Existence Without an Apology

Is it just our being human to wait
For some to become like a caution sign
Warning each morning on the breakfast plate
Of fate? By theirs these represent the fate
Of many as represented by mine
For example as I depreciate
In value to me but I hope not you

I deviate from that conformity
Where what is brightest is not what is best
But chosen frozen and waiting for me
Predestined to death by love and by hate
Deranged by dystopic deformity

The time is as short as the hour is late
As we consume ourselves unconsciously
And wonder why we do the things we do
I wonder about the bad and the good

I wonder as I watch them watching me
As though spectators for some sport of blood
The entertainment of an afternoon
Embracing catastrophe fire and flood

Can they not see it come for them? That soon
They may not be secure behind their gates
When vengeance arises red with the moon
In its existential enormity?

Revenge is as impotent as the rage
Of the doomed who just do not know it yet
It seems to animate this angry age
For those who have forgotten to forget

A bottle of courage bottled-up for
Those made too afraid to fight anymore
By hurt upon failure night after day
By day who wish night would take them away
But who by night never got very far
And who never know how lonely they are

Some go on to become so I have heard
Raw-meat volunteers for the thought-police
Those who caution against the written word
And who fold spindle mutilate and crease

Those who fear the writing of poetry
As symptomatic of insanity
And never mind all of that music then
On which I fixed my young years fixedly
Which turned out to be the ruin of me

A cautionary figure of how when
We give our all to something still we die
But by dying live to embody why
We have to do our cautionary best
Why we must do no less to be content
To bless at our last as first we were blessed

As many have cautioned many have meant
There is no escape from the now for we
Who live this game and make these moves as pawns
In black and white chessboard eternity

Like a lifetime of disappearing dawns
With one great dusk coming when none may see
Less judgment than simply the close of day
Now is the forever of destiny

A candle winks out in infinity
A prophet writes of God and has him say
"Vengeance is mine" he says "I will repay"
A caution finds the best revenge to be
Existence without an apology

+Steven Curtis Lance



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