Life in the Golden Age

Life in the Golden Age

In our vicinity
The last of the dinosaurs are dead.
For that reason, and for others,
We do not pack heat.

The globe is warming, but we
Sit comfortably high above the rising waters
Of the planetary ocean.
New York may drown in water
And Darfur drown in blood,
But here on Cloud Nirvana we enjoy
The Golden Age.

This is the Age of Gold,
The age of now,
The apotheosis
Of a million hungry years of human hope.
At this moment, now,
In this place, here,
Humanity has reached its celestial peak.

The spatiotemporal coordinates of this event
Are quite specific.
The month of April in the seventh year
Of the Twenty-First Century of the Common Era.
The place is Yokohama, in Japan,
Tokyo's dormitory suburb by the sea.

The weather moves in from China,
And the news,
Similarly distantly sourced,
Arrives from horizons elsewhere.
Usually, it's none of our concern.
Bomb blasts, contamination zones,
Carnage grounds and systematic genocide,
It happens elsewhere,
And none is our enormity.
We cannot hear the screams from the burning dungeon.
For us,
There are the sybaritic sounds of peace.

Here in Japan,
Civilization is delivered daily with the dawn.
There is for me no must-do-this requirement
To weapon my way to safety with a gun.
Security is a given, a guaranteed,
Accepted without a question as if a norm,
A standard blessing granted by Nature's boon.
Quicksands, precipices and falling meteorites
Are for other people elsewhere,
Not for us.

Is it Paradise?
No, but pretty close.
The truth of the present moment is utopia,
Everything working for the best in,
Being realistic,
The best of all possible worlds.
Not Paradise, no.
Neither rose garden nor fairyland,
But you surely wouldn't want to live in either.
This is a real world
Where real people can live their real lives.
This is a living truth achieved
In the hard cold light of unembarrassed day.
We do not need the wished-for world of angels.
We need a human sphere,
And that we have.

This is the gilded age,
The living Age of Gold.
Our screens are bright,
Our hard drives, they are perfect.
Our electricity is a cool perpetual,
And all our connections broadband.
At my fingertips,
A billion Internet pages sit and wait.

I am aware, of course,
That events could turn untoward.
In the comic book emporium of my mind,
There ate aliens savage as Aztecs,
Fascist zombies,
Al Qaeda school maams,
And mummies wet with fungus from the tomb.
Also Americans.
But, for the moment,
They cannot escape from the hallucination zone
Into our sushi shop reality.

I live in Japan,
Where the fiercest of the real is the crows,
Hugely black and glistening,
Glossy with intelligence,
Alert, insolent and predatory,
Infinitely confident.
Our natural supplanters if we fall.
But we do not.
For the moment,
Our grasp is perfect.
Nirvana Palace reigns supreme,
And our world is suzerain.