longer.blue

~ History repeats With acid stirring sulfur To fire and brimstone ~ The opening line, "History repeats," anchors the poem in the concept of cyclical time — the well-worn idea that human societies are doomed to re-enact their own catastrophes. But rather than leaving this as abstract philosophy, the poem immediately grounds it in the visceral and chemical. "With acid stirring sulfur" is where the piece becomes genuinely unsettling. Sulfur carries a double weight here: it is both literal and symbolic. As a dietary and environmental substance, sulfur is something we ingest, something present in our food systems, embedded in the very biology of modern life. The "acid stirring" suggests corrosion from within — not an external assault, but a slow, internal rot, a churning of something already present in the body of society. The image evokes a laboratory reaction, controlled and deliberate, yet inherently dangerous, as though civilization is an experiment gone quietly wrong. The final line, "To fire and brimstone," detonates the poem's full meaning. This is biblical language — the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, divine punishment for moral corruption. By arriving here through chemistry rather than theology, the poem makes a bold argument: we don't need God's wrath to destroy ourselves. The noxious fumes we generate — industrial, moral, political — are sufficient herald. The path to apocalypse is "heartburn" through the mundane repetition of corrosive choices. These three lines enact the very thing they describe — a cycle moving from diagnosis ("repeats") through process ("stirring") to destination ("brimstone") — suggesting that catastrophe isn't a dramatic rupture, but the quiet, inevitable result of chemistry already in motion. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To support me, visit: https://tinyurl.com/andy-rukes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~