[Becky]
Who’s the new Hershey’s kiss?
[Tanner]
Leave it alone, Becky.
You do not need this.
You don’t want to miss
the first week of the year ahead.
We should tread lightly
and get the lay of the land
before we begin to grand stand.
[Becky]
No problem,
as long as her brand
stays off my land.
[Diane]
You sure you want to
continue in this journey?
This is not like home
where you’re always free to be
your honest self openly.
Here you need defense
to heed aggressive attacks
against your turned back.
[Yolanda]
A perfect place to hone skills
that will fulfill my needed
advancement to thrill
my parents’ keen assessment
of requirements
they perceive to relieve all
odd obstacles, large and small,
that just might befall
my spectacular ascent
to enlightenment.
[Chuck (Charles)]
Hi, Diane; who’s your friend?
[Yolanda]
I’m Yolanda; here to see
Diane’s true proclivity
to succeed and be
our student poster-child
that will be filed
at our coming of age
celebration staged this Spring.
[Chuck]
Whoa! Diane, you’re being investigated.
Good times gonna be terminated.
[Diane]
Get ready for school,
fool, before I extricate
you from that seat, creep.
Did you have to tell him that?
Now I might have to take flak
from those who like to
tease me to renew contests
to out best others
vying for witticisms
at my defenseless expense.
[Yolanda]
Just my sly defense
against prying eyes and snide
comments that prevent
unwanted attention at
my explanation needed
for unsure, fearful
students experiencing
my cheerful focus
with sustained, piercing review
to discuss their true status
among their peer group.
If I’m going to snoop, then
it is best to bend
such stern concern toward your place
easing their perceived disgrace.
[Diane]
Reciprocity,
Yolanda, concedes its creed
is pretty much free
to be equally applied
to reside in the dark side
as well as the light
which means the fight moves through grooves
cut by either source.
[Yolanda]
I am not looking to force
your hand to stand against me.
Sorry for my slip.
I did not think you would blink
at my deception.
[Diane]
No worries. Your intention
was for prevention not harm.
Next time just confide
your plans with me so I can
withstand the fallout.
[Marlo]
Yolanda plans to shadow
Diane until she expands
her command over
nuanced traits to discover
this group’s social flow
allowing her mind to know
the truth of this practiced show.
Mathematics bleeds
logic and cold, exact thoughts
that feed abstract thoughts
fraught with specificity
and fixed selectivity
to measure and plot
position and quantity
but not emotions
laced with sensitivity
to awaken empathy.
Cold numbers, theorems,
equations, laws and firm rules
can’t school emotions
to seek clarity over
petty slurs that confer hurt
to attack naive
innocence to abandon
needed self defense.
Hence, quantifying does not
qualify that which cries out
for more robust, clear
explanations describing
justice, kindness, love
over wealth acquisitions
and above power tripping
by souls with cold hearts
and weak minds that find nothing
advantageous nor
beneficial in the art
of nurturing every life
to excite freshness
and deploy joy to buoy
against daily stress
from individual greed
that seeds the narcissistic
need to enslave and
brand all others as weaklings
and unworthy souls
to bow to the powerful,
beautiful few who should rule
the unfortunate
crass mass of dull witted drones
that hone servitude.
Two and two making four scores
undisputed clarity.
Math class passed without
any doubt about the truth.
The youths were quiet.
[Yolanda]
Twenty-five is not the size
of my instruction at home.
[Daine]
You need not worry.
Period three will be free
from boring, numbered
constancy. Life is much more
than a tour through statistics
and numerical
certainties void of human
life’s necessities.
Issues of Government will
present events less distilled
through sterile, cold facts
that dehumanize via
reductionism.
[Marlo]
Period three won’t be free
from dispute and sharp rebukes.
[Diane]
Mister Swanson holds
some bold discussions that fuel
heated verbal duels.
Stay sharp; these seniors embark
to claim fame and fortune’s gain
to explain their right
to rule and school others’ views,
sincerely expressed,
as unimportant notions
of trivial opinions.
[Mr. Swanson]
Science, Math and the Arts
inhabit our path we start
to inspect governance
with Language and Consilience
as important aspects to consider
as most relevant to our predicament
of diverse individualism reconciled
within communal harmony.
Compile, filed-away facts and reflections
blend into coherent systems
of a unified vision
that informs every decision.
Science rests upon energy and matter.
The latter is easily described and defined,
yet I find the former elusive,
inconclusive of a definitive definition
for what energy is.
The ability to do work doesn’t relieve
the need to know the substance of its existence.
What it does is not what it is.
Energy to science is
power to governance.
Mathematics sticks tightly
to the emotionless rhetoric
of numbers and formulae
to express phenomenon
with exactitude to preclude
anything less than a paragon
of accuracy without proclivity
to moral interpretation,
explanation or judgement.
It’s the language of economics
that’s the major concern of politics.
The Arts are part of the creative soul
that reveals what it feels but doesn’t know
to show what is concealed between
the facts that attract special interests
that seek investments for personal gain
regardless of the strain on massive lives
struggling to survive, wishing to thrive,
above the hard working horde serving
the rich and famous lords and ladies
craving all worldly pleasures
certain to avoid any measure
of the growing gap between the have-nots and
the haves.
Relationships are intangible
forces of reality
like gravity
between celestial objects
or cells united together
to better serve the group
that gave rise to a troupe of cells
forming tissues that issue functions
of the organ that runs
our respiration or circulation;
our thinking or excretions.
