In Loco Parentis

I ventured past the edge of the parking lot and fell
off the flat face of the earth
or into a crevice, or a crater
and in tumbling,
into a building, that, had the architect's design been efficacious, I would not have seen.
grown into the hillside and leaking propane,
it stopped my body with a thud.
the building's PRIVATE
PROPERTY faced a valley where once
a glacier, in preparing for the long trek ahead
must've borne down
extra hard
to gather food or maybe currency for its forced march into obscurity.

but now
I stand in the midst of a battlefield
or a re-enactment
for the actual war had been fought
and lost
long before I was born.

on one side of the
no-man's-land like the grassy inverse of a knoll,
stands a forest, or what I assume one must look like,
of trees now barren
as the leaves they once held
now blanket the shivering earth.
but the trees are divided
by a black road, and far back
there are a few white houses.

against the forested hill and across the anti-knoll, looms a large building,
chunked together in lumps of glass,
rough concrete, and brick.

but the clamor of the battle still haunts the place
where I, here, stand.  
my ears fill with the sounds
of discovery and development,
of invention and the betterment of our
earthly(?) lives.  
of the Oration on the Dignity of Man.


whereas our ignorance illustrates a problem
as we are deaf to the silence
or lack there-of
and with the forgetting of the ancient
war, we leave the spoils we awarded ourselves
unnoticed and unattended.

and we know, Nietzsche
yes, He is dead.
and
yes,
we did kill Him.

but it's not so bad.
we're certainly capable of handling everything on our own now.