Industrial Man

21 July 2022

When I survey Industrial Man
in his anxious glory, his endless
competitiveness, I still doubt
that his station is final,
that any part of his nature is fixed.
If by now one knows not to assume
that the spectre of Progress can save us,
perhaps we can doubt, too, its wrath,
which still animates workers,
machine-like and futile,
in cities all over the world.
You have heard this before,
but my question is different.
It grows from a deeper uncertainty.
Reason defies observation. The chaos
is plain, and our planning has ended
in time. So the wrath can be doubted,
the wrath of the godless mind-in-the-sky
who defies observation, whose wrath
is our animus, naked and pure,
like the God of before, without love,
but that wrath drives its heart I am sure.

There is something uncanny about reality,
sitting out there in the ether,
like a renegade neighbor,
the kind that can never be trusted.
Reality, too, can surprise
even those with the best educations.
I wonder what more it will say,
once the moss has grown over broken traffic lights
and deer play through shattered parking lots.
It likes these places best, because less
resists it there. Even here, where traffic flows,
I can hear it call like the sound
of bird-shot through tin, the eccentric neighbor
readying himself for adventure.

The machines never sleep, nor do we,
being imitators of our environment,
and somehow we have to compete,
feeling threatened by gadgets
that do it all better than we can,
and so we assert our own dominance
whenever we can. Apes that shove
one another to the mud, the slow
endless endeavor to be king of the hill,
on a hill now maintained by machines
bred by science in underground labs...
Why is there no more sunshine here,
in our minds, where in earlier times
gentle breezes brought birdsong to bear
on a plant's slow endeavor to blossom?