His Name is Warsama Youssouf

 

 

It is a feature of the human race that from

primordial time to the present migration

lends itself as a major urge to relocate to a

different geographical location, at times of

curiosity or a drive to discover opportunities

beckoning elsewhere, sometimes forced by

desperation to escape destitution, criminal activity

tribal antipathies, sectarian threats and often

institutional discrimination and hostility

where armed conflict wracks lives and ruins

nations. Some nations of the world are well

acknowledged for their dysfunction and

reliance on a culture of violence and where

migrants appear in pacific societies their

presence violates the established peace and

security when violent deaths, gangs, guns and

illicit drug running are identified with names

revealing origins instantly recognized by

their importation of lethal force, hatred and

a mass psychosis embracing psychopathy. 

ISIL/Syria Human Rights Exemplar

So, where were we now? Oh yes, now I

remember, the election of the Islamic State

of Iraq and the Levant to the human rights arm

of the United Nations. Right! Wrong? My

impression is all skewed, is it? Well then

correct me. Oh of course ISIL mocked human

rights, it celebrated Medieval torture and

honed its skills in atrocity-laden videos the

better to shock the world; it took human

decency to the bedrock of primal anguish

over inhumanity. So how could it qualify to

join the stalwarts of the UN's sterling-qualified

roster of human rights defenders? Well then

what in effect is the difference between Syria

and ISIL? The Syrian regime slaughtered a

half-million Syrians for the crime of opposing

the regime which failed to represent their best

interests. It committed mass torture, imprisoned

and raped men, women and children before

killing them. It sent helicopter gunships to attack

breadlines, it bombed hospitals, it used chemical

weapons on civilian populations, it dropped

barrel bombs on its Sunni Syrian population, it

created millions of displaced and refugees. It

fits right in on the UN's rights format. It is ISIL.

Another Victory for Justice

What a brilliant concept, what comfort to be

derived from a global institution designed and

created to uphold universal human rights, to

set standards by which all nations recognize the

human and state imperative to strive toward the

assurance that equality, opportunity, justice and

freedom prevail throughout the world. A world

beset by conflicting values, cultures, religions

all striving to mount pinnacles of superior power

over others convinced theirs reflects the highest

attainment of human achievement. The politics

of conquest, of ethnic and sectarian hostility all

surrender to the humanizing concept of equality 

and fairness where the great hall of member nations 

call misfits to order and consign outliers to the 

dungeon of moral opprobrium. So comforting it is 

to see a country that has seen fit to slaughter a 

half million of its own for insubordination while 

half its entire population flees the wrath of the

regime appointed to the great institution's glowing

human rights forum where it can henceforth 

pronounce judgement on other nations respecting

the rights and entitlements owing their own.

Forsaken

It's an old truism borne out as fact that whatever 

is old is new again. Wait long enough and what 

was once popular returns to yet again become 

the current fashion because 'everyone's doing it'.

That 'it' may have acquired a bad odour at some

point but no matter once it is dredged again from

the sewer of humanity's lowest common denominator

it's the flavour of the moment. That flavour sees

the interminable denunciation of Jews as horribly

flawed, their presence somehow inspiring evil in

the world given their morbid designs to grasp

whatever is of value in a satanic conspiracy to

rule the world. They once were viewed as sweet

and cuddly little mascots, emaciated in striped

pajamas with neat little tattoos, in mourning for

their loss and temporarily all their transgressions

were forgiven. Until that time when punishment

imposed by a hostile world led them to return from

whence they came and there establish defences 

capable of transforming the pitiable victims into

formidable adversaries, no longer sweet and cuddly

and susceptible to genocide, transforming them once

again into mere Jews, ridiculed, despised, forsaken.

 

 

 

Oh, CANADA!

 

My home and native land, you're breaking

my heart. As a child I was a Christ-killer.

I knew that because other children told me so.

