Anatomy

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:  

magnitude of tragedy is directly related to its cause.  

A man and a duck walk into a bar.

Humor does not speak to our understanding of an event.  

A priest, a rabbi and an accountant are sitting on a plane.  

Sorrow adds depth and balance to the joys experienced 

on the playground equipment of our youth.  

So the bartender says, “I’m Bubbles!!”

Boundless, open hearts are just as prone 

to breakage as empty, cruel hearts.

So the pilot says, “We’ll be landing just off the runway…”  

In a horrible, human way, every newer greater tragedy

only adds to our overall sense of accomplishment.  

Let me start here:  

I forget everything that comes after this word, or this…

or - - - wait:  this is the absolute last.  

I am not a role model.  Raging, empurpled griefs pile up as our asphalts, 

children,

don’t let this happen to you, to anyone you once loved, 

to anyone you do love, to anyone you think you may love one day,

protect them from harm, all of them!!  

Revenge takes what solace it can from salvation and makes you holy.  

Where the blued apathies of olden days? where jealousy meant something 

and it was still a surprise to know that evil did lurk in the hearts of all – 

men and women, first! children on your own:  was it the gnostics

that taught us that or Agamemnon, standing at the door, barefoot

on the flowing sea of purple metaphor, telling whoever would listen,

“Take my wife.  Please.”  Those droopy memoirs of the Furies

were everything that stood for anything.  Else.  Redemption is

equally as hollow to the dead as it is to the will-be-dead.  Nothing

less than the abyss of our own punchlines we want saving from,

whether we speak in tongues, or walk on a path of sly snakebacks.

Or not.  Hold heart when heart may flee, add another and you

hold a pound.  Eight ounces of beat or clog and pulse or seizure,

and we measure our walking, talking, pulpy grapes by this seed.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved