Vigilance & Scrutiny

A passion for the arts and the murder
Of family rivals are too familiar
Themes of our peculiar evolution,

Coshed-in skulls appearing about the same
Time as delicately perforated
Shells to string as ornaments on our necks.

Charlatans give demonstrations of power
That can be harnessed, predicted, explained,
But not in that order. We scrutinize

Each other. We strive to be vigilant,
But beauty, which cannot be faked, unstrings
Our guts for spirits that move more freely

From corpse to corpse, kin and strange descendants,
Oh no closer than a species-level
Kinship, than our bodies move through the world.

We are the enemy we never meet,
The luminous painting in the corner
Of a dying mind's imagination.