Still a child when World War Two ended, I

overheard my father quietly telling my mother

that a mutual friend newly arrived as a 'greenie'

had recognized a guard from the slave labour camp

he had been assigned to, walking along College

Street in Toronto. As a teen I was stopped on the

street or approached on a streetcar by complete

strangers wanting to know where 'I was from'.

Canada, I said, puzzled, born here. As a young

mother scolding a boy who viciously harassed

mine and collaring him off  our property when

the father later knocked on my house door to tell 

me to keep my hands off his son. An afterthought

 paused, asking aren't  you Jews? In a lifetime of 

silent observation and random defence at offence 

reporting schoolboys at the Catholic school's office 

for chanting anti-Jew slogans, I've never doubted 

that Canada is my home, safe and secure. Now? 

Mobs of Jew-hating scum attack my people on the 

street in Canada's major cities. My prime minister 

cautions that anti-Semitism is anti-Canadian and 

so is Islamophobia ... now how did that get into the

conversation? Yes, not woke, just questioning.

 

 

The Fullness of Time

The Fullness of Time

When all else seems lost 
in the push and tug of time
the ebb and flow of our lives
there is left to us memory
and there are those treasured
albums not only in our minds
but those we so carefully
arrange chronologically as
photographs, an accounting
of joy and happiness when
fortune smiled and all was well.
Once young and vibrant,
expectant and hopeful,
living and loving our days
and finally arriving at the future
to discover the new reality
of deprivation when life turns
to loss and grief seeks proof
that happiness and the 
comfort of expanding time
once sweetly housed our dreams.

 

Truth and Consequences

For every action there is an opposing reaction

there are penalties to be paid for the invoking 

of honour, truth, justice and freedom

mere inconsequential words like human rights

to those who dispense with the pretence

they bear any responsibility to uphold

universal laws of right and wrong for to

them there is nothing wrong with their

decisions affecting untold lives of others

and everything right about accruing to

themselves the power to do as they wish

an extension of which is to punish those

with the unmitigated gall and naive intention

of holding them to account. It is the young

with their visions of idealism imbued with

the fervour of righteousness who march and

protest on behalf of the silent majority who

fear the consequences of opposing tyranny.

Devolution

A delicate creature she was
bones like a bird
little beak of a nose
voice trilling her welcomes.
If bird she was, a cardinal.
Flaming plumage she had,
her burnished fly-away hair
trailing her exquisite face.

Her body small and neat,
in its way sturdy enough
to take her to motherhood.
She’d also two dogs large
as she was not; golden retrievers
whose haircoats echoed hers.
Her constant companions
roaming through woodlands.

These creatures revolving about
her as though in an orbit
about their nurturing star.

Gone now, her companions
even as her children have
fled the coop she devised for them.
The children entering their futures,
the animals overtaken by their
finite life spans into oblivion.

While her future lies yet
yawning before her. She has become
as the sun, an orb of substantial
proportions, her hair still
flinging bright rays into the
atmosphere. Her petite features,
half hidden now beneath her
evolved gaseous rotundity.

Survivalist Traits

When nature's living gifts are unpacked no

instructions accompany them for nature 

has her own expectations that instinct will

instruct maternal minds on how best to proceed. 

An investment in survival comes complete

with a new generation to raise and to nurture

to prepare the nascent instinct to preserve the 

continuum of natural reproduction to populate 

nature's gift to her creatures, a green and 

vibrant playground laden with the resources

meant to inspire and instruct the minds of the 

curious and the gifted enterprising in their 

vision and capable in their talent geared to 

exploration and the advance of productive 

invention. Teetering on the edge of a world 

where nature as the supreme nurturer imbued 

her creatures with entrenched traits no mother 

might confer as values upon her young as 

quarrelsome, jealous and greedy little tyrants 

given to hysterical fits of ire and violence 

threatening and endangering the goal of 

communitarian universal peace and harmony.

