Chaos Theory.

I want the world to be ordered,

Separated into neat categories,

But it’s all butterflies and bears

And once in a hundred-year storms,

Polar ice melting, sea level rising,

Forests burning, people killing people

Over land, religion, whatever.

And when I look inside, I see my own mind

Running a hundred miles a minute,

Calculating a risk I will never face,

Voting down autocrats whose names

I will never know,

As I blindly swerve through streets

Designed by engineers well versed

In making the impossible seem possible,

Only to arrive at a destination

Preordained to not be the one

I was aiming for.

Who knew

That in the maelstrom of information

Swirling about the ether,

There are codes to make sense of things,

But not to us – we who suffer and strive;

No, this intelligence belongs to

The shadow world or marketers

And large corporations who mine our data

Like it was iron ore,

Our values, our interests,

Our preferences, our clicks on Pinterest,

Every desire, perversion, quirk or love,

Converted to zeros and ones,

Chucked into a digital tumbler

And spat out as spam,

While the world outside spirals

Into an insane whirlwind of war

And aggression, as if we have gone

Back in time 50 years!

What have we become?

We are children of chaos,

Our merely being here

A coincidence of egg meeting sperm,

Which required the dinosaurs to die

And mammals evolve,

Thanks to a random meteor strike,

Hitting that sweet spot between

Total annihilation

And partial species extinction.

We still look to the skies,

In fear another rock might

Peek out from behind the Sun

And due to Gravity’s eternal return

Smash us into oblivion.

We seek order in a disordered universe

That doesn’t hear us and doesn’t care.

So, we are going to have to learn

To live with chaos.

It seems to rule,

And it is everywhere.

 

 

©Shaun Green 2023