By: KJ Hannah Greenberg

Argued into Existence

Reality yardsticks, measurements acknowledging, cognizing,
Integrating others’ attitudes & actions across personal views,
Let citizens wrestle meaning. “Getting the gist” does matter.
Flinging pixie dust can’t compete with shared values’ power.

Hume, Kant, Voltaire, as well as Jefferson, who authored The
Declaration of Independence, Paine with the Rights of Man, Adams
Penning The Empire of Reason, used words to dispute The USA
Into existence! Connotations flowed like mucilaginous liquid.

Per ideals of privacy, individualism, intellectual freedom, open
Criticism, and community action, information remains a social,
Historical construct. Worlds rise from credible texts, instead of
Morality plays. Pamphlets eased out town criers. Books matter.

Yet, until people’s ideas get expressed in publicly legitimized
Documents, like constitutions, they don’t reckon as echoing
Collectively-held beliefs. Standardizing parlance and thought
Regulates that stuffing, delimits where “truth” should reside.

While print empowered persons to compare copies, discern
Verity’s places & positions, scholars merely replaced clerics.
Humanity enjoys no linguistic certainty. Language yet builds
Barriers, stratifies folks to classes, establishes elite echelons.

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Advantages that Inhere in Marriage

It remains advantageous, decades after canopies, to have one cuddle partner.
Likewise, there’s a comfort in familiar farts and wheezes.

Few protest the essential character of a spouse’s accustomed toilet lid height,
Missing toothpaste caps, or dishes strewn forever in kitchen sinks.

As well, it seems that relationships built from ylem almost always allow space
For atavistic caparisoning habits involving T-shirts, maybe jeans.

Among white-haired couples, fractious moments receive no undue attention.
Rather, it’s small kindnesses that get illuminated.

A coffee served bedside, a sock darned, a pile of leaves raked just for jumping,
Plus, related ephemera, become the corpora of delight.

Unfortunