by Shaun Lawton
It is a time of frustration amid conquest, a time for killing bees in order to keep our lawns tidy and clean. A time when citizenship means tainting one's innocence with the complicity of mass suicide. A time when all one can do is wink and think "That's the problem though, isn't it? Thinking about it in the first place," a time that is forever escaping us through the collective screen of our forgetfulness, a time to be echoed through the void after its own echoing, a time currently being lost to us all at an accelerating rate we are fundamentally incapable of keeping up with, a time bound to leave its imprint as yet another layer of electromagnetic radiation which woven into helps define the remainder of creation, in other words a time like any other to come or go before it, a time whose arena becomes the stage of our actions and their consequences here during this primordial moment we managed to capture for ourselves by our very definition, the solitary champions of existence, wallowing in this, the time of our lives, a time of shedding more than skin after we strip our clothes, a time of flensing and dismounting from our sure footed steeds, our bodies we have ridden this time wave upon wave our entire lives from the moment we were conceived, to our Mothers we have continued to occupy and further this time, a time of treasured visions behind the eyes of a dragon, a time of sapphires and tiger pupils held in locked regard, a time of regalia and innocence devoured wholly as in the instance of the anaconda preying upon the star-nosed mole, a time of rapture like any other and of a pain so unique and intense it blurs away altogether among the suturing numbness of the stars, a time to remember who we are and forget who we've become; the universal solvent performs its work on everyone, once upon a time when personality was exterminated in favor of efficiency and convenience, when fear of the dark was bred out along with the heart, where automated drones did not so much as spill a single teardrop over the prospect of the extinction of the bees, where gray skies unleashed radioactive rain upon a new continent of plastic, Anarchia, home for the formerly homeless and disenfranchised splinters of humanity, a time when oceanic travel was outlawed by every nation on Earth and pirates once again roamed the seas, naturally; it was a time for starting over and beginning new stories.