 

Dousing Hostility

On her own her smile of greeting is ivory

white and wide, effusively 'Hi!' whereas in

his company both avert their gazes, the

neighbours of thirty years from whom

cold distance emanates to the extent that

before the gates of unfriendship went up

he would merely cross the street to avoid

countering someone but now he pivots to

head in a different direction, a lost soul

socially dissonant, evasive and skilled in

avoidance of civil discourse or contact. 

Today they walked by as a neighbour

pumped a flat tire, stopped midstream to

a mission where most would pause and

offer help. Was it mean, that frisson of

satisfaction when that ignored elderly

neighbour once more embarking on that

aborted mission passed them strolling by

just as a sudden cloudburst let loose?

 

 

Notice: Handle With Care

You must know the quality of language is of

vast importance and the thoughtlessness of

its careless use causes grave injury to those

whose social fragility can be shattered by

the incivility of assigning gender roles as

though doing such is entirely normal when

in this day and age we all realize it is anything

but normal when those who were assigned at

birth to a gender group were unjustly and 

painfully harnessed to a socially-personal

role entirely foreign to their psyche. Have a

care, do, when casually tossing off identifiers

designed to stab the heart of those who resent

and refuse their assigned genders vastly

preferring their own agency to determine

how they may present themselves. They will

suffer no longer and nor will they suffer the

vast uncaring public to speak the dread words

'woman' or 'man' in their presence. So pained

are they that compassionate governments have

passed laws against this form of hateful violence.

In making amends, one speaks now of a pregnant

person, a breast-feeding person. Remember that.

The Mass Psychosis of Exterminaton

There are some regions of the world that 

remain mired in the elemental primordial

laws of survival; the thin veneer of civility

often abraded and torn away in the passion

of tribal rivalry and vestigial stirrings of ancient

enmities. So it is in Africa which remains

a dark continent of violence in competition

for resources still viewed as scarce setting

tribe and clan against one another to create

victor and victim, a widespread condition of

inhumanity common to south Asia and the

Middle East where restive tribal and vile

sectarian animosity of ancient origin seethes

and simmers sending nations into paroxysms

of rage mounting conflict after conflict where

the guilty and the innocent alike become

sacrifices to enmity and the passion of greed

the lure of possessing that held by others

when destroying what is coveted becomes

the solution that no side celebrates conquest.

The raw law of survival turned on its head in

a mass psychosis of mortal extermination.

 

 

 

NEVER AGAIN

The instinct for self-preservation lies deep in the 

sub-consciousness of all living things since survival

is the goal imbued in all of creation's species and 

humanity is no different. Human beings can be quite 

definite about their preference for life over death 

even while other humans can be quite as insistent 

that they mean to take the lives of those resisting

the Grim Reaper. Jews have an especial fondness

for life, clasping it close to their bosoms for they bore 

an example of just how successful a sufficiently

determined enemy of life -- their lives -- could be

leaving ample reason to mourn in perpetuity. 

NEVER AGAIN they declared en masse and agreed 

that only a sovereign state that would defend them 

unlike all others that deserted their time of need 

would suffice for the full confidence of life, liberty 

and happiness. Now they are not herded into cattle 

cars to be shipped to crematoria, they stand and they 

defend each other from the malign plans of violent 

terror states and militias whose agenda is to destroy 

the Jewish state and once more annihilate its people. 

Before succumbing to yawns of indifference, the world 

castigates Jews for defending themselves while in turn

defending inhumanity against Jews in trivial pursuit 

of life, forced to take others' lives in a desperate effort 

to deflect the intended genocide by doing unto others.

Spring Forest

 

 It is as perfect a late-spring day as any that can 

be recalled to mind. The afternoon sun bakes the 

newly-fledged foliage of the forest canopy

as a refreshing current of brisk wind rustles the 

bright green leaves, a gentle murmur of content 

washing over the landscape. The red cap of a 

woodpecker ferociously attacks the bark of an 

old pine with metronomic accuracy. Heat hangs 

on the atmosphere, dry from lack of recent rainfall. 

