Our patience with lizard skinned schemers,
The humble turned decadent,
entitled, malevolent and arrogant,
Insidious architects drawing margins
to elevate their earnings.
Preaching equality from throne rooms.
Their words of peace birthed
inside the barrel of a gun.
Those extractive, exhausting reprobates,
Those green card patriots,
Those "virtuous" devils who hide
in the shadows of faith.
It wore thinner than a razor's edge
and we turned livid.
Furious with them, then ourselves
for having ever fostered their ilk.
We stared out our windows,
then walked out our doors,
peered above our fences
and cried"no more. No More!"
These Streets
This evening as I walked along streets I've traced countless times before, a thought took hold. 'How wonderfully fragile and changeable the human mind is'. Years ago, upon these same streets I'd nurse tales of woe and be unkind to myself in the basement of my mind. As those streetlights glared back at me, I was a particle of dust , bereft of hope and significance. Even contribution was an act of existential guilt. All this heavy on my spine as I wearily trudged through the days. Yet through the days, the months and years that were to unfold... Came a new way of being. Seemingly through attrition, the roots of despair came to wither. Exposed by questions. Starved by the ascension of gratitude and choice. No longer frivolous intellectual notions but palpable truths of the day to day realities of living .As the grip of victimhood unraveled, there was space for new things to grow. New colours where there was only black and white. New layers above a greedy undertow. A life richer than binary choices. The capacity to receive love.
What contrast upon the same streets, within the same skin. What capacity we have to shape and shift our perceptions. But is not only human to forget this power we wield? How vigilant and compassionate we must be to ourselves and others as we scale the mountains and swim through the oceans of circumstance.