Heroes

I

Glassy towers lurching toward the sun
From top to bottom filled with folk
Who run
The world.
Lost and tossed amidst the paper piles
Computer disks and coded, numbered
Files.
They're hurled
From crisis to emergency to mess
While trying hard to solve the urgent
Press
Unfurled
As business, school and politics of state
Are put in queues with decisions
To await
The whirl
Around the office in a bureaucratic haze
Competing for attention of the makers
Of the maze.

II

And they all feel like they're heroes:
They are saviours of the modern age.
And they all feel like they're heroes
Stars upon a self-deluded stage.

III

Human workers striving through the halls
in buildings (open planned) where only
Walls
Can scream
As everyone attempts to do just one thing more
And solve another problem just
Before
They dream
Of stopping, to take stock of where they are
And why the answers always seem
So far.
It seems
That death and sickness are the only way
To end the maddened frenzy, and
The grey
Tired stream
Of work as practiced by our weary friends
With faltering, feeble pulse will finally
End.

IV

But they all believe they're heroes,
Keeping systems sound and running well.
But they all believe they're heroes,
While the systems slowly slide to hell.

V

Has life become a set of 30 second takes?
Where all of us are cogs in a machine
That breaks
Apart
If we -- as one -- do not perform at peak
To do our level best to win,
To seek
The Part
Of victor in our deluded man-made war
And stand upon the entrails and
The gore
Of hearts
And aspirations crushed and burned and flayed
And the ashes of our psyches are what our systems
Made
To start
To build the glassy towers reaching to the sun
From top to bottom filled with folk
Who run
And run
And run.

VI

But we want to be like heroes.
Yes! We want to feel our colleague's love.
And we want to be like heroes
As the towers fall upon us from above.