Dogs race down the hillsides of the ravine to 

plunge into its creek and the crystalline water turns 

murky but this is of little matter to the pair of Mallards 

cruising serenely down its raceway, content with their

decision to remain where they first sought haven 

following an exhausting reverse migration in early 

spring. They have adopted the forest stream as their 

very own  and who would now contest them?

Moving On

The sheer numbers inherent in great volumes of

victims stun the mind and stunt the imagination

depriving it of emotional connection to the mass death 

of a half-million men, women and children deliberately 

caused by a tyrant reacting to his population but not 

of his ideology and religious sect agitating for freedom 

from the restraints of the regime. The relentless violence 

of a president of a nation against those of his people 

victimized by neglect and inequality who orders his 

air force to drop chemical and barrel bombs to still

their complaints captures the aghast notice of the world 

for the horrors he commits and the refugees that result

absorbed by neighbours and the international community 

even as his ongoing assaults become a bore and notice 

slips elsewhere. That same world community is never 

bored with the spectacle that presents when groups

of terrorists attack the Jewish state of Israel; a gasp 

of apprehension as Israel's defences strike back and 

the media fills with stunning condemnation not of a 

nation that must time and again defend itself against 

violent attacks but a nation that defends itself and exacts 

a price from the tireless attackers shielding themselves

behind their own populace, drawing return fire from 

the attacked geared to orchestrating the deaths of 

non-combatants whose tragedy terrorists triumphantly

trumpet as proof of victims of Jewish aggression.

Unforgotten

Don't fret, Grandma, you're not forgotten 
after all; hear that musical little ping? 
That's your email messaging you of another 
arrival made simple despite distance. It's your 
favourite - sorry - your only grandchild. All 
the more priceless and cherished, remembering 
you. A long, loving and detailed missive, 
grammar perfect, spelling also, filling in on 
the last memorable conversation: What's up 
with you guys?  She missed a few days of
classes; buses not running - severely inclement 
weather days the culprit. Finished reading 
The Book of Negroes you recommended, now 
eager to read others.  An "I told you so" moment, 
she cheerily admits. Best friend gave her
The Art of Racing in the Rain for Christmas.  
The book kind of teaches life lessons through 
the eyes of a dog, she explains, then goes on to 
elaborate on the plot, hoping the dog doesn't die
on the last page, a writing device she loathes
and anticipates.  The cover art is adorable -
see, she has photoed it as an attachment. She pored 
over clothing inventory online at American Eagle, 
chose what she wanted, went to the mall (crowded 
and gross) but they had only just the ugly plain crap
and clearance stuff no one wants any more.
Her longtime school chum Tyler, mentioned
his dad suggested taking him on a trip to look at 
universities during March break, and said he could 
invite a few friends, so she's thinking wouldn't 
it be fun! to map out the different schools 
they'd want to check out.  Love.

Insincerity or Civility?

 

It was a ravaged face that drew close to

yours as an involuntary recoil shook your

mind while you continued congratulating her

on her svelte new appearance. Gone the

thick rolls of flesh so familiar over the past

decades, in their place a curvaceous body 

with the merest hint of a upper-waist roll.

It was her face that transfixed you, pallid

and grey, wrinkles so deep and wide she was

transformed haggardly at close range. Not

a word of that, hissed your mind to self as

you heard out her references to overeating

on cruises, losing the weight, restoring it on

subsequent cruises. You know her, referencing

status symbols is her shtick and you have no

intention of hinting she was always thick

but smile and stroke her ego for she is after

all, like anyone else, entitled to kindness.

 

The Price of Survival's Instinct

Humankind did not forge itself

out of nothing, did not have a hand

in forming and creating the creatures

we now are, a race of thinking

awareness that seeks knowledge

and answers to the questions that

begin with why, how, where and when.

