[Suzerain of Sheol]

Agathós Daímōn

It wasn't the day we killed the last philosopher-king
as the idiots gang-raped wisdom in the streets
cheering for the razing of their civilization

It wasn't when we accepted our lot as sellout assassins
executing the future for anyone who'd pay
a bullet to the biosphere for food on the plate

And it wasn't the sunrise presaging extermination
merely an empty threat full of hot air
as we dragged it down to star in our snuff-fuck of the planet

No

This wasn't any of those things

This was the death of history

And I can't remember how long ago we started to envy the dead

They burned the forests first and then everything else
the space required to erect their idols
Thanatos and Demogorgon
Mammon and Angra Mainyu
all hauled in bitterness from the sludge of the abyss
in the evaporated beds of Styx and Lethe
ashamed of the association
but slavery was more vogue than sex
so we found a new use for the old gods
in the churches of science laid to irradiant waste
and no one knows how to make more nukes

But that's not even the half of it

The ones who remained pretenders to the sapience of virtue
as if it had ever meant anything at all
those salient pariahs drunk on memes of lèse-majesté
careening into the ether as they plummeted to the gutter
cursing in languages no one understood
our martyrs of an unspectacular suicide
missed by none

It was not long before we forgot what heroes were

Every mind the victim of its own chimera

Fear could be one's joie de vivre

We were a people of poison
inimical matter down to our particles
stacking fake atoms together on the cosmic floor
and now the sieve of the earth shall cast us off
the human experiment rendered as a collapsing function
zeroing out
the great filter
the soul

I might lay myself down on the empty shore
and allow the waves to take me
cast off to the glowing waters
where mutant light would deliver me from the torture of this witness
the annihilation of a conscience as the last stand of truth

We could have been angels and we chose to be animals
dividing happiness among the billions until there was no other choice
the amniotic blood of the next population driving the engine of extinction
when those responsible have died and we suffer for their sins
abandoned to the cosmos as fetal innocents
left with no lives to regret

If only laughter could carry to the desolation of the stars
the testimony of this deranged species serving as a warning to the universe
as though there were some sense of order to it all
but there is only this ugly divorce from the earth
the unbreathable wind that we created
the legacy of humankind expelled to the void

and the hope that we never come back