Home » Poems » Gerald Dillenbeck » Heads Roll With Laughter

Heads Roll With Laughter

What to do,
how respond,
to totalitarian tyranny
in someone else's home
or community
or economy?

OK, good question,
I hope,
yet with ample precedent
in polycultural battles to attain harmonious balance
where we have become monopolistically lost.

What do you do,
how respond,
to monocultural stimuli
advancing in your own heart,
across your backyard?
When illness stalks you,
declares you alien to life's current probabilities
of rationally redeeming praxis,
when even your friends recognize your karma
arcing from past memories
inviting evolution's highly personal fragile future.

What do you do when you fear
your ego 
and ecological relationships of love,
and sometimes even faint suggestion of domestic peace,
may realistically be at an unwelcome end?

I tend to ask myself,
then those around me,
profoundly wise questions:
Have I done something to tick you off?
Why this tyranny,
where is the winning function of decay,
mayhem, mercenary merciless mob
thuggish behavior?
Who is winning what 
in this long-hot summer
of monopolistic habits, 
monotheistic norms,
assumptions of egocentric,
rather than healthy ecologic.

Why zero-sum competitive strategies
and principles of decadent economics?
Who designed such sick chaos?

And, my answer always echoes
resoundingly back across our Eternal Transitional Moment,
"no one,
this is a fool's game we witness."

So, whether this totalitarian monocultural weedpatch
of a socioeconomic climate
is your own
or your neighbor's
or your wider DNA/RNA-rooted
regenerative cousins
trees
seas
stardust Elders,
if you know them as
interdependent relations within EcoTherapeutic Praxis
we mentor with, by, and for each Other.

So continue to water your cooperative flowers
and ignore that violent weedish autocrat
suffering from too much yang,
too little yin flexibility and graceful mind
and inclusively grateful breath.

If you can't engage them,
join them in distant laughter at ourselves
for being such an autistically exclusive species,
distracted by our own solar spots and days gone solo,
we forget we're all in our mess together,
whether we aim ballistics at hearts,
and wallets,
and purses,
and values,
or not.

When my teenagers cannot believe
they need not fear me,
because my actions tell them otherwise,
according to their diverse abilities,
they laugh with me,
this laughter so surprises
I cannot retain my fear
and anger,
but maybe a little suffering,
or my daughter shuns me,
or my older sons ask me
what is my problem?

It helps when they remember 
to ask with kindness and curiosity
about my pain 
and fear 
and anger
and cherished suffering.

So, why not a simple email
from one head of state,
tribe,
community,
household,
unholy terror,
to Other:
I can see you are suffering
catastrophic loss of wealth and happiness,
your nutrients are leaking,
your polycultures fade
and your monocultural trend is sharply rising,
how can we help?

Sometimes I'm in no mood to talk.
I want to hang on to my suffering,
to fully harvest its lessons.
Sometimes I'm in a mood
to not tolerate shunning
from Ms. Oppositional Daughter,
but my son who cannot speak,
understands no language
beyond rhythm and resonance,
language as music in personal keys and chords,
when he laughs at my vast righteousness,
I melt and wilt
to join his polycultural revolution
of atmosphere
attention
primal assumption of mutual gratitude.

We will always laugh together
as we have throughout our incarnations.

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