Modern Ritual | Carlyle R. Phelps

Modern Ritual:

It’s dead quiet, save the occasional whistle—
A chapped-lip dry whistle, kickin’ up dust along the plain—
Nature herself hummin’ a dirge for saints buried in the sand—
Innocents outlived usefulness after only a year of life.
Bellies filled with fentanyl, then sacrificed to Santa Muerte—
Every bit of flesh abused—used to satiate passions—
Mangey dogs spilled their guts, then rolled ‘em in Terra’s waves;
Their blood feeds the demons on the periphery
Of a people beset by rituals of excess and degeneracy.
If we’ve a pang of heart, perhaps it’s well enough intentioned,
But our talking points obfuscate a pattern in myopic aphorisms.

The Spirit of Slavery haunts this land with a repetitive refrain:
“A human is not a person—merely a means to an end.”
A polished plantation, full of ghosts of materialists,
Housing the trafficker, the racist, and the abortionist.
The Eugenicists plantin’ clinics in thinly veiled blackface—
The phrenologist doctor sayin’ tiny things won’t be missed.
Stepin Fetchit takin’ that baby for his pale massa race.
Perish the thought our progenitors were any more the savage—
We fund the means to carry the child to his grounded end—
Be it ship, or coyote, or clinician hand, it’s all the same chorus:
“Life is measured in power so the weak are worthless.”

We erect ziggurats we don’t call ziggurats;
to gods we don’t call gods;
Through science that don’t use method;
Behind credentials that don’t bear weight at all.
Under knives of healin’, our progeny’s ripped in twain;
No more or less the Aztec, eatin’ the heart of the slain.
But one day we’ll be on death’s alter, alone in isolation,
Going the way of Rome, with slow, then quick decline—
The embers of our children will heap upon our head,
As God hands us over to the passions we freely chose—
Love lost and love rejected will be the damnation of our soul.

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