6-11-2013 civil war

by Charles Stein

If there is going to be
civil war
it’s a matter of inventing
what compassion
is for
when you find yourself astonished to be sitting
smack inside of one
of the combatant camps — it’s your war
too—
   no conviction
strong enough
to put you on
the outside of it

•

coconut monk
in no-man’s land
accommodating
escapees
from both worlds,
having had enough
of being right
and the struggle to preserve
not values — not yours, not theirs—
but existence itself: that’s your side of
the inequality — the other?
you cannot even say it
in a form the “enemy”
would recognize — the rift
is that inevitable, the times
that
Bad