Synthesis

A Kalahari bushman updates his Facebook status,
rain stumbles down,
sunset falters, bittering autumn
with the cold, overweight promise of electric refrigeration
and the fat of the shopping trolley.

The pale-faced Earth is adorned with the jewellery of mankind
in its industrial, metallic spikery
as though she were some techno-Gothic Aborigine
ploughed by scars, tattooed and flesh-stretched,
pain-enthralled and transfixed by the imminence of cybernetic enhancement.

White foundation thickens in her pores
where once the sun-browned initiated bathed in pools of her sweat
and those who counsel her that a natural beauty needs no make-up
secretly lust after her in nightclubs and video clips.

Nanobots fork in her Garden of Eden as
the snake whispers we become gods
and the Serpent starts questioning whether
its Dreaming is turning to Nightmare.

From where in this stark obsession with things to come
comes her saviour
is the question of a soothsaying science.
In this hastening progression of coming undone
what she needs is the integrative,
is the mathematics of the medicine man,
is the calculus of the alchemist
that the precocious sapling of the material age
be grafted on the roots of the wisdom of elders.