What would it mean to be civilized?
History books praise kings.
Didn’t they frolic in blood?
Overlords never planted flags,
snuffing unborn potential of the world.
Their riches arrived
in special delivery from God.
What would it mean to be civilized?
No cotton fields,
no ships packed with Black slaves.
Mississippi never burned.
No nations bared their fangs;
others don’t suffer gangrened body parts.
Industrial Revolution came—
we showered our love on Earth.
It took her billions of years to give us life,
we choked her breath in a few hundred years.
The hippo blinks its meagre eyes in disbelief—
now she understands
why their bosses banned
the word \"civilized.\"
God created special trees
that bore killing machines.
Nuclear arms were delivered to impoverished nations
through Heaven’s postal service.
Now the tigers have become vegetarian,
ashamed of civilization’s destructive powers.
No one chokes other nations
with red eyes and currency domination—
yet we call ourselves civilized products!
The monkey’s disbelieving laughter
echoes across the universe.
And the trees petitioned God for legs,
righting a historical wrong.
They want to save their lives
from the killing spree of civilization.
So what is civilization?
Serial killers’ senseless urges?
A show of performative performance,
where actors parrot the cues
without assimilation?
Now God sits in an empty office.
Visitors come only for nostalgia, spectacle.
They pray to Him,
with as much faith
as they have of winning the lottery.
He was stripped of power—
the day of his ascension,
dethroned by the tyranny of wealth.
And we invented art,
a shroud pulled over God’s face,
proof enough—
we are civilized.