Nine

No one but me can hear the mental din
Of clashing thoughts and images that fight
A bloodless ghostly fight to determine
Which hordes of phantoms have the right
To a monopoly of me. I am
A would be refugee from any kind
Of violence. But here I’m in a jam.
I’m motionlessly fleeing from my mind.
I’m devastated by a dreary war
That may be only manure from my brain.
But it goes on. I can’t remember what it’s for.
There’s none to whom I dare complain.

A precise cut with my sharp gentle knife
Is all you need to end this pointless strife.

Man’s inhumanity to man remains
A puzzle unresolved. Perhaps we should
Know why we are so bad at being good.
Our purest thoughts are thick with bloody stains
Of all the lives that have been shed to give
Us life to think them. We bear the scars
Of massacres our forebears wrought: of wars
They won: of rapes, of tortures. History’s sieve
Has left us here. Selected to elect
Ourselves elected to perpetuate
The race until the gods eliminate
Our kind, for reasons we shall not detect.
It’s strange to feel such twinges of regret
For unlived lives of those we’ve never met.