Poetry

Rejecting Soma

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Steve McAuliffe

 

 

And so we find ourselves now, living through these dying days of drip-fed Soma
And incremental soft dogma
A shiny self-promotional world in which oppression
Finds its manifestation
Behind manifold masks and expert skin-grafts
And the grim oppressor dons the cloak of freedom
Whilst secretly shoring up the already- mighty fortified walls
And still, the remaining doped-up shackled serfs do not determine
The true extent and nature of their own imprisoning
Coz from the earliest of ages
We were taught by rote
Passive obedience
And stage-managed subservience – to an overlord we would never ever encounter
For a good old while back there it seemed we enjoyed our dreams
And steered-fantasies well enough
Electable interchangeable front-men and women
Human sales-pitch-faces for the permanent machine
Selling us a nightmare as an attainable dream –
-Surface change we could believe in
Tiny almost imperceptible alterations to the pitch and speed of the bleeding
But there is something fundamental changing
Trust me, they can feel the swell of the terra firma shifting
And what was certain seems now uncertain – consequently all the stake-holders and placeholders are to be found keening
Fretting, sweating
At the terrifying possibility that the 100th monkey has finally awoken
For outside their diminishing reach, somewhere out there
Something is stirring
Deep within the caverns of solitude and despair
And yes, they have the means to monitor all these emerging tangled networks of awakening
But they lack the tools to close up the magic box
Thus those who would be dream-weavers
Are now reduced to mere observers
Banks and banks of screens in bunkers
Track and stack the information into computer servers
But still scramble to make sense of a narrative ever-shifting
Ever-developing
Enveloping the still-evolving minds of those who curse the status quo
And consequently they damn the very day we became our own narrators
Began by-passing the machine-selected editors
Laughing in the face of stone-faced men
Whose job it is to rein us in

See, nowadays
Only a select brand of ageing greying husks
Still place their misplaced trust
In twisted dangerous narratives and a machine that’s doomed to rust

It’s coming.
Trust me, this is the hour before the breaking dawn.

You can listen to Steve perform this poem on our pod The Great Sweary-ing In 

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