Be ashamed...

Stare quietly into the sun,
Or loudly.
It matters not a whit how you became blind.
Hide behind whatever it is that makes you feel better
but when called out
don't pretend,
don't act outraged
for being called sightless, thoughtless.
Know what it is you are.
You chose this darkness over the light.
You don't get to divorce yourself
from inconvenient faults
or pick you own truths from the rabble,
to parse the darkness into pieces
as if splintering it creates light.
You stared into the sun
and it hurt not you... and you knew this.
You know this.
You did not care and you did not think and you did not reason
because you were blind before you ever stared into the sun.
You could not do those things before you were blind,
you cannot suddenly do them now.
So don't for a moment try to tell us
there is light in the darkness,
because you never could see at all.
And you do not care,
Don't tell us your are righteous and proud for being righteous
when you have lied all along and still cannot deem to tell.
Don't you dare think to tell me I am angry
to try to make me feel less than,
when I am passionate and take a stand.
You do not get to claim a moral high road.
You do not get to claim to be good
to have integrity and character
for choosing to be blind
for choosing to be ignorant
for choosing to stand with those who hate
as if none of that matters
and besides that,
claim to be loving and compassionate
because only the blind
stupid enough to look into the sun
can see.
We see.
I see.
We see you are blind.
We see that you are blind because you are stupid enough
to stare into the sun
and think it didn't matter,
that you chose us over we.
You should be ashamed
but are too blind
to see.
You should be ashamed
for you are not me.

Fear of falling

May your house of cards remain unchallenged, lest your entire world fall apart. Those unable to challenge their beliefs claim mystery. There are no sacred ideas. One cannot argue the truth of fiction, one cannot assign arbitrary truth to mysteries. That is why you become so angry when your beliefs are challenged and lash out in offense. Linking your ideas to your ego is your fault, not mine. Your fear is that there is no truth there, not my words that challenge you. I am not responsible for the fall of your house of cards. Don't malign me for your inability to reason a better house for your fears, or for having the intellectual integrity to question your notions.

Moral courage

They used four of them.
One would have sufficed.
But they were afraid of him.
The myth of who he was had become bigger than the reality.
He was just a man.
A man who understood his purpose differently than they.
They knew he was right, but that would admit they were wrong.
One of them knew this, the eyes, the posture, the words...
There were four,
not because he was strong,
but because they were weak,
and they were wrong.

Beautiful Things

Its was more that he had come by it in an unusual and unexpected way.  I haven't done a good job describing how this happened as I don't fully understand it myself.

But undeniably, there it was. It was set in the middle of the table as if it had always been there. It was as if it was looking at you everywhere one went in the room, maybe even anywhwere in the house. That gave it an eerie feel that was likely unwarranted. It gave off no color or light, made no sound, and it moved, or at least appeared to, only when we did. It made him nervous, waiting for some death announcing sound to issue out of it as it flew into a sudden and random flurry of mayhem, but really, it gave him no reason to think so.

"Well. That was odd."

"Yes, quite...",  I responded, not taking my eyes off of it.

"Do you think we should poke it?", she asked shyly.

"No, I dont think we should poke it, Amy, no!" , George retorted with a vehemence that even surprised him. I suspect he too was waiting for it to unravel and rain death upon us. His eyes never left it, as none of us trusted the other to keep an eye on it, as if that alone kept it from killing us.

"What then should we do?" I asked of no one in particular.

"I, for one shall be changing my undershorts, and then we can figure out what the fuck to do next", George offered, backing away slowly. "That whole 'Oh how pretty!' turning into running and screaming, and now this", he said, pointing at it, "quite literally made me piss myself."

His hand was steady as he wagged a finger at it as he left the room. Mine were still shaking.

"No one can know about this, or we're all fucked! No. One." he said, poitning at each of us as he left the room. Amy and I continued to stare at it, calming in its presence.

"Its... its sooo beautiful! Can I touch it?", she asked.

"Were you not just here? Did you not just see that's how this all started?", I asked incredulously.

"Yeah, I get that...", she replied softly, her head tilting off to one side.

We just stood there, waiting for George.

Then it whimpered, and began to wag its tail, having met the limit of its patience...

