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If You Are Without Mercy


by Darryl Price


"The opposite of fear is not courage but compassion."--Peter J. Gomes

you are going to die a
most pitiful death from your own tears
of crushing boredom. Crying over
your self you will probably
never understand how it is a
simple blue-capped flower saves
the world, one open petal 
at a time. You'll always

fail to have enough courage to sing a Beatles song out loud.
You shall immediately
be forgotten the moment
you are gone.You'll continue
to buy all the wrong records by all
the wrong artists. You'll shower
alone whenever it rains.Especially when it rains.
You'll see nothing special in

the eye in the sky above
the lake,only meaningless
stars.You will not be held close together
on purpose. Forget all the
little names for joy.You won't
get to taste the yummy joke
at the molten center of
the cosmic wormhole. You've tortured that bridge

well into a flood of thin enough flaky ashes. We don't
return your hate. We never do. You're still as free as ever
to shoot up as many fear
inducing dreams as you'd like. But
we say why not melt the gun that was once
your welcoming heart back into its shipping box.Without some ongoing mercy you
are without a true and recurring love of your own in this world.You will not
live to know your own potential for now.






a bonus poem:




      

Lake Bed

 

The creature with the broken mirror for a face

decided to throw a constant barrage

of rocks at my already silent windows

and when I climbed down to quietly

greet her and shoo her away,for she had the most beautiful wings on her back,she

tried instantly to blind me with the moon's

swiveled reflection, all of a sudden

bursting forth from her polished pores like little

pencil thin laser beams going off

 

in every direction at once, but it

just so happens my friends that the moon and

I are what you would call old chums. I knew

exactly where to look to keep from getting

instantly fried like a gooey egg splotched and greasy right

on the spot. She then took my left hand ever

so sweetly mind you and led me to

the beautiful dark body of the lake

 

where we gathered sand like miniature

Milky Ways and made grand wishes together,she

then tripped me onto a root and pushed me

in. She started to beat the ground all around

the shore with her sleeping laughter like

a single handful of branches on fire,

but I simply rose on up out of that

dripping and drying lake bed wearing the same 

 

water's shirt like a long silk robe to hide me. And when

she tried pulling the snowy hood over

my head I just let her. That's when I shrank

into a mini ball like a blue river

rock and fell back to the soft arms of Mother earth and

crawled out below the hem she was yanking

apart with all her many serrated fingers and

walked right past her, back into the house of  

 

mutated lights. She sat on a mossy seat

outside the invisible rain's umbrella,mocking the world at large 

and howling at nothing, for about another

full hour.Finally I heard her

rusty car door of a heart open and

slam and the tiny engine of her selfish

greed starting to pull away the many

miles she had come to judge and sentence

 

me to a hopeless night's frosty fever.

Some time later I heard a real honest

to God robin singing loudly like it

hadn't a single care in all the whole

blessed world.And I thought  to myself oh

yeah it might just be the day has come for

some good old hot fluffy pancakes. All you

can eat. Smothered in loads of butter and lots of maple syrup.

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