We know the where and the when

and we think we know the  how

but it is the why that bedevils us and

eludes our understanding. A simple

enough question, an elusive response

for nature does not willingly divulge

her creative process, much less the

flaws in her design. Unknowable and

remote nature devised the creatures that

we are, a race of quarrelsome, suspicious

acquisitive, inquisitive and emotional

beings that has seen fit since primordial

times to the present to lay waste to what

others have built, to loot their possessions

murder and enslave those not of their clan.

In our conceit of perfection we make no

effort to reverse the order where emotion

supercedes intelligence, a condition which

endures and victimizes the entire race 

reducing it to superficial intelligence

readily overturned when barbarity erupts

and civilizational mores collapse.

 

 

It's Be Kind To Barbarians Day

 It is touching and a source of great comfort

to know you have friends deeply concerned for

your well-being and you know they are prepared 

to fully support you when everything is turned 

inside out and you've been violently assaulted by 

a psychosis-driven psychopath. They will always 

be there for you, they tell you there is no 'daylight' 

between their support and your dire need. So 

closely are you fastened in their thoughts

for your distress is theirs as well. And they

counsel you be calm, exercise the civility of

restraint in the maw of a whirlwind of hate

driven by an existential threat. Sit back, relax

don't react, it will blow over, even as they tut-tut

an excess of violence; your defensive actions

in response to an ultimatum; leave your home

or die. But isn't it such a balm for the soul the 

solace of knowing how very deep and utterly

sincere is your friends' desire that you manage

to extricate yourself from the grip of death

with all due courtesy to those planning it?

 

 

Lights, Camera, Action!

The modus operandi is a familiar one stale as it is 

but why discard what works for those who are both 

psychopaths and cowards. Hudna waits in the wings 

once the stage has been set appropriate to the occasion 

provoking the entity to react to violence self-protectively.

Drawing the enemy to respond, whom the psychopathic 

charter schedules for eradication to possess his property 

an ancient heirloom of a long-gone past morphed

into a renaissance of the Judean homeland meant

as a world haven for a conflict-exiled diaspora

settling anywhere that peace could be found and

finding in return resentment and malice and finally 

an all-consuming campaign of genocide. The play 

at hand meant to portray the innocent of character 

traits owned by the psychopaths earning disapproval 

from the very sources that saw fit to surrender Jews 

to the gas chambers. Malevolence unleashed by the 

psychotic need to slaughter Jews sees rockets pour down 

like demented toys to explode the tranquility of a 

people's existential human will to survive. Its defensive 

military with the capacity to destroy those who attack

restrained by the principle of the sacredness of life

while no such inconvenient scruples hold terrorists 

in check even as they cry 'victims' exhorting the 

international community to condemn the brutality 

of a people steadfastly refusing to be annihilated.

Bigger...Faster...Stronger

Go ahead, cast your mind back to early days

and resentment that 'boys had all the fun' 

then match that with a strange new philosophy

that boys will be girls. Girls struggling to emerge 

from men's bodies to free their female minds from

involuntary 'occupation'. And when they succeed

leaving masculinity behind they can still become 

fathers (or mothers) in a non-birthing role of

musical-chair-genders that is the darling of the

triumphant progression of society's wokeness. 

Women unable to compete in sport and athletics

with their masculine counterparts created a role 

for themselves as female gymnasts, sport figures

competitive-ring fighters of Olympic medallist

recognition competing against their counterparts

in the world of women's competition. Suddenly

confronted by transgender 'women' with all the

characteristics and embodiments of male virility

competing in female categories, outperforming

women-at-birth to great acclaim. Too bad, so sad.

Wrestling next up? Best not end up incarcerated next

to a celled female-by-choice-and-natural-inclination 

toward the exertion of male proclivities in forced sex

in this strange new world extraordinarily privileging

the victims of nature's unfortunate rounding errors.