Burn Out

The morning was passing quietly. There was the soft click and brief run of the air conditioner as it sampled the air temperature. The background warble of the same news on the TV with different names and places than yesterday. The cat stretching and rolling on the floor in the next room, vying for his attention against the doldrums of his mind. Coffee cooling in a Cafe Du Monde cup from a trip to New Orleans years ago, its aroma drifting across the room enticing his wife as she could smell it, while he had lost that gift some time ago. It promised to be a warm, humid and rainy day, but the afternoon expected to cheer with sun and light winds driving out the solitude the darker skies and darker mood provided.

He turned the page, realizing he hadn't taken in any of the passages he had just read, so turned the page back, and with a moments mild chagrin put his hand over the page and then closed the book. He was thinking of nothing, everything, and that thing. Yesterday had been a trying day, and that turmoil had stuck to him like axle grease. It had been a perfect storm of a young woman's psychological soup, her entitlement, arrogance, and stupidity threatening to be mistaken for malice, his rapidly diminishing pool of patience persevering to the door but not beyond, and a no-response-from-management to address the minor quake and its serious aftershocks. The taint stayed with him all day, confining his usual ardor for his work. He had been trying to dilute the thoughts and emotions tied to it ever since, but it remained the Sun, his other concious thoughts orbiting about it. Like a yo-yo, he threw it afar only to have it roll back on the string that kept it tied to him, snapping at him. The rest of the day was just irksome. He found himself staring pensively at the cat, who was struggling between curiosity, grooming, and napping. He gazed out the window, thinking it fortuitous that he had the next week off. He was no good to anyone or himself in his current mood.

With the encounter yesterday, its spin-offs and friends, he had come home emotionally and physically exhausted. At the end of the shift a barely more than teenaged clerk, who earlier felt she had the right to address him an a tone usually reserved for idiots, read a compnay broadcast email drenched in the velvet tones of corporatese announcing that one of his physician colleagues, a man he respected, liked and considered a friend, was quitting. At least this email didn't have the hint of hostility the others had. His leaving was another in an unleveraged tidal wave of talent and skill leaving the company, taking with it the quality of care and high standards the company promised. They bore the news in silence, the vexed clerk feeling ignored walking awkwardly away. He texted his friend and thanked him for the news that "took my day to a whole new level of suckage".

He had driven home in silence, the radio off, finding a moment of quiet sans the constant Pandora stream that masked the tension of the overly busy clinic, the first time in 13 hrs he was truly empty and carefree. He made his way to the refrigerator having once again not been able to get time for dinner hours past, his wife pointing out that they needed to clean the long haired cat's ass as he manged to sit in his crap again. That done they watched a favorite TV drama off the DVR, and called it a night. He missed most of this moving through it all in rote passivity, finding himself in bed staring at a news story on his tablet, barely registering his wife, dealing with her recent spell of insomnia by complaining the light from his tablet was keeping her awake. Turning it off, plugging it in, he was asleep in minutes. Waking once in the middle of the night to pee, with his cat's ungrateful still wet butt in his face, another time hearing his night owl son quietly but not, clattering down the hall to his bedroom at some O-dark-thirty hour before day break, he had otherwise slept the sleep of the dead. He woke knowing he had dreamed, snippets recalled, nonsense unfathomable, oddly distressing. His wife's alarm softly cajoling her awake, he wondered if it bothered him that the alarm on his phone didn't allow him such an alluring choice to sleep through.

He turned his attention back to the coffee, recognizing that feeling of first world hunger, and mindlessly reviewed his options for quelling it. Nothing he thought of motivated him to move. He came to understand that he had no fucks to give about anything and entropy planted him firmly on the couch. As she left for work, his wife sweetly reminded him of today's "have to's", to which he pursed his lips and thought, "yup, just put them on my bill".

Yeah. It was going to be one of those kind of days.

Carioness and Appennon

It was evening when the rain slowed to a mist, and people began to emerge from the hovels and storefronts that lined the cobbled path. The flotsam and jetsam that washed down the gully and puddled in the wagon tracks of the road brought a new foulness to the humid, fetid air.

