It has always seemed the strangest thing to me, the way that people will lacerate others -- with cruelty, with lies, with dirty dealing, with petty spite, with cold neglect, with violence, violence on the body and the soul -- just to gain, for just a moment, some bestial sense of dominance, on one level or another, from the highest to the lowest, turning the inexpressible miracle of existence, this paradise of consciousness and sensation we've been given, into a stinking, churned-up living hell.

I look at all this, and I think: These people don't know they're going to die. They don't believe the blow will come. They think they've got all the time in the world to churn in the filth and make themselves "important" -- an importance that will be ripped out of them like a disemboweled gut the instant death closes their eyes ....

I keep looking at the face
That keeps staring back at me
The hard and haunted visage
Of my mortality

© 2010 by Chris Floyd