Trees as Survivors

 

Rebellion is not necessarily the sole 

prerogative of humanity though the search 

for an ideal well may be. All things being equal 

in nature each species is conspicuous by its

form and features typifying its kind and 

recognized as such. Yet there exists among each 

of its kind variations with some so askew to 

the original blueprint their presence taken for

an instance of a living thing choosing through

personal agency a form unrecognizable in its 

lack of symmetry. Giants of the forest are in 

this category; a misshapen form rejected for 

utilitarian use where straight and tall is the ideal

bypassing the anarchic symbolism of rebellion 

to form, ultimately resulting in a perfectly venerable 

specimen of breath-taking girth and height its guise

of majesty and longevity a triumph of nature.

Eye To Eye

 

There, now, is a union conjured in hell

yet it will certainly serve its principals

well for neither brags of principles that will

fail in their communion of conquest and

subjugation. Comrades now, though one

celebrates the peacefulness of harmony in a

restive population requiring frequent reminders

that conspiring against their government comes

with the promise of life imprisonment and the

other dispenses with such niceties through

outright mass slaughter of those resistant to

their rule.  The mutual proviso both have

settled on is non-interference in each others'

management of their respective populations

each free to punish as they see fit through

diametrically opposed ideologies. Tyranny 

makes its home in many persuasions.

 

 

Dread Disablement

 Nature neither negotiates nor compromises.

When her blueprint was complete in the

certainty that every minute detail was

attended to she flicked the spark of creation 

unfolding the universe in the vast timelessness 

of a vacuum she made space for then watched 

as her creatures animate and inanimate emerged 

in the fullness of the new element she called time.

Of her creatures large and small she endowed

the means to survive to know themselves

and to evolve crediting the explosive genius

of their maker. Of those who failed to use

her gifts she devised the exquisite agony of

reclamation of consciousness rendering the

failures inoperative and dispensable as every

internal organ critical to life along with memory

and thought fled the spirit due to expire. The

demon she appointed to oversee the inexorable

process took to its assignment with a vengeance.

Friends, Not Confidantes

If it's a shock

keep it to yourself.

You haven't seen her in awhile

and now she appears like

a deathly apparition. Yes

she's smiling, she always does.

And it's genuine because she

genuinely is a lovely person.

All the more shocking

to see her visage with its deep

perpendicular runnels etched

distressingly in her still-young face. 

Standing casually her husband

beside her they are as always

the well-adjusted couple yet

she has become vanishingly

less than she once was. It is

you know well vanity that dresses

her in tights and brief tops

and you wonder why a woman

of her age and stature is mired

in such insecurity and whether

before it's too late you might express

your concern or simply say the usual

that she looks like the cat's miaou. 

 

 

Force Majeure

Hers is a mighty power from the 

minutiae sketched within her 

creative disposition of the universe's

gases and minerals before time

and the vacuum consuming endless

space she is attentive and deliberate

overseeing all that exists while

tasking her elements as aides in the

drama of upheaval and renewal. 

From the spinning of nebulae and

evolving of constellations and their

stars overseeing all that evolves and

revolves in the heavens of the stellar

night she turns brief scrutiny on her 

lesser landscapes to artistically create 

an impulsively fey spectacle of 

shimmering incandescence as rays of

the morning sun burn through the 

canopy of a forest drenched through

a night of ferocious thunderstorms

wind still whipping the steeples of tall

old giants paying obeisance to nature.

The Monsters Among Us

There are those who ply their horror in dark city

passageways awaiting vulnerable passersby

young girls on their familiar morning treks

to school never again seen alive, their frantic

parents calling police who discover a horribly

bludgeoned body as the coroner identifies death

by asphyxiation, with insufficient evidence to

lead to the perpetrator who goes on to commit

other atrocities. And there are those who find

purpose in numbers to assault entire tribes

vulnerable and peaceful leading to bloody

slaughter of the men and children, abduction

of the girls and women used until they perish.

These are men born of women whose ghoulishly

twisted minds and absent souls stalk the unwary

with bloodlust reflected in their entitlements

to terrorize and shred the dignity and security

of the helpless hapless whose anguished cries

for mercy feed the fires that burn the furnace

of hatred, passions venomously steeped within as

they menace and strike and rape and slaughter

while the world looking on, shrugs indifference.  

It's The Jews!

Shout it into the dark abyss of the universe

of a cursed humanity within which there is

a single enduring pathology, the searing

cyst of hatred seeping from the pores of

a myriad of fanaticals whose tenacious belief

in ridding the world of one tiny fraction of an

ancient people would be of benefit to the

balance for in their absence the weight of 

world society's inequities would stop the wobble

in Earth's axis and all would settle into a fairy

tale of peace and goodwill. The attempt was

made with some success before it fell in upon

itself with the realization that the satisfying

fuel upon which anti-Semitism feeds the

stupefying ire of bigots would be forever lost

leaving Jew-haters to look in vain for victims.