The intangibleness
of an electromagnetic field
yielded from charged, moving particles
in relationship to space
have profound effects
similar to that which exacts
justice or injustice to effect
our affect to cooperate.
Language is the medium
that provides the continuum
of thoughts, reflections and perceptions
of the vast mass of humanity
especially with the onset of writing
and the wide distribution of such recording
over centuries of human history.
And then there is consilience,
the essential difference
to balance reductionism
that schisms reality
into its minute parts
to impart understanding
of the totality of reality.
The problem to consider
is the disaster of the pandemic
that wreaked tragic havoc
with over half a million
U.S. citizens dead from the spread
of Covid-nineteen.
[Craig]
What’s the big deal, Mr Swanson?
There’s no real issue here.
The human herd has overpopulated
and has turned Earth into a debilitated
refuge polluted with human refuse
exacerbated by leadership unconcerned
with stewardship due to their worship
of competition and greed for currency
facilitated by a powerful oligarchy’s
disdain for our democracy.
The human herd must be culled
to annul overpopulation’s devastation
of the harmony
of complex niches’ integrity
to accommodate diverse creatures
dispersed throughout Earth.
[Mr. Swanson]
Tanner
[Tanner]
Craig is absolutely correct
to subject populations of herds
to culling to deter from overwhelming
the balance of resources conferred by nature
to support diverse niches within geographic regions.
Hence predators, wars and disease are to ease
the devastation of overpopulation.
From our tool making success
humans have compressed their enemies
to war and disease.
Covid deaths are a natural process
to cull the infirmity of humanity.
[Sarah]
There are many humans
that ascribe to the doctrine
posed by Craig and Tanner
that it’s nature’s way
to waylay runaway populations
with destruction, persecutions and devastations
as if the course enforced through balancing
weight, distance and speed
between gravity and centrifugal force
that is the source of planets
dancing around the sun
or the moon around Earth
are of the same scientific worth.
Rather, it’s a buffoon’s search
for an opportune moment
to circumvent personal responsibility.
With certainty, I contend
there is a force
intended to mend mistakes
thereby alleviating the need
to forsake lives.
Humans are nature’s seed
to breed a robust intelligence
as a force that can prevent
the expedience of violence
as the precursor to harmony.
Modern forms of birth control
extol human ability
to end overpopulation
through planning and managing
the effects of our impossible urge
for copulation.
Inquisitive intelligence is the force
of consequence that enhances our consciousness
through learning with reflection
that brings forth our drive for invention.
Wars and disease need not be
nature’s decree to maintain balance
needed for harmony.
[Lawrence]
Sarah again expends her energy
to extend liberalism’s false narrative
of the true nature of reality.
Toss out the hopefulness of kindness
and gentleness as the basis
of life on the planet Earth.
Chaos swirls throughout the world.
The strong eat; the weak perish.
[Cole]
Opposing sides are being formed.
Our elected leadership has sworn
to uphold our constitution
and strengthen our democratic institutions,
but the country is being torn in two
by some leadership equipped with the power
to shower the people with disinformation,
not facts, with conspiracy theories
that belie televised scenes of our living history.
On the sixth of January,
the joint session of Congress
was attacked, breached and ransacked
by some armed citizens and others,
dressed in combat gear,
creating an atmosphere of violence
with police being beaten and
five dead bodies as a consequence.
It was an event witnessed by millions
minimized by Republicans
no longer supporting the bastions
of our young democracy.
When wearing a mask as a task
for enhancing public health
and saving a million lives
becomes potentially caustic
in the hands of Republicans
fueling the limbic system of humans
with gimmicks, falsehoods and half-truths
inciting uncouth behavior
bordering on treason,
it’s a damn good reason
to sure up our democracy
from the savagery of domestic terrorism
spewing forth from white citizens
fearful of the shame that came
from the actions of their ancestral history
of abuse induced by a righteous superiority
upon people of color abducted,
restrained in chains, and shipped
to a distant land beyond reckoning
to have their spirits broken
under the whip of slavery and hate,
a fate that creates only more hate.
[Diane]
Human behavior
wants to preserve its freedom
and always savors
the ability to choose,
but the Hatfields were enthused
to kill the McCoys
who found it equally fine
to embrace the shrine
of revenge’s crimson flood
honoring their harsh blood feud.
Schooled by the ruling
kinsmen’s figure to engage
their weapons’ triggers,
young and old had to boldly
hold combatants lives forfeit
as retribution
void of any contrition
for all past lives lost.
So harmony’s precursor
can never be violent
because actions spent
to vent vitriol and spews
insults to abuse
feeds resentment before hate
creates physical trauma
that begets supra-
emotional conditions
to cage extreme rage.
All human actions have been
sanctioned or regulated
internally or
externally by parents
whose judgements children
seek to circumvent when risks
provoke adventures that stroke
planned executions
of cunning calculations
to hide from such eyes.
When maturity sets in
risk assessment wins the day
and adults are left
alone in Life’s daily fray
to defend and spend
their energy most wisely
for family and good friends.
Then, there are others
who gained the power to rule
the community:
the family’s Grand Matriarch
or Patriarch, tyrants or
heinous dictators.
We have elected leaders
as legal keepers
of legislated statutes
to resolve our disputes.
So our being
regulated is never
to be considered.
Rather, the process applied
to outline the behaviors
with which we are to
comply is the issue tied
to communal pride
in our harmonious
endeavor for all to thrive.