The Mask Of Kali Poem by Alonso Menendez

The mask sits alone in a box at the far corner of the room. A green glow is emanating from the box. I cower under the sheets of my bed, peeking at it from under the covers. I am afraid of the dark energy. It calls to me in the seductive voice of a million pleasures. It promises of dreams come true but I have seen the nightmare. It is an eternity of betrayal and exploitation that consumes the soul till only a shadow remains.
I have been exiled from paradise and can only to see it from the other side of the mirror. The future is chaos and I am alone. I traded innocence for pain and believed in wisdom where there was only failure, chasing illusions that will never replace the emptiness left behind from what is lost.
This is a candy land of lies that stains the hands with the blood of victims never known, blurring the line between right and wrong and uses the art of rationalization to divide ourselves from our sins in the hope that we not be damned. We are dancing with morality all along avoiding her eyes. Do not look into her eyes. You cannot be blamed for what you did not see. I didn’t know. There was no intent therefore the fault cannot be mine and so the consequences of karma are escaped. It is the way of the world.
I am but one voice being overwhelmed by the deafening roar of the machine, having no other options other than to be crushed by the gears and cogs or to surrender to the machines influence in exchange for the comforts that offer no comfort. They are temporary luxuries that fade with time into a mist of insignificance.
The measure of ones meaningful existence is recorded in an accountant’s balance sheet as profit and loss, maximizing efficiency to reduce cost with no account of the sacrifice of blood, sweat and tears. It is a steady disintegration by virtue of the monotony of repetition.
We identify ourselves by the labels that describe our function as manufacturers and distributors of a social economic system that ultimately reduces everyone to the level of consumer in the quest to posses the highest possible dollar amount. Value is increased by the degree of disparity that is imposed. We are drawing from the dark side and surrendering to greed as the motivating factor, thereby corrupting everything we come into contact with.
Forgive them father, they know not what they do. Dehumanization through industrialization, the purpose of our lives judged by how they are sacrificed upon the altar of the global corporation, monopolies spreading worldwide like a virus and we go willingly as sheep to the slaughter. Success is measured under the limitation of numbers.
We boast of the chains that imprison us, the slave in love with the master. It is our shame. It is my shame. It is despair that awaits us. We shall be cast aside when we are no longer of any use.
I pray that ignorance be enough to wash my hands. My eyes are closed so my conscience is clean. This is the mantra that justifies our ambivalence to the result of our actions.
When a ship crashes upon the rocks, is it the fault of the current or the one who steers the ship into the current? We place our lives into the hands of others that we may cast about culpability into everything that surrounds us, never realizing the initial choice was ours and made of free will and it is our responsibility to watch where we are going.
There is no sanctuary. I have seen the truth. Few escape the spider’s web. I remove the mask, humbled by how readily submission to violation was accepted.
I have become a whore on the morning after who discovers that a lifetime of excuses have yielded nothing but a counterfeit wealth and humiliation, feeling cheap and used up because prostitution, at any price, denies the true value of what we hold within. I am left not knowing how I am going to get by. We have been manipulated into the belief via propaganda disguised as education that the system is a necessary part of civilization, so ours is the duty of conformity to the conventions of society.
The nest survives because each ant assumes it’s role without question. The individual is nothing. It is easier to pay lip service to freedom than to actually achieve it and if the system is the provider of life, then only in death is freedom possible.
I place the mask in a box at the far corner of the room and watch it in fear. Fear that the outside world may yield to it’s power and doom us all, or fear that I myself might succumb to it’s sweet song once again. It is calling, always calling to me like an addiction. I feel there is no escape, for the spirit of the mask is destruction and still I hear it calling to me.