Bleak:
Some mountain top village, a villain peering from a tower down at the ant sized humans below. The all seeing eye burns, a magnifying glass in the hand of a giant, snuffing out lives for entertainment.
“Deadliest attack by insurgents since the fall of Fallujah.” Those lines leak into the system, cross the wires, disseminate their data into the farthest regions to be cast aside and remembered in the late hours, before complete system shut down. Flash of body parts, smell of diesel and burnt asphalt in desert sun. Oil skimmed off the top of the Euphrates, that artery of the Fertile Crescent, pumping more than blood from an ambushed convoy into those verdant hills and outlying fields.
Count the stars. Kiss the solar system. 98 million miles and one new planet discovered, or moon.
and those ceramic heat tiles on the shuttle; “it’s a clunker, piece of shit car,” in orbit, sent up by baboons and rhesus monkeys in starch white short sleeved button up and collared dress shirts, coffee stains, no more smoking in the control room.
It signifies our lack of importance.
It signifies our obsession with god.
To shoot the distance, close the gap to heaven and escape our earthly vessel to feel complete. And then it becomes clear for just a second through the haze – a cylinder of sun – that nucleus of us – shines down into a swath of land, half burned by incendiaries, the other half covered in elephant grass that sways in the low breeze.
It’s the Oreo effect.
It is this wishful thinking that will do us in.
A Coat of Red Paint In Hell 