The Spurned

There will always be a way to express hatred 

and there will always be a target for that hatred

vituperative, poisonous in the trajectory of its 

exodus from the depths of a common sinkhole 

of rabid rage to the ears, eyes and minds of the 

recipients who once took it upon themselves 

through their ancient sages to be a light unto the

nations who collectively spurned that light

deriding its source and spewing the venom

leading to justification for genocide. It is in 

human nature to try again when the initial effort 

failed, and there have been occasions when 

the effort was urged on repeat mode and still 

that stubborn people will not abjectly succumb 

to the scorn but proudly insist they are what 

they are the designated people forever spurned 

yet held to the very expectation from others 

that they must suffer for it is their assigned lot. 

A shrug, a sigh, the mustering of resilience and 

hope and carry on as we must, for it is destiny. 

 

 

God of War

 

God of War

He rampaged bloodily through the

pantheon of Roman antiquity,

Mars bellicose and triumphant,

leading the never irenic battalions of

Rome's fearsome military might,

their phalanxes, their helmeted,

breast-plated, shielded centurions

and their raging chariots and swords

to lay waste to all those nations

defiant unto death against the might

of Rome. How could they possibly

know of a distant planet that 

served the Universe by experiment

through incomprehensible orders

of magnitude far surpassing in time

the era of our own ancient mould -

Mars unleashed a nuclear storm 

of absolute annihilation, destroying

all life in its dread demonstration

of the very nature of intelligence

coursing through an advanced

civilization ...  An eternal memory?

 

Canada Calling

 It's that time again, a new census. You

will receive your census demand including 

your secure access code to enable your 

retrieval of the online forms the statistical 

geniuses at Statistics Canada developed to 

reflect the interests of the government they 

serve in tabulating vital issues and just 

incidentally labelling you and every other 

citizen of the country. Through the medium 

of tedious questions largely focused on 

residential occupancy, prompts urge you to 

respond to queries of sex assigned at birth

current gender, marriage status and whether 

you are the wife of your husband and your 

husband is your ... em ... husband. These 

critical issues appear the crux of the statistical 

drive. The repetitive redundancy of questions 

appear designed by a quasi-literate ignoramus 

well steeped in progressive wokeness to please 

the superior demands of a feminist LGBTQ-2 

overseer. You may not count yourself out of this

exercise in sheer stupidity on risk of a fine for 

non-compliance is a crime. This is the law. 

 

 

Lips Sealed

Shush! Lips sealed. Ears closed. Eyes shut.

Not a murmur, not a hint, speak not of what

humanity is capable of. Think deicide

matricide, patricide, genocide. Imagine also

fratricide, both Biblical and historical but say

nothing and instead look in your rage and

disbelief for causes and blame far more

palatable, stifle fact and history for it stings

in echo of the pain and suffering of untold

unheard, unwanted dimensions of truth. Cast

about for blame seething with the rage of

racism and tamp down the suffocating history

of tribal slavery, the pillage of humanity in

the darkness of the soul of darkest Africa led

not by conquering Europeans but by Black

tribes looting and killing and enslaving their

own, aided, abetted and partnered by their

pious co-religionists setting the stage by

showing the way for trade in Black slavery.

The Sky's No Limit

Beijing's on a virtual roil, there's no stopping its

exuberant triumph over attaining its rightful 

place as world leader in any sphere of human 

endeavour even if it results from spiriting away 

discoveries made by others displayed as their very

own success story. There are no horizons too far 

nor issues too taxing for China to overcome for 

from its seat on the UN Security Council it has 

veto power and from its perspective as the 

powerhouse of production, a Goliath of global trade 

no David exists to warp its trajectory to world

dominance. From Belt and Road where impoverished 

and aspirational nations become indebted to 

infrastructure investment courtesy of China's new 

Silk Road where all roads lead to the CCP, to eyes 

cast to the heavens and a Long March to settle its 

claims of universal dominance, China rules. So 

look out below for when the dispensable baggage 

of its orbiting space station is jettisoned as a 

metaphor for all that becomes lost through China's

blueprint, momentous crashes are imminent.

