the road unravels before me and the horizon keeps running two steps ahead of me and I cannot stop from imagining what the earth would look like without us, how all this concrete and steel would be overrun with grass and vines, wildflowers and wildlife... wildlife?  wildlife would just be life without us here to label it by our standards of what is and isn’t “wild”, without the plague of what we like to see as “civilized humanity” and my mind goes into its own metaphysical pseudo rage at the terminology of that phrase... “civilized humanity”... are we civilized?... humane?... if we stop to read between the lines... if we examine the folds between the pages of our history books... if we don’t blindly swallow down the twisted perspective of the past... if we don’t willing believe the lies we make up about our yesteryears so we can see ourselves as hero’s... instead of the villains... the villains we only stopped pretending to be when the victims of our crimes rose up and fought back... the men in chains, the women without voices, the children forced to fight for words and ideas of old men too afraid to die for their own beliefs... and even now, day by day history seems to be stuck on repeat... a scratched record of wobble wax turning round and round as out of tune as we are out of breath, and worse than that we seem to be allowing it to rewind and tangle and gurgle out white noise and static, to take three steps back for every king of freedom we have let be assassinated... for all the X’s we have drawn on their necks to mark where the knife and the bullet and the noose..should slash... should strike... should choke the life from...their bodies... their voices... their hearts... because freedom is only allowed to be pretty in the eyes of a metaphor... it is far too dangerous in the hands of the of the general populace... far too fragile to let our “civilized humanity” be in control of... we hear the word anarchy and imagine it ripe with chaos... never admitting to ourselves that the only chaos that exists in the ideology of anarchy is our own inability to treat each other with any kind of social responsibility without the threat of some kind of punishment... we only have ourselves to blame that without “law”, there would be no “order”... give me freedom... give them death... I could paint you a picture, tell you a tale of two similar in every way but the ending... one walks away and one falls to the grave... the grieving see no justice and the living just keep on walking... i hear that only love can defeat hate... i hear these words echo back and forth through time... i hear them echo over the bombs of the past, i hear them whisper over the bullets whizzing into the future, i hear them in ever beating heart in this room...yet i cannot stop myself from wondering... why does it feel like we are losing... why does it seem like this is a battle love will never win... why do we keep fighting... love vs hate... love over hate... when if we don’t stop fighting... one day soon... I won’t have to imagine this world without us... and everything, all this concrete, all this steel, all our flesh, all our bones...overrun with grass and vines, wildflowers... and life