Here In Spirit

 

You are gone, but your indomitable spirit

defying even the Angel of Death lives on.

Unbidden, memories of you visit us daily.

Your loss and our grief daily replenished in

snapshots of your loving and beloved

presence in our lives. Your brother recalls

your being there yet knows you are now not. 

There is nothing, no one that can replace

you in our hearts, though yours stopped

beating through the daily cadence of our 

lives together sharing the joys and all the

tribulations that life brings for all too short

a time. Little did we realize in the moment

when we took such anxious care to shield

you from the vagaries of life's unexpected

threats that the most implacable enemy of

life would nonetheless enter at the time and

place of his greatest advantage taking you

from us. Time's essence has not mitigated

our loss and your memories do not yet 

compensate for your abrupt departure.

  

Nature's Landscape

 

Nature's unrivalled genius lies not only 

in the unfathomable depth and breadth 

of her invention through timeless creation 

but the minutiae of the complex interrelations

each of her creations are imbued with, an

endless chain of existence interdependent and

exquisitely graceful and it is with gratitude

that her creatures observe the immensity of 

the landscape she has provided for practical 

and aesthetic sustenance. The most minor

of her creations of no less importance than 

those whose heightened awareness conceits

their sense of consequential primacy. The 

forest is a monochromatic landscape of 

black and white in its winter guise; its floor

steeped deep in snow, its trees dark and gaunt

its diurnal creatures stirring at dawn, the 

night-haunting raptors and four-legged 

stealth predators retiring at daybreak. Above 

the canopy an expanse of blue invites high 

flyers while woodpeckers cleanse tall old 

sentry hosts of larvae. Nuthatches and 

companion chickadees flutter here and there

while small furred creatures assiduously

search out seeds; their aquatic counterparts

shelter under icy streams that meander 

through the forest. The setting sun casts 

fiery fingers lighting the tallest of the forest 

trees until dusk arrives and night falls.

 

 

Irrepressible Malcontents

 

Yowling and howling with the wretched

injustice of it all, these tender flakes

of humanity represent an anomaly

where it has become evident they have

failed the test of social maturity, content

as they are, determined as they are to

remain malcontented juveniles forever.

Like children everywhere who seek to

possess what they see others have

and they not, quick to claim their

rightful ownership of all they covet

scornful at suggestions of civility and

the possibility of sharing so that others'

needs too can be accommodated. For

each and every potential solution to their

pouting pique they dissent with rage

then resort to violence reflecting their

reasoning that if they cannot obtain the

objects of their desire then no one shall

and those who occupy their desire must

pay the penance of death at the hands of

the aggrieved. They have lost the sympathy

of onlookers, the support of nearest kin

for their unreconstructed incorrigibility

has wearied all but themselves, left now

to their usual devices of demonic rage

for their unfulfilled aspirational tyranny

expressed in murderous defiance of

the merest scintilla of human decency.

 

Waiting...

 

With the limitless patience of the faithful

they wait, imperturbably confident and

assured, the seers and the shamans, the

yogis, the sufis and the swamis, near

Chichen Itza.  Their followers worldwide

besotted with the spiritual chill of the

unknowable void of being will settle for

alternates.  Awaiting the spirals of

heavenly light promised to invade the heads

of believers, from their vast galactic journey

they weep in fear and joy.  A cosmic dawn

arrives to gift the worthy with telepathy and

they will loose themselves from the

niggardly magnetic bonds of Earth, to

levitate and flee its constricting confines

set to implode.  Electrical vortexes

arrived from the galaxy's centre bid them

hither and they will respond, leaving fear

embracing love, bathed in the light of

transformative cleansing of the soul.  For

they have discovered true salvation, fleeing

the stagnating brutal influence of life as

we think we know it.  That is the revelation

the cataclysmic upheaval that engages 

humanity, at one with the golden light

of divine forgiveness, an arcane alchemy 

of  life bypassing death, the final frontier

to incandescent longevity.  If not immortality

then why not?  Thirteen and counting.

Look...at us, at them, the pathetic ones --

quivering with the misery of unrequited life.

 

 

Viral Pandemic

 

It lurks, an unsuspected menace

patiently awaiting opportunity

for this pathogen is a rapacious threat

its endurance and communicability

a fearsome feat of nature's strange

random endowments to her creatures

both minuscule and gargantuan

whether harmless or endowed with an

appetite to consume other life forms

on the path to realizing its dedicated

existence. From its original host

patiently waiting ... waiting ...

then striking and striking again

and yet again ... its unqualified

malevolence striking terror into

the minds of observers whose

medical training informs them of

its potential as a raving and present

risk to survival of its hapless

victims, sending the clarion call

of enhanced vigilance and urgent

calls to isolate and examine its very

nature the better to arm themselves

with a discovery capable of disarming

the beast's intention of calamitous

global destruction of humanity.

 

 

Your Truth

 

What could be as headily liberating

as the freedom to speak, to release

from the prison of your mind how

you feel, what you think, your

unsolicited but urgently needed

expressions of belief, your solutions

to problems that you know exist yet

are rarely discussed, the details of what

you know so that others may too and

from your generosity of sharing may

join you in your private campaigns

or laud your courage in airing such

sentiments, perhaps even assemble a

cadre of like-minded stalwarts in a

campaign to air the musty corridors

of certainty and introduce nuances of

disbelief challenging and exciting. So

no need to clasp silently those thoughts

and misgivings lest you betray your

enmity to the smug civility of the social

contract for the greater virtue of free

speech calls. You are not truly racist

when you parry-and-thrust verbally

over critiquing the criminality of

Zionism, the penchant of Blacks to

disrupt the serenity of the white race

the slovenly habits of Asians and others

whose culture and errant habituation

sounds the clarion of disruption to the

norms. And when you scathingly consider

feminism a symbol of man-hating

bitches focused on empowering women

while emasculating men. And nor do

women have a monopoly on gender

for any man bent on upsetting their

referential superiority has but to declare 

himself an absolute her for society to 

humbly genuflect for this, you see, is the

grand power of free speech utterances.

 

 

Exhibitionism's Grandeur

 

 

This child whose face is perpetually grimed

in a paroxysm of rage will never win a beauty

contest nor be credited with a sweet demeanor

but she has become immensely popular as one

with an aggrieved message to deliver in a

manner quite congruent with her pathology on

the autism spectrum of oppositional defiant

disorder, despising authority so redolent of

adolescent juveniles' resentment of adults

positioning themselves as authoritarian in the

belief they have the right to regulate children's

behaviour. Children invest much in their gleeful

assertions that it is adults with their lack of vision

who have disrupted nature's unblemished accounts.

What a different world we now inhabit than might 

have been imagined a half-century ago when

parents felt assured of the sex revelation of

their offspring at birth, to the very present 

when what you see is not necessarily what you

believe with gender dysphoria representing yet

another life-disruptive issue in the social order

pitting progressive authority against the mere

status of parenthood. Long years past people

were aware of quaintly rare anomalies such as

hermaphroditism and homosexuality and the

attraction to transvestism as an entertaining

novelty, before an entire championship and

celebrated industry arose embracing the

new reality of errant humanity's fascination

with the dazzling display of nature's occasional 

deviation from the boring irrelevant ordinary.