The Triumph Of Narcissism

Caring men can not live in this world

I do

the things I do
to stave off the pain
the butchery
the vanity
the holocaust
that is humanity

you back off
I rush in to fill the void

clamoring to feel
what you don’t
what you won’t
what you evidently can’t.

No,
you condemn instead.

You
who call feelings weak,
truth conjecture,
foresight fabrication,
you condemn

you who kill for God

exterminate species
rape the planet
pillage the soul

you for whom there is no reality but self
condemn those who care and call caring false.

And God saw that the wickedness of man was great
and every imagination of the thoughts of his heart,
And the Lord said I will destroy man
whom I have created from the face of the earth,
But Noah found grace.

And a great flood came and warned us,
not of the sins of our flesh
But of the arrogance of our complacency,
And we ignored it.

And Narcissus sat transfixed by his own image
in a Pool left by the Receding Waters
And the Pool was called Civilization.

And the generations of man were not many
But were plentiful and they were proud
And Pride begat Hubris
And Hubris begat Calamity

And a carpenter’s son came out of Nazareth
to point the way to Sanity
But was Butchered for his effort.

And the Butchered Son bequeathed the cross to a fisherman
And anointed him Defender of the Faith
But the faithful transformed him to Pan
while their brethren in the East Found Faith in a Prophet
who found no faith in man.

And Pan begged mortals to follow the melody he sang
But the power of the cross was heavy
And the way of the crescent one-dimensional
And nature was undone again.

The imams and the priests turned their backs
while the Vicar and the Satyr merged in death
And were born again as Peter Pan.

Believe in magic
the Born Again said
believe and you can fly,

Clap
he cried as the light began to fade
clap if you believe.

And we did
And still do
But the fairy tale is done.

The warnings sound
And water starts to rise,
we study our reflection in its surface
But never see
it’s nothing but ourselves.

Narcissus Pan is the only man left
And he is not a man.

Here we sit clapping in the dark
failing to adapt
excluding and making ourselves extinct:
evolution is but experiment
And we are only one of many.

Noah weeps,
And Jesus and Peter and Mohammed and the Gods,
And turn away to avoid seeing the end of everything they sought to create

And their great hearts that founded fertile nations
And could once save man from certain suicide
tremble and grow faint in the face of the cataclysmic storm.

And the storm comes.

And it is done.