Now we live in a world where hope is gone

Now we live in a world where hope is gone.
The police have done something with it.
Or maybe the politicians stole it.
Anyway, it is gone and gone for good.

Now we stare and our eyes have become dry.
Now stories have lost their meaning.
Now grandpa prattles on about days that never were.
Now babies drink milk without an ounce of milk inside it.

All of the conspiracies were true.
Even the contradictions between them were true.
It was hell before, it is hell now.
We do not even know the meaning of fire anymore.

The fish are all dead.
We still smell their carcasses along the shores.
They have been dead twenty years.
We still smell them like fresh death.

Rather than religious wars religious jokes.
Or jokes of wars, wars that play the joke on all of us.
All of us beating our chests over our beliefs.
There are no beliefs anymore.

Beliefs are a thing of the past.
We believe nothing, nothing is believed.
It is hard for us to believe in depression.
It is hard for us to believe in hunger or madness.

There are a few small animals kept in zoos.
Zoos and laboratories collected a few specimens.
There is a tale of a man in Scandanavia.
He has the last elephant, and he is quite satisfied.

Some of us eat other human beings.
It has become a norm in some places.
There are no more riches to be had in this world.
Poverty abounds, like mold in a damp house.

People are not really looking at one another anymore.
There is something between any one person and every other.
There is something between each breath and every other.
We can hear the machine running now.

MMMMMmmmm...that sound, something steadier than a lung.
The thing hums along like it knows what it's doing.
Then the dong of a bell and the boing of a spring.
There seems to be a whole bunch of mess in the mechanics.

Children no longer practice getting shot at.
They have stopped practicing shooting too.
Now they play again as they should.
They play in this somber, funereal way.

They are becoming living apprentices of our dull wits.
We have nothing left to teach them.
We have forgotten how to learn ourselves.
The children will have to rule this world without guidance.

There is a cheapness to everything.
We are constantly unsure what we are saying.
There is no weight to the heaviest thing anymore.
Poseidon's trident's really a silly toothpick.

Faces are turning into made-up things.
Our names are a politics of the minute.
Our names are tiny caverns.
The caverns have enough room for one giggle.

There is a loneliness at the heart of this new world.
An old loneliness that makes this new world old too.
Realizing that we are never alone in this world.
We are all crammed together too tight in here.

But we might forever be a loneliness.
A loneliness so deep that the loneliness is hopeless.
Hope has gone all the way to hopelessness in this world.
We do not know the meaning of fire anymore.