So Here’s the Deal
The same world
The same species
That can hack one another
To pieces with machetes
Can also move heaven and earth
To find a child in a collapsed building
The same world
The same species
That can mass-incinerate
Millions of humans in ovens
Can also send rovers to Mars
Or drive cars on the moon
The same world
The same species
That can riot over big box store sales
Can also experience near-religious rapture
At sight of a drop of dew glistening in morning sun
…Or see the Milky Way
in the eyes of a newborn
This is what we’re working with
Genes and wiring that maybe took
A wrong evolutionary turn
Some Millenia back
Too much bloody/warring chimp DNA
And not enough hippie bonobo DNA
But the better possibilities
Are still out there
And we have some say
In the matter
Kurt Vonnegut once noted:
We are what we pretend to be
So we must be careful about
What we pretend to be
And when I look out upon
our current dark lands
of America
I feel that to be
So very powerfully true
…And I am pretending
as best I can
Steven Meloan‘s fiction collection, St. James Infirmary, was released on Roadside Press. He is currently assembling a poetry collection…and searching for spirit guides.
