Lost in the din of In versus Out,
the mind as vigilant as some unkillable tribe
trying to keep a safe distance from lions,
long captured and tamed, supposedly
still lurking in the darkness, the darkness now
masquerading as the wrong garments, say,
draped over our naked-as-ape skin,
or the wrong thought structure hovering
over our dead (yet well-maintained) bodies –
Heaven forbid some hare-brained ideology
forces us into the cold where the fanged among us thrive;
so, so obviously, we do everything we can and more
to maintain some sense of In-ness at all corporeal cost
and to re-brand this life or death In as
fashion, rhetoric, football, or the Federal Reserve.
The frigid and frightening lack of In we call Out comes
cloaked not in fiend-filled nights, but in cancellations;
better to be in with the mob, any mob will do, than be out
in that basic ancient all-encompassing fog of uncertainty,
that post-visible and inextricable present that our village
is indivisibly made out of and inseparably into.
And what we call civilization itself? An unthinking It
lifelessly building itself out of 1s and 0s, bit by divisive bit,
all for the good of server farms and faster search engines,
ever more for the greater good, ever more for the always faster,
trusting the high-hatted chieftains and tech wizards with torches
believing when told what backward versus forward might be:
yet this 12,000 year game of who’s in and who’s out
has left us arguing over what existence herself aims for,
and if that be the prize for the game we’re playing.