The Essence

 

When?

Nothing more important

for you tasting the salt of a cold ocean

or me wandering endless sand in baking sun.

I hate Augustine and all late repentants.

Like it's never too late

but what the fuck it's never too early either

when there is a knee on your neck

or a crude, selfish employer insults

a worker to rip the light cape of dignity.

Are we to eat the dirt of grinding poverty

while you search your pebble soul?

Shall we all wait, wait, fucking forever wait

while you give yourself a medal

or drop a dime on a museum?

Shall we review ten thousand years of economics

and conclude it has always been this way?

Only the good die young.

It's a dog-eat-dog world.

Kill or be killed.

Rob or be robbed.

Is that what this is all about?

That I, like God, shall wait patiently

while you rape the universe

and oppress all the good who are not dead yet,

who wonder why they depend on you,

you who refuse to see that your palace is

a mountain of blood and trash.

. . . let there be a tax, one hundred percent

on all sinners who do not repent within ten minutes.

And the office is closed for renovations.

I beat Saint Augustine.

I beat him with a broom, a shovel and a mop.

 

        John T. Manimas, April 2021