Carioness looked up into the cloudy evening sky, pulling his hood a bit forward, and stepped out into the roadway, avoiding the rivers and riverlets that were slowing into ponds and puddles. It had been a fortnight since he had last seen Apennon, and wasn't quite sure if he would be able to find him again. Apennon had a way of not being found, even when he wasn't avoiding Carioness, and he was very much avoiding him. He owed Apennon a sound beating, but that wasn't why he was looking for the slippery vermin. Apennon still had the sword he had taken from The Vendipaln, and it was Carioness who had been tasked with returning it to its place in the hallowed hall. When Carioness had found Apennon, it was quite by accident, and Apennon took advantage of the surprise to disappear into the crowd. Apennon was not carrying the sword, which troubled Carioness. Had he already sold it? Had he damaged it? Carioness feared that neither was the case. Apennon was not a thief. Was he a Believer? Few things made Carioness nervous, but Believers were the boogeyman every child grew up fearing for the tales told to make them behave. There was irony in that, and the thought made Carioness smirk derisively.

As he moved through the streets people nodded towards him, recognizing the scarlet trim and ornate deep blue and silver designs of the High Praetorian with respect and a smile. There was curiosity too, as Carioness walked alone, and the Guard was rarely seen, but more rarely seen singularly. But Carioness was no common High Praetorian, and they had no reason to know that he always worked alone.

Apennon had been a student of the Arts, and taught history at the University. It was long thought that he was a leader of a shadowy group that sought to overthrow the Saemositen and its republican rule of the Three Realms, a cult that was called The Gramen, for the region they were thought to hail from. It was a bastion of nationalism and the last remnants of the past rule that had darkened the continent for millenia almost two hundred years ago. There was irony in this too, his being a historian. He was well aware of the rife, terror and ruin of the Canseore, the family that had ruled the largest Realm with fear, hate and violence. It took centuries to overthrow them and establish the Saemositen, the people they had ruled keeping them in power for the hope of favor in the short term, denying the realities of the long. The peace and prosperity that came with the fall of the Canseore brought the Three Realms together, as the leaders of the Three Realms found their way to common good rather than common animosity.

He paused having found himself in the midst of a round, where the worn streets went off in five different directions, one differing from the other not the least in appearance, only in the direction in which they promised to go. This vexed him, badly, as he had neither the time, patience nor desire to muddle with riddle. And so he sat at the edge of the ornate fountain in the center, and he waited. If there was one thing predictable about Apennon, it was that he too has no time to waste in playing this game.

Not today

In one of those moments,
when my  heart is open to wound,
a sadness winds in and visits briefly,
reminds me that I am human,
and that my troubles weigh on me
as they do on all the others,
the silent, and the loud.

I sift through them, finding the one that seems to matter,
hold it up, blow the dust off,
and wonder if tomorrow I will care as much as I do today.
Will the dust accumulate again and dull the pain,
lighten the burden,
until I decide to let it dry out, and turn into dust itself,
forgotten, leaving perhaps a scar in its place.

In that same moment I sit, I see, I listen, I feel,
the games and turmoils of others swirl around me
pulling at me, threatening to pull me in,
some hurled my way,
creating new worries, troubles, fears.
Most wash by, not in my circus today,
but all leave a trace nonetheless,
a sense of danger, an empathy, a sadness.

I watch as others struggle through their own storms,
Some making it rain and crying for the dampness,
all hiding their pain in myriad ways,
parrying, fighting for control, struggling not to drown in fear,
others not aware they stopped fighting long ago and died,
many keeping their arms up, their hearts closed, hiding,
to keep the violence and pain at bay.
Too many creating drama and rot in others
in a life and death struggle with themselves,
to control the narrative that others see,
to cloak the damage that is their center
by hurling pain and strife into the stream,
that it stain others, that it focus on others;
you cannot hurt me if I cause you pain.

In these uncalloused moments I am profoundly sad.
Why, when we know in ourselves the pain and the turmoil,
do we cause it in others?
Why do we find succor in false gods, false beliefs, anger,
when real peace is within another a word away?
We are renewed when kindness is shown even to strangers;
knowing this powerful love, why do we deny it to others,
ourselves?

This is our end,
that we forget that we are alone in this but for each other,
that kindness and compassion are the human way,
that we are capable of so much more,
if we would just stop being afraid.
It is in that moment, when we let go of fear, when we open up,
pain rushes in, hurled by another who knows nothing else,
who seizes the moment for themselves,
and we are lost to our sadness, hard or subtle though it be.

It is then that we learn what kind of human we are.
One unburnable, one who lives, one who matters and makes a difference,
or one who will be ruled by fear, died, and meaningless.

I put the trouble away, caring not that it is all akimbo.
Today I have no time for this.
Today I choose peace.