His unwillingness to be a victim
Soully exceeded
Buy his willfulness to be a perpetrator
Better to have
Willed a gun
Than mirrorly get
A ballad in ahead
That imminently natural selection
Of hapless pray
Re: in force
Such patriotic cant
And simp-ly a parent of chorus you can
Too the tear of awe
Weepin’s helled in our hands
Sow a verse
That thin red line
In the thick of
The deference
In the seaminess
Of oppressor and oppressed
The enigmatic quest in
Of weather you can
Have won
Without the other
To shed more hate than light
In discriminating prism
Only to con serve
Cell preservation
Or wherever egos
Fallowing death
A firm life
In mortality
A test too
They’re weepin of choice
This poem is a dramatic ode to the thin line between victim and perpetrator. There is a horror in both estates of being. The truism that hurt people hurt people begs for a broken chain, often presenting itself to beat the hell out of others or take it as unjust a beating. Is there a fare-mined weigh to go on, strike?
The horrific picture in my mind is that of children in war zones enforced into soldiering, specifically by being forced to kill someone else, typically someone they know, as an initiation into the invading forces. Or be killed themselves. The ensuing trauma, and the desperate promise of survival as a perpetrator rather than death or indigency as a victim, often seals one’s fate in a choice beyond most adults, let alone children. Such a display of soul murder is perhaps the most dramatic, even as an epic cautionary tale far removed from the real or contemplated lives of most adults in this world. Nonetheless, the daily bred of the victim-perpetrator cycle is mostly much more subtle and insidious. The routinized bargains most of us make are well fed by seamless self-serving rationalizations and hermetically sealed worldviews safely partitioning good and evil. We are grateful, even thank God, that we happen to be, well, on the good side. Our own cultural in-groups are neatly washed in the wringer of what we typically call civilization, a convenient euphemism for “us” — now, even 25% cleaner; progress you know! Our dark sides are projected on others, safely sequestered in “them” — the looming barbarous hordes, who mostly want to take our way of life (or jobs) — equally progressive and precarious — but will take the life of our hired mercenaries, peace officers, or even ourselves if we let our guard down.
What I hope this poem inspires is some contemplation about what might be that thin chalk line around your soul that defines what you would not do to save your bodily life. What would you not do, even if a gun was pointed at your head? Such a boundary quite starkly outlines that which you re-guard as sacred, worthy of the sacrifice of your bodily life. If your skin in the game is only to protect your own skin (or kin), then the cycle of perpetrator-victim will be incarnated perpetually. Protect your own or sell your kind? What kind of quest in is that? Won of kindness — your own kind and every other kind. Dramatic examples can be highly instructive in contemplating the demarcations of our soul. Still, my hope is to provoke a more thorough deconstruction of our lives, as our lives are sow much more than bodily existence. What in your life would you be willing to lose for a higher purpose? My favorite definition of sacrifice is giving up something of value for something of greater value. I view this trading up as the primary vehicle for living up to our highest values. What material/bodily stuff are you willing to trade up for that which is higher? What parts of your life are you willing to sacrifice for a greater whole? We all end up in a hole; not all become whole or make their fare share of the whole. Of course, the hierarchy of goodness is not simply some binary division of material and spiritual. Our bodies and material goods are gifts to be purposed and re-purposed in the progressive filling and fulfilling of our souls, shared humanity, and awe of creation. If there is anything that all spiritual and religious traditions lift up, it is that our purpose wrests in that beyond our self. Next in line would probably be that we each have a soul responsibility that cannot be contracted to others. As you confront the many weepins in life, may your soul purpose find itself bigger and better, not simply at a loss.
