For Those Who Will Outlive Us

Is the dark forest real
Or are we alone?
Asking are we the assholes
On a cosmological scale?

Compressed by surly bonds
Our ancestral DNA
Hands on an empty globe
The illusion of place

The second Big Bang
Another big splash
Fear the next ASAS-SN
21st in its class

Compressed by surly bonds
Our ancestral DNA
Hands on an empty globe
The illusion of place

The Earth, a hunger stone
See the signs and weep
A guilt-relieving trap
Overfit for the weak
To justify thirst for violence
In doomsdays more bleak

We'll join our descendants
Arc minutes away
Our hands in an empty bowl
In the distant grave of space
To touch the blackened clouds
As it starts again to rain

All paranoid, left behind
Give right to fight or flight in sidereal time
To fear the end is to be violent
Right or wrong, a threat's a threat
A self-centered societal excuse
Spreading this fear across the universe
Peering in at the neighbor's schematics
Designing our bunkers with the mold still in the attic
Shake hands through our cameras
Build sunscreen for the algorithm
A Hobbesian trap
Psychological contraptions
In the mental grammar of cold wars
Our imagined dilemmas just make us ignore

We are bugs that can think
The most invasive game
On a planet without trust
We have only ever been bugs that can think
Ant colonialists
Marooned away
Molten rock gone cold with us
Like fists in our pockets
Without threat of a fight