When you look back and see insane
and the insanity of others much more insane than you
visited their madness upon your unsuspecting soul
all to the good to break open your closed mind and heart
to let in the light of hell where you had been heading for so long
rejoice, for in that moment you made a right choice for the very first time
and turned away from all the sad madness you had spawned.

I see the waters of old
And remember when they were new,
To know I am forever part
Part of their shimmer.

To know that dreams are an eventuality,
While life is asleep and our souls
Would meet sometime in this flesh,
Which comes as chance and destiny.

I have not known much hope,
I have not seen the brighter side,
Life has been a sad gold,
A roughed up diamond.

At times when the evenings spread
Like the sunset stretches the shadows,
I think of the tiny miracle of the moment
When I first met you.

They say to take your time,
So I will take what is given,
The great eternal moment
That I marvel at your presence.

In these waters that have no end,
The immortal flow that brought us together,
What is now and forever
Has saved the best for us.

In a moment, all had changed
We sat, as many might
For dinner, late

Rolls and peas, plus a bit of meat
Once a week, we fared better than many
It came like a wave, rolling

From the east, if facing east
I know for at my table, I looked north
But felt the change, weary my bones

I saw my wife, her eyes blue
Deeply light blue, almost gray
I saw her ****, eyes changed green

Struggled, she breathed
Then the wave, took one after another
I felt it pass, emotions tumbling at once

She seen something, hidden
Miles away, blocked from sight
From behind stone walls, as we prayed

Then, the ****
She howled, we all whimpered
For the madness, overwhelmed

Contagious, it spread
I heard it first, bringing me back
From neighbors, less distant and west

Snapping me back, to see her
Gnashing, breaking her teeth
Pulling and ripping, hair

She flailed, grasping a fork
Stabbing our children, one to another
Before I could move, inhumanly fast

As they cowered, deep in rising fear
Not of her, but of the emotions rippling
From distant and far, but always east

I struggled, when she came at me
Flinging my arm up, warding her off
My knife came up, involunteerily

Then it dimmed, although
Some great beast, gathered it's rage
In some great birth, then awareness

It pulsed, lower now
Like humming, out of mind
Letting us know, a god now strode

We could feel it, where it looked
It's attention, driven us mad
And now, we live in its shadow

we're all armed
with an appliance
of emancipation
we can nurture non-violent
defiance in a
non-compliant ethos of
antiauthoritarian self-reliance

we have the ability to eliminate the
vestiges of imperialism and
dominant dogmas that choke
and impede our creativity and shackle
our imagination to impotent ideologies

fragmented unrealities augmented
by fractures in our psyche
tendrils of theology that prey
upon our fear and exacerbate
conditioned responses that are
at once
unnatural and irrational
and lead
inexorably
to infantile expressions of
regression and fantasies of an
aggression rooted in the
suppression of dissent and
the oppression of dissidents

deities
as impotent
as our terror
of the unknown

by the promise of security and prosperity
a cabal of brutish thugs have erected an
imaginary hierarchy and demanded our
subservient obedience and reverence for
this malfeasant apparatus that leeches
our paychecks and robs all of our dignity
while somehow retaining the illusion of liberty
a delusion that festers like an open wound
a tumorous ulcer oozing foul fluid into our minds
blotting out our capacity for cultivating a
future divorced from misanthropy

so pour kerosene on this fluttering
flame of revolt before it sputters out
if we'd quit looking back and forth at
one another rotting in the gutters
checking to see if we have more to
our name than our sisters and our brothers
we might just muster the courage to overthrow
the vapid and misguided fictions that
divide and segregate us into pawns
trapped in this unending rat race
they've deemed the American Dream

harness the revolutionary tenacity
dormant in humanity's most important *****
infinite potential latent in every molecule
each neuron dancing across synaptic
gaps and fanning the embers of an engine
that gives motion to this evolutionary frame
the human brain is omnipotent