Violent Baudrillard

 

We draw our nails across the sky

And scratch the blue away

A jagged line, a hole in space and time

A fissure in the surface of this world

This false world, I should say

If you look close you’ll see the folds

And creases in the map

That lay on top of streets and buildings

Passing for the real 

So tightly is it wrapped

But it, like paper, comes away

We tear and rub and work it loose

There’s truth behind this thin facade

We’ll see, once it’s come apart

We will not let ourselves be fooled

All around, like paint on glass

People move and sing and laugh

But they will see the truth revealed

We’ll scrabble, strip and scrape and peel

Their joy is no more than a photograph

We score away the shallows

Of this unconvincing simulacrum

Rub right through this thin veneer

Religion, romance, music, power

We tear apart this weak illusion

And now, at last, the work is done

No longers will the shallows of this world deceive

The surface is all scored away

We will see our real faces

Reflected in the mirror of the deep

And there, beyond it all…

Is nothing

An emptiness. A silent void

A cold dead blast of empty sky

An endless ocean of white noise

The surface we have ripped apart

Had been, it seems,

Sincere

Not truth, exactly, not “the answer”

Often contradictory and random

But in the end, the closest thing we had to something real

Cobweb thin, those tiny brushstrokes

Painted in the world, each day

A fragile pact, a shared illusion

Truth though a million scattered visions

And we 

Unconvinced by what we saw

So clever in our quest for something more

We had scratched it all away