’s minutes of lingering aftershock .

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?