Apprenticed to the world
the key decision is what weight to give the testimony of the world.

In a world of cover-ups (you know how to whistleblow, don't you?),
we stare at the bare, trying to see through the self-defeating strategies of society,
impotent impetus, confusing the banal for the practical—or worse, for the real—
the living upheld by the dreams of the dead: to conquer, to surrender, to acquire.

I don't agree with the action, I don't believe in the cause,
the coalescing of variables into the monomania of the feeble,
into declarations of anxiety: a mania for money; an hysteria for security;
plans, schemes, and machinations; the invention and circumvention of rules,
remorse, and other restraints (like cooperation, a specific kind of conflict).

We need instead more cosmopoliticians, inciting an erotic attack on theocratic crazies
from the sensuous life outside the commercial cloister, else ethical dilettantes,
lamenting dilemma, with the tentative activity of those who would chastise audacity,
defend the right to bear harms, lies of the auspicious, deny integrity without unity,
insist on our freedom to be poisoned like Socrates or to be poisoned like Neruda.
(In practice, you can't be friends with a fascist.)

The early harbingers of communal death may, like autumn, be beautiful,
but they are the enemy, this is where the battle must be engaged,
not in the frozen fields of winter.