Before mankind rose
to see that the brightest flash
creates the darkest shadow,
it was already known
a life lived in fear
was a life half lived.
Half lives
used to be different.
The calculus of age
has always held that
children double in age
faster than their parents.
The gift of youth,
the simple magic rituals of play,
use an energy like anti-time,
that seems to suspend
the perpetual wave of moments
on which we all ride.
Unmarred by tragedy
and left to its natural course,
the innocence of childhood
decays slowly
with a half-life of a decade.
What's left of innocence,
if left to decay,
either becomes disdained as ignorance,
or, if kept alive,
a spark and a seed
for the rediscovery of beginner's mind.
But now
our children mature
so much faster yet
from the pseudo-hormone
chemicals that,
more than any other affliction,
increasingly cancer our children away
into the void.
Lost.
Lost to invisible demon rings
of dioxins and chlordanes that,
despite their slow half lives,
are accumulating in a mass of humanity
that has enthroned itself
at the top
of a techno-empire food chain,
an experiment with the chemistry of our future
that'll linger longer than us all.
Living in the age
of the big lie
the dispirited elders
cannot lead
toward a better truth
because they are as lost
as their progeny,
the youngest blameless
for the circumstances
into which they were
born.
These leaders: the ones who
excuse radioactive emissions
by claiming the exposure,
relative to background radiation,
is marginal.
Conveniently forgetting
we've been slowly increasing
the background radiation
for years:
With every excuse, half lies
with a half-life
of hundreds of years.
Then there's the final enigma,
soon to be a black glow
beneath a desert mountain,
the spectre of a Plutonian future
with a half-life
of 10,000 years,
a future greater than civilization.
Empires built upon
so many half-lies
no one can tell
if any truth
is to be found in the
result.
The half life of half-lies,
the halved lives,
we have life,
our lives half lived.
