Where the Behemoth Falls

Look upon these husks,
behemoths and hulks of
servitude run down to
their grim obsolescence,
devoid of all those burning
reactors of potentiality,
unladen of all that good
cargo, that soular kinesis
of old, and wonder out
these answerless questions
against the sad and sand
carrying winds.

If we have disappeared
from beneath our own
worn uniforms, heard still
in nothing but an echo of
a name, all goodness gone
and only the malice of
ghosts remaining, then
why do we yet dream,
yet yearn for all those
handholds higher up
the cliff’s face than we
ever managed to grasp?

If we are doomed, nothing
but scraps upon the emptied
dust bins of time, purposes
all gone for naught, nobility
pierced through by every
well-documented exception,
servitude to our own basest
urges written so clear and
bold on the document of
our reign, why have we
created all these elaborate
falsehoods and grandiose
conceptions of worlds
beyond and undreamed?

If we were wrong about
everything, taking all and
giving none in return, just
as angry children do at
each awful birthday party
and never seem to understand
as their friends, one by one,
seep tears from their eyes and
ask to go home, have these
flashes of holistic thought
been nothing but a series
of off-speed pitches, us
on those rare good days,
perhaps moments of
clarity decorating a long
eternity of drunkenness
and spite?

If we lay dying, or have
already passed from these
shattered vessels in all
but the smallest, phantom
remains, if we are lamented
by none, mourned by
no legion of friends, given
elegy by no chorus of
happy angels, why do
we yet cling so hard, and
maintain, somehow,
hope of another dawn,
hope of another chance
to be all those things we
have fallen short of
thus far?