All-and-none

Count me among your many,
but count me not at all.
By skin, or taste, or refrain
I am but my own.

But by breath, and life and wonder?
Consider me your brother.

I hope to share the space of ours
in peace.
Though I may be quiet and
oft reserved, I am peace.

Never will you watch my movements,
for they shall not hurt you.

A view to private interest

I worry now about rule with a "view to private interest,"
and I do so while I hear the call of greatness and declarations
regarding primacy of place.

I am not a country, but a man.  
Am a working man, a human of this present
with a desire to exist peacefully and fluidly.
My primacy of place is fixed by my love of self, 
not the screeching of banshees propping themselves
upon the backs of others.

But the great spirit that protects me is vulnerable.
Hijackers, proponents of a collective disintegration, 
work their voodoo on the frazzled, hoping to string
us along together.

They feed on the sores of the body ideologic, 
drawing strength from the bubbling excretion
of the wilted body
as if imbibing a sacred elixir.

Like man, like state

Of the simple knave ask: education?
     They respond - but slight.

In such inadequacy, a force both restless and intemperate.
So we must probe the enduring dilemma --
     Wisdom as reflection
     or,
     an endless aspiration?

To know and name human effort and watch it crumble,
stifled beneath the myth and mirror of self-aggrandizement. 

In the fields,
each one a voice!
And beyond?
Nothing.

Behold reality as reflection: like man, like state.