And so I say

Alack a day

The sword once broken mended

A song, a tune, an ancient rune

Along the way are blended

We are the product of our age

And yet of time eternal

We think the most yet count the least

Our scope must be upended

Why does a man not serve himself

Why do we our time fritter

Why does the cow lie in the field

Where wolves can fairly tend them?

I guess these questions count for naught

When power is in question

We turn attention to the side

And leave the main untended

Oh foolish we to never see

the pattern of our labors

we spend our life denying it

that from the womb we’re rended.

A little mercy shown to us

by love and shocking beauty

instead of looking all around

we pass much by unnoticed

We make a mischief of our ways

We drone on days about it

And when at last we arrive home

We think we’ve been befriended.

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The process of poetry itself is a canard

We sit and worry when the spirit will run out

We pray for inspiration, little knowing it is all there

Ready to roll

Like the pavement seen over the greensward

It takes some imagination to visualize it,

But we humans will, given time, pave it over,

Perhaps saved only by the next great ‘invention’

Which will create its own space wasting,

perhaps next time, the air over the earth.

We say it with certitude, but without belief when it comes to details

That there is no free lunch.

Yet time and again, when we expect the bailout of our last misadventure

We act as if there it is, like the air and water of yore, free.

What is it about us that leads us on the paths of the latest temptation, without considering the consequences? That leads us to overspend, overvalue, overindulge, overrate, overpower, oversee and overplay the main themes.

Perhaps it is our penchant for bigger than life performances, for the unusual, yea the bizarre, for a turn in life that is out of the ordinary. Strange, it is the ordinary and our utilization of it that gives us so much power in the world, and our yen for the extraordinary that creates so much difficulty for us. This leads us to expectation, which, as I think of it, is more of a downer than temptation, although it shares with temptation the promise of better to come in following this versus another path. So, while we deem ourselves optimizers we are in fact squanderers. We have, through fruits of other’s labors, more than enough to go around. And then we are beguiled by the sins of our neighbors and expectation into repeating the error, again and again, until it becomes necessary to our apparent survival. Addiction, the mother of civilization.

So, what to write about? The extraordinary in the ordinary. The path of least resistance. The cart before the horse. The meeting place of great minds and the haven of small ones. Our lip service to the rights of others and denial of it in our actions. The illusion of service. The secrecy of gossip and need to bring down the big guy. Nietzche’s idea of the weak developing beliefs to keep the strong in line. Our vulnerability and using of it by others. But what is the payoff? Power? control? Importance? The need to betray confidence to get what? Again and again, we are betrayed and betray. In all the little peccadilloes, hiding behind closed doors and playing with our own devices. The sneak has to work hard to remain in the dark. But it is light out there. Why, I ask Plato, do people stay chained in the cave seeing things in two dimensions, when there is a bright 3-D world out there. Why indeed!