I’m curious,

because to show mercy once in a blue moon only makes the unforgiving

more furious,

as if kindness and grace were ethereal rare gifts in the realm of the

luxurious,

as if there were something hard and remote at the core of the human

nucleus,

despite compassion and tenderness making the darkest of souls almost perfectly

luminous.

I’ve sensed some creature not far from the surface, cold-blooded,

imperious,

with a heart like a cannonball lost in an ocean trench, stony,

impervious,

or lodestone lodged in the brain and locked on a bad star that brings out

the worst in us.

Look at me, God’s gift to graffiti, spellchecking

‘injurious’;

look at you, joy-riding the soft-top hearse all the way to the

terminus;

here we go, planting our poppies then torching the forest, carelessly

serious.

Meanwhile we’re crowding the brink of the lip of the cusp of the rim of the next

Vesuvius,

trying to flag down a passing planet or mother-ship, failing to lip-read

the universe.