modernity

Down and down the corridor we whir.

Sometimes ambling, sometimes running,

to create the illusion we are the masters of time.

As the automatic doors of both chaos and joy

are flung open on either side, the escalator rolls,

both towards and away from joys we cannot grasp.

You wonder why in this day and age

you cannot speed yourself past the chaos,

while you are fed terrible visions at a malicious snails pace.

And when you wish to stay a while, on you are forced.

You slow to ask a nurse why these doors are automatic,

if what lies behind them is so dangerous.

'Take it or leave it,' she replies,

with the institutionalised bitterness of an age.

Then is there not some remedy if I cannot stay the key?

Surely these doors were not always mechanised,

electricity being relatively new.

But maybe modern automation was borne

not from electricity, but from fate.

That we have always, and always will, see what we see.

Though we first built doors to extinguish the world;

we cannot.