capitulate

It’s a blindness that exceeds the eyes, a blank spot that only widens with time. The words go one way, the actions another, the mind makes up the difference. Mostly it’s just animal sounds, air escaping through an orifice, the grunts and groans required by physiology and environment. Chest thumping, howls and displays that came with us on the long road towards the particulars of our species. Rationalizations to pave over our fears and motives while we use laws to commit egregious crimes and pretend that we’re good people. We take whatever stance that allows our cowardice to count as conscience, to rebrand our bowing and scraping to clowns and criminals as proof that we are free.

Whole lives pass by in the callow mirrors of others’ eyes, seeing the meaning of that hobo culture the way they see that liar faith, heaven and hell and castles and thrones made entirely of far flung shit and shaken branches. Hollow hierarchy and tacked on reasons that prove little but bad intentions and weak knees. Can’t save souls, can’t help fools, can’t strike without heating up the iron. Caste systems and social Darwinism and varieties of apartheid and Jim Crow’s bones remain the building blocks of most politics and opinion where the dumbest of lies prevail. Every generation engages the same old holy slop and says Behold!, revealing the entirety of their ass. 

It reads like Revelation, but these days all the prophecies are self fulfilling. We elevate rapists to high office, canonize deception, and hide from our painful history and hard truths. Nature and nurture long since obscured by naive acceptance of the new bright and shiny, we turn away from the skid, so we spin and spin into the void of our hubris. Fly the flag in earnest over ghoulish slaughter, fly in the face of facts in favor of premeditation, fly off the handle whenever the evidence is mentioned. Stare into the rear view, see as it all speeds away. Every day a further capitulation, you find your self farther from your made up soul. A straight razor and a beggar’s bowl, you bear the bruises as you genuflect. Tell me that you’re good.