day ONE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED and FIFTY

a temple to our best possibilities

we batted the word around
dystopian
paranoid, I wondered
if I should be more paranoid
my friend insisted
it can't happen here

maybe I should have read
more pulp sci-fi
looking for clues
on humanities need
or reason to color
the future so dark

is it true we understand love
in a way that makes us fear it
is it true that somehow
as humans begin
to see this version of humanity
as non-binary
that somehow our thinking
becomes solidly binary
maybe that's more a symptom
of the times, a corporate
branding of information

to look at the future
from 1980, 2000 wasn't so strange
it was religious nonsense
a coming milennia
that was scary

it was easy to see this future
or some version of it it
from twenty years ago
both cases a slow descending
a winnowing down
of freedom, we failed
to call fascism
now authoritarianism blooms

to look ahead, the future
should be a blank space
a blinding light obscuring
perception. it should be
a temple to our best possibilities

humanity is in dire straits
it needs to change course
drastically to remain
a species after this mass
extinction we created passes

as always
we let our hubris lead
yet again our hubris fails
it might not be dark yet
but the future, the temple
of our possibilities, is fading

--Jason Baldinger