Bête et Méchant

Hobbes was necessarily right:

our lives are solitary, poor, nasty,

brutish, short. Beyond that plight,

we’re dead meat, and ecstasy

in some abstraction, like adumbrating

realms of re-lig tendrils of

–ions not prone to easy connecting,

cannot mask itself for love.

We’re caricaturists all, we mostly draw

to denigrate—what we will—

to circulate whatever shock and awe:

reap regardless what we till.

There’s nothing civilized in what we’ve seen.

I’d satirize everything

to prove the woman at the well pristine:

her questions and reckoning,

her draught of water, sight unseen, her need

for more than what she’d relieve.

No life can thrive alone, says Hobbes indeed,

despite what lone wolves believe.

Bête et méchant, the day dissolved. What would

make a god-damned difference?

Any prophet might weigh in, could and should

administrate… common sense.

This very verse is subject to your take

or leave (fickle in the end);

I drew it in austerity. My stake

is in praying all faiths mend.