It’s not like the words were waiting, the sheen of rain, the falling sky. The grinding down of girder and slab and fragile lives, the flattened affect gray dusted face of genocide. The hurtling of empathy and epithet, gnashed teeth and curses while even the pleas for mercy are criminal, the clampdown naked and seething in its appetites. It’s not like the words are coming, blow Gabriel or cavalry call. The passion only another apostasy, the suffering served in heaps and hells, the respite only rhetoric as the evil is so shamelessly revealed. We listen in as leaden tongues turn the words on end, the hastily slapped bow on the violation.

It is still the rote patter of the daily ache, the listless shadow, the sought out stars. It is still the way that beauty still bends the light, the fury that what you feel is just words to loose for most, justice just the bruisers at the door despite every paradise you storm. No longer the grace in the desolation, no longer up on the sunny side, just these low life lows beating down. I rage and I sputter, I smoke and I steam. These idle paths, these unyielding oaths, the brick by brick, the bird by bird. All stunk up and aglow with the flicker of rebirth in this deathbed dull repose, this turn against the tide.

The body count, the cry for blood, grinding children down as their daily task. Death worshippers and dissembling flunkies gibbering from their corrupted pulpits as the world is punished at every turn. The poisoned preaching has hollowed out the rhetoric, words left rattling in their shells with wishes chambered in a smoking gun. The lonesome cat crawl dying of the everyday witnessing the heyday of the witless and worthless cashing out and taking everything that isn’t nailed down is an after market insult added just for show. The harm is intended. It is cruelty and greed and too much to allow unanswered. We who turn with the tides of the ocean, earth and atmosphere, we who hold to the old and the wild, we who shield the young and defenseless by instinct and ethos— we all recognize the calling. We will not be silenced.