SONG BEFORE BEDTIME

Evolution built itself a crude
imaginative faculty, like the nightingale’s
song or the peacock’s tail, all
sexual signalling before it was refined

by the tribe, with blunt tools
into language, thence culture, and finally
art – the long road’s apoapsis,
to here, the far end of the ellipse.

Which is nice, even as the waters
rise to meet Western Civ as it declines.
The alien messiahs failed to greet us
as promised; watch some cartoons –

they’re a purist existentialism
from the zombie state of living dread
if you need a distraction,
or pop a pill’s oblivion instead,

because if there is some Platonic
superlunary capital ‘T’ Truth,
it’s probably, vide Rorty, irrelevant
if you enjoy the scenic route.

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