Land of promises

This moment passing now
is pungent with years,
reeking of impulsive,
self-immolating whimsy,
and has eaten away the years ahead.
How much time is left,
now that all the world is taken?
This moment passes,
and with it, promise.
Ever the future's promise sings louder,
and we listen enthralled,
good little consumers all
spending (it's your patriotic duty!),
accumulating (it's the American dream!),
tearing up and building down
our disposable culture (see how easy it can be!).
Inconsequential Americans,
living outside of time
and above the world,
let us eat cake since we got it.
World and time and cake enough
for our bellies to grow big and strong
enough to eat us up.
Always an urging,
life breeding life within living bodies,
urging then spreading, contaminating in a moment's bliss,
and leaving a void when fulfilled.
Airports, interstates, bridges connecting
metropolises languishing
with empty condos and empty industrial parks and empty malls,
while alone in our darkened bedrooms
we shop and socialize bent over some flashing screen
consuming
until bloated and sweaty we crumple
like some financial market.
Cruel future.
Your promises unfulfilled,
you arrive with a stopping point.
All this pent up waste
gushing forth like rivers
breaking the banks,
washing tons away.
Future now present,
you shake us and
blinking, we creep out of the dream,
look around, and see each other,
and see the years behind us.
We were saviors once
and could do no wrong.
Our star rose with glorious enterprise.
Democratizing opportunity,
enmeshing nations on these stolen shores.
This living experiment sewn together from disparate parts,
kind of like some movie monster.
We burst upon the scene,
a radioactive giant,
and wonder why the world recoils
at our lack of self-awareness.
Waste more, want more.
We fuel our desires with oil and green,
and in the burning,
world and time are drying up fast
with no future left to fix it.
We catch up to civil rights
only to realize we're fifty years behind
(Closer to a hundred and fifty if you think about it.)
and the world wasn't waiting for us.
The giant went back to sleep
while dragons and tigers and whole menageries woke up.
We awoke on a quiet September Twelfth shocked and paralyzed.
And lumbering out of slumber,
we struck back.
Only we're fatter now,
and far too proud.
Eight years and two wars and no resolution
jutting into a future that may not be there tomorrow.
And we're beginning to look like the bad guys
even in our own fun-house mirrors.
We have tortured. We have terrorized.
We have leveraged the world into serfdom.
And we are everyone of us culpable.
Where was the protestation now that the hippies have all grown up?
The hippies we idealized and emulated
with flower-print skirts and folk revivals
were just snake-oil salesmen
profiteering on counter-culture
when it was most marketable.
Yeah, what they're doing is wrong,
but look at these prices!
We bicker over the meaning of 'is'
while our leaders steal the rain,
prop up dictators, and train terrorists.
We are willfully ignorant
and far too safe.
We are demand
in a such a glut of scarcity
that even Liberty thirsts and
not even a feather rests near an empty perch.