THEY
Everything is too complicatedSlouching toward Armageddon
Chapter 8
But being punks,
2With an ax to grind,
3We don’t care about what they will say,
4aEven if they still know how to read,
5And even if they bother to read it,
6Because somebody somewhere had to write down the Word on the Past,
7And the Word on the Present,
8Because it’s all around us,
9Everywhere,
10Including TV and the schools and the movies and what they call literature and art and philosophy,
11And nobody has a chance to change a single Word,
12Unless they know that it’s just a bword,
13A word that can be changed or scratched out and replaced,
14With one that works a little better.
15But you can be sure that they won’t ever quite get around to putting it down on paper,
16Because if they did,
17It would look an awful lot like some punk had done it,
18Some punk with an ax to grind,
19Because when you really try to do it,
20And sum it up in the cmodern way,
21Without a lot of djingoistic lies and ecomforting delusions and fmisguided optimism,
22It starts to look like it might be headed nowhere,
23gWith nothing more than a microscope under its arm,
24hAnd a cynical gleam in its eye,
25iAnd a book of quotations in its overalls,
26jSlouching toward Armageddon,
27Just waiting to be done in.
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Chapter 8 / 10