History Becoming Naked
by Odin Roark

Remembering a tenuous future…

Summit talks once of smiles
beneath top hats and three-piece crumpled suits,
now but misinformation by microblog and hashtag delivery,
reminding those interested,
that Special Forces once parachuted into rescue mode,
but now may become but radiation’s dust rising
amidst the torrid mushrooming of man’s hatred
like a floating chorus of tutus.

But unlike a Degas ballerina class,
the future-war pirouettes will defy gravity,
remaining airborne until at last
the disintegration of life’s form and beauty
settles as nothing but radioactive particles
shrouding the once fertile planet,
perpetually blinded by negation.

Such layered bygones,
the compressed replication of metamorphic past
will reflect tautology’s unlearned lessons,
mirrors facing mirrors in an echoing triumvirate,
the denial of reality, love and peace.

Such might be the not-too-distant tomorrow,
the consummate ad infinitum,
history becoming naked.