Culpable

When DNA shunted a tad to the right And the very first man got his very first sight Of his chimpanzee brothers, less upright, less tall With rocks preselected he bludgeoned them all Man’s earliest crime from man’s earliest time Civilisation? A very long climb. So kill to survive became killing to win The first creeping roots of perennial sin One million years on he talks so he lies His enemy lives so his enemy dies One million years on he wants so he takes His smile and his friendly demeanour are fakes No-one knows when or from where it came He harboured the concept of someone to blame He had God and Gods but the field wasn't level So he grasped at the notion of something called Devil For thousands of years most of the crime Was blamed on the Devil most of the time Man raped and man pillaged, man tore man apart And all for the Devil was in his black heart They’d told it, then wrote it, then acted on stage Finally Hollywood explained the rage The Devil, he’s Satan, he’s Lucifer too So nothing you do can be levelled at you But what happened next has modern man vexed The Devil shuns Facebook, nor does he text He cannot inveigle or instigate grief When the man of today has little belief God is what happens at Easter and Christmas The Devil’s not mentioned aloud nor in whispers Satanic movies and tomes gather dust Yet man’s ill intent stands proud and robust No caveman, no spaceman and no John Doe can Refute that an evil resides within man His guilt is his own, be it malice or passion Now that the Devil has gone out of fashion _ _ _ _ [Inspired by my partner, Annie, who, as we flicked through The channels looking for a movie to watch, said... ‘The Devil’s gone out of fashion’]