Five-Hundred Eighty-Nine

Hedgehogs, sentinels
of steel lining the divides,
side effects of man's
cruel and unusual
nature, rather beastly one.

Poking deep holes in
bone, flesh and muscle just to
tell the other side
that they are the losers, the
ones bound for complete defeat.

Crawling down low in
the sand, the slop and the s**t
and the black waters,
fighting pointless battles in
mindless, bloody total wars.

Our nature is to
nurture a permanent blood
feud with other men,
because birthrights mean more than
anything else to mankind.

The traits that unite
us, the eyes, the ears, the arms,
the legs, the fingers,
the toes, and the seven holes
in our eight-pound human heads.

And now body parts
and steel hedgehogs litter the
streets and the beaches
because the lust for blood must run
down to molecule level.

We decimate to
repopulate virally,
just our small sliver
difference on the long chain
molecule can take the lead.

The golden mean or
the utilitarian
maxim are fictions
of convenience, no point of
reference in our beings.

That is likely why
morals of divine command
are so popular
with most cultures around the
Earth, the genes are gullible.

Driving past the white
stone markers ev'ry single
day, a war culture
celebrating its need for
ritual blood sacrifice.

We may exhibit
goose-like tendencies when the
comrades have fallen,
but this few and far between,
we are self-motivators.

And maybe doing
moral actions for the sake
of morality
is enough to evolve us
into higher being states.

But, what will that prove?
Maybe nothing after all.
Forty-six and two
maybe the next step in our
evolution, the new apes.

Even then, the old
apes are still violent, pushy,
fighting over the
smallest details in the group,
a miracle after all?

So we ask our gods
of the humanistic kind
to curb our violent
tendencies into something
easy and manageable.

Yet, horses have horse
gods and they do not exist,
so humans are the
only ones that can change things
for the better and the worse.

This explains moral
fictions betters than any
god authority
ever devised by the minds
of rather imperfect men.

That is all we can
do, strive for our own sorts of
improvements and goals
because perfection is a
human ideal, only that.

Because once it ends,
there is nothing, zero left,
so we should do what
we can now while we are here,
because that is what matters.