a final fire

day after day of pushing buttons. never knowing which one will start the reaction, the mixing of fuel, the runaway implosion that forces the core inwards. he sees the gauges behind closed eyes, glowing. they will not let him sleep. the stress in unbearable. alarms go off. temperatures rise, the damned gauges react, the all-or-nothing pressure reaches ALL then releases its rage reducing the world to NOTHING.

but not today.

another day, no faces, run and hide. shift after shift, shifting but never changing. wars imagined, made real, fought to the death. the banks win every time, quietly behind the scenes, laughing between piles of infusible irrefutable gold. the buttons, pushed. hidden codes shuffle. thunderstorms pass far overhead. what if the power fails? all the codes would fall to the floor like last week's rose petals. and without the codes there is nothing to stop the irrational, irreversible reaction.

the end of 10,000 years of arts and invention. maybe plants will survive and inhabit our bones when we're gone. things will scurry and tunnel and dine on our silted-over credit cards, take a bite, spit it out, inedible garbage. the sun will continue to pump energy into the earth. we were just a side effect of that energy. may the next creatures rise and be all we wanted to be, and more.

--- daydream at 1am, 4/17/07