The Waterline and The Bridge part 2

The Bridge

We are a world approaching a bridge, driving up in two lanes, but

The right one is out, requiring a merge some way down

The dutiful respectful masses get in line on the left

The speeders bypass to the point of intersection skipping to the front on the right

Sure enough someone lets them in, every day rather than the embarrassment of saying

You cut ten million behind and slowed us all down if everyone aligned in the back

We would all flow through faster, but no the cheaters always win out and the losers

Have their solace in doing what was right, knowing the peace of sleep and facing the mirror

Of their child’s eyes, so in the dilemma, how do we cross this river?

This bridge of generations of slowing down and speeding up of ethical rules to pass the musts

Of what needs to be for this globe and humanity to function;

For the average intelligence person to find dignified work, to feed his family and not feel absurd

What of the traffic lights installed on the far bank, does poll position ever even out

Where those ahead must wait and the straggling left-lane motorists slow and steady from behind?

Or is the red-signal our Nagasaki, where it all ends not with Gabriel’s horn, but a foul

Expanding cloud mushroom squawking above the horizon boiling the seas in pastel dies

As we find so many us are feckless to the tasks of the modern computing power

Of machine learning dusting our capabilities into a shriveled shell of boot-strap self-sufficiency

Imploded to the idea that the exponential power of the microchip spreads prosperity

Rather than consolidates it into the digits of routing numbers to foreign financial institutions

To detour taxing nexuses drafting out healthcare, education, factories, roads and safety

To the very consumers which purchase the iPhone serving a billion needs in a single empty pocket to the legions at Foxconn to the true ingredients of a hot dog, the tales of talents spin

Like the rims of the ride-high Escalade in the right lane pushing up and boxing out

Seeing the world from a certain perspective; the on-star, the rear camera, the in-dash hard-drive

Makes one on a perch of sorts, aware of what one can witness, but not what one blocks by asserting the very position that obstructs seven drivers from behind from forecasting the road ahead.  The gawkers rubber-neck the accidents causing more never knowing what it was like in the dustbowl depression when drivers would abandon a full stalled automobile because no one could afford to repair a car, let alone find parts.  

Oh Woody Guthrie, we see a man sloshing in this circus to find a doctor, a door frame, a meal and diploma for his daughter; How does this turtle stick his head out the water?

Above the line to be where he naturally should be able to go,

But the world seems to drown him, cast in a shrimping net with no escape 
To trawl the whole ocean floor demolishing eons of coral and ecosystems to show

A moment, a pause to connect the disparity to tyranny

To bridge a flower to seeds without soil

To a people without air

Serving as machines in high-rise tombs twiddling hours of idleness and traction-less labor

For digits to exchange accounts for in the end we are an aggregation of our numbers

Viewed as either a sum or a unique composition to the source code in ones and zeros

Trading daily our most limited resource to rearrange currencies of tulip bulbs

Hoping each to traverse that bridge and find our journey justified by how we crossed

To whatever is on the other side

Looking over the watery edge, knowing so many never even made it to the precipice