The Transition of a Thousand Stages

Leave your lovers and heroes
Of righteous causes. Ignore
Those strangers coming to town.

There are older storylines,
Narratives with deeper ruts.
Change disrupts a cyclic world.

There’s a new way to collect
Energy, or a new way
To manage information.

There’s a new pump in the world,
A shift in distribution.
Could be life, jaws, oxygen,

Eusocial organisms,
Looms, wheels, print, bits, whatever.
The way these tales always go—

Unlike external chaos
Tales of earthquakes, volcanos,
Devastating asteroids—

Is that disruption evolves
From within, starts trivial,
In happenstance invention,

Then radiates growing waves,
New power imbalances,
New stunts with information.

Things go brutal, violent.
There’s novelty, suffering.
Then things settle down again

To cycle stably. The End.
The genre of the story
Could be called stage transitions.