Social Evolution

Water towers have sprung up in the centers of yards
outside of building complexes where the poor live
behind chipped painted walls and windows with bars over them,
from which damp clothing hangs. Within a room, abundant
with southern sunlight, a mirror in a corner reflects
the faint green opening to the portal – the only door
through which to leave. The surrounding city has aggregated
me in. I remember where I went from having taken tours.
I know busy roads that imbue ambient dust in the onward way.
It sometimes doesn’t go according to our artifice.
Somewhere once there grew a tree. It got flattened
and turned into stone. Now rubber rolls over it on wheels
that have been commandeered by motors. The foot presses
the pedal. Hence the car accelerates. The hand lets go
the steering wheel to honk the horn of warning: Beep!
it screams, Watch out! Coming through. Evolution progresses.
Even in this latest stage of collective human history
we all still have yet to learn how to cooperate together
in an endeavor as simple as cleaning up the pollution,
eliminating poverty, assassinating the destitute on sight,
neutering the mangy canines that roam, exposing fleas
and lice to deadly chemicals, educating the worst
impoverished in the proper uses of soap, driving away
animistic superstitions, replacing the fear factors of communities
in villages with kings, banks, vast conglomerations
of fiscal power, the government and the scrawny, naive
soldiers and police forces. I will look after myself
if you please. I am the Federation of Me. Here, I extend
you the olive branch. Let’s form an economic alliance,
which will be one also of tender amnesty. We nations
might sit close beside one another by cozy firelight
and nestle against one another’s winter sweaters
playing footsy in wool socks, kissing with increasing fervor.