Immensity, Intensity

It is the duty of a witness to remember
It is the duty of the chronicler to dismember
This bloodless corpse, this nation’s history
But the immensity, the intensity
Of this task freezes the blood in my veins
And I am at pains to maintain accuracy
But there is a gun at my temple
A dagger at my heart and I stagger
Beneath the weight of this regime

That slid smoothly into place and the spell
They cast, the spell that put the kingdom to sleep
And, while immobile as statues, we still weep
At what we have become, at the crimes
Carried out in our name. As I am summoned
To the bunker of our histrionic dictator
They do not insist, yet I do not resist
And I live the life of a hedonist,
Destroying the future, obscuring the past.