Wild Canada

Aloof and dignified the giant bird

stands immobile in a small meadow

adjacent a stream deep within

the floor of a forested ravine

as though contemplating when to

move on in its reverse migration

for it will soon exhaust the fish this

stream has provided the traveller  with

after its prolonged journey to refresh

its endurance before setting out to

continue flight toward the  ultimate

destination where it was born and

retains memory of its origins and the

familiarity and urge to revisit the habitat 

best suited to its appetite for life 

and so it spreads its wings wide and soars

legs dangling in the distinctive measure 

of flight identifying one of nature's

many creations, the Great Blue Heron.

Lord of the Manor

 

It is mesmerizing to watch this

creature with its clever, dexterous

hands with opposable thumbs

skilled at manipulating objects with

a singular grace and familiarity much

like my own. He is not the least

perturbed by my presence, nor I

with his. His opportunistic presence

taking advantage of food placed out

for neighbourhood birds and squirrels

is one of casual entitlement. We speak

it would appear the same language so

that there is much we share between us

this round furry animal and me each

engrossed in our separate preoccupations

he to gorge to his heart's content knowing

there will be more to come and me busy

in the garden tidying up after winter.

Social Culture, Primitive Urge

Clearly, the most outstanding and obvious feature 

of a socially primitive society with its fundamentalist 

view of women as brood mares whose presence is

solely to fulfill the carnal needs of men is its view 

of the place of girls and women in that society

where a sacred text of ancient origin instructs that 

little girls from age 9 forward are suitable for sex. 

Odious as it is to the civilized world this permission 

gives great comfort to those males in the knowledge 

that their dire needs have divine blessings and

can be met with the same fervour as committing to 

other tenets of their faith. By contrast civilized societies 

understand quite well the boundaries of the social weal 

where neither children nor adult females can be viewed

as chattels else a moral crime has been committed within

an enlightened community. Aside from which predators 

consumed with the passion of psychopathy within that 

community pursue a similar goal of rape, merely sans 

sanction and punishable by law. In the former men can 

do no wrong in abusing women and girls, in the latter

carnal acts of depraved violence merit discipline

as long as the malefactors are not men of influence.

 

Irksome Meddlers

My four-score years and more do not

shield me from the officious little

commissars who plod through life

with the undiluted belief that

they hold the universe together

in their great unblemished wisdom

firmly knowing that rules are rules

and no one must be permitted to

ignore them and it be his self-appointed

duty to proudly inform the ignorant

of their perceived assault on limits

of the permissible. And so I as an

inveterate naturalist besotted with the

natural world and a lifelong student of

same lovingly at times transplanting

wildflowers to flourish in my garden

given a lesson on the legality of what

was presumed underway. While snapping

the shyly elusive head of a spring 

wildflower chastened with the warning

it is illegal to pick such. Nor would I;

the presumptuous little twerp ignorant

of the legality of transplanting them to

camera or mayhap to the garden.

Hostage to Hostility

The sainted embodiment of poets

and playwrights knew full well

that there is a corporeal language

shared by all humanity endowed

by nature in the primordial past to

bleed when we are pierced and

to feel pain wrack our frail bodies

to mourn when we have been deprived

of life's full meaning. Our faculties

of thought and sight and hearing

and movement are similar one to the

other. Each and all of us wherever we

live, however we live know fear and

humiliation, prize the dignity of the

person, ardently seek to secure our

unknown futures. Above all we evade

death for as long as we possibly can. This

the language of humanity languishes

with the calculated deliberate withholding 

of empathy for the pain and suffering and

loss by those whose culture speaks an

entirely conflicted language of hatred.