Killing People For Truth

Killing People For Truth
© Surazeus
2024 06 12

Though my refrigerator does not know 
when the white-crowned sparrow of liberty 
will fly over Miluo River at dawn 
where weeping women throw handfuls of rice 
to honor Qu Yuan after he drowned, 
I will drink grape juice from valley of ghosts. 

If I vacation on the dark seashore 
this summer while wars are still going on, 
I might bring watermelons from sad fields 
where horses dream about the joyful wind  
before I decide on my next crusade 
to change how people perceive what is real. 

Since nobody else wants to compromise 
over who gets to eat fruit of the tree, 
I will climb up the last telephone pole 
to eat sourdough bread with strawberry jam 
while people talk about philosophy 
that provides guidelines for whom they may kill. 

Not scared about futility of life, 
I walk around the crowded theater 
to steal secret thoughts from minds of the blind 
who believe what the preacher says is real 
though nothing they say matches world I see 
which I assemble in puzzle of tales. 

Because the secretive river-gouged vales 
of the Grand Canyon plumb depths of my heart 
when I see it from the airplane of faith, 
I rend rocks into fissures with lament 
for fragile beauty of the lonely girl 
who vanished in clouds of the Upperworld. 

More enigmatic than the humming lute 
that wants to explain star intelligence, 
the moon-eyed owl on wall of paradise 
watches me perform role of the mad king 
who dances wildly on the windy plain 
to wake spirit of the stone in his heart. 

While our memories of the unseen past 
are preserved in paintings and photographs, 
we decide the end justifies the means, 
trapped by death wish of the apocalypse 
that never happens in two thousand years 
despite caws of crows on telephone lines. 

The same old stories in the news each day 
describe people killing people for truth, 
or nature killing with indifference, 
so I talk to the deer in my backyard 
about language the sea still teaches me 
when I choose not to invent reasons why.