(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 28, 2015)

The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.

Devaluing proposals only because they are purportedly originated with an adversary.


Adversaries: we imagine them up
like dime store villains. The heroic "I"
discharging bullets at the caprock
until a quake tips the mudslide.
This is what we say when we say
the hero and the villain are one.
Violence is just or unjust;
the hangman is the madman.

Depends upon who holds the axe.
Depends on our reckoning
of your freedom and any estimations
on mine. There is no reason to it.
Only rationales and riots of biases,
sentiments knotted up in the noose,
the ethical choker worn to glisten
in the pageant, worn to crucify,
worn to suffocate.