Life’s Currents

Urban Life

She moves like a spark across pavement,

heels striking like flint against stone,

windows flare with neon lungs

breathing out exhaust and ambition,

each crosswalk a fuse waiting to ignite.

Working Class Life

Hands calloused into circuitry,

palms soldered to labor’s rhythm,

coins clink like raindrops on a tin roof,

each purchase a small thunderclap against the silence of need.

Celebrity Life

He surfs the glare of cameras,

a comet skimming atmosphere,

burning not for warmth but spectacle,

his words like fireworks,

bright, brief, and hollow when the smoke clears.

Everyone’s Life

The ladder of progress hums like a power line,

its rungs trembling with overload,

the current threatens to arc,

to leap from human grasp into the choking chaos of flame and ash.

And still…

A child’s hand is cups his pilot-light,

a curious flame of dusk-like fragility, delicate as a firefly.

Yet, what awaits are rifles pressed into fingers,

dooms day vests heavy as tombstones,

innocence turned into over-the-top circuitry for destruction.

Eventually…

A plume rises,  

not incense,

not prayer,

but a mushroom cloud,

time’s hourglass shattered,

sand scattered into the wind.

And then…

The current falters,

the wires slacken,

the wattage dims not into ruin but into silence.

Life’s third rail hums,

hungry for touch,

its appetite a drumbeat of catastrophe.

Centuries pass.

Dust settles like a librarian’s sigh.

Beneath strata of concrete and bone,

a chronicle is found,

etched in brittle paper,

scrawled in ink that once thought itself immortal.

The discoverers are not us.

They arrive on wings of kindness,

their eyes like calm oceans,

their hands incapable of fists.

They read of our cities sparking,

our celebrities burning,

our workers soldered to hunger,

our children wired for war.

And…

They laugh.

not cruelly, but with disbelief,

as if handed a playbill for a tragedy performed by clowns.

They shake their heads,

marveling at how a species could turn wattage into weaponry,

could mistake overload for progress.

Then…

Absurdly,

they shelve the chronicle next to “Extinct Curiosities,”

between “Dinosaurs” and “Self-Inflating Balloons,”

and move on to plant gardens in the ruins,

to teach the wind new songs,

to let the earth finally rest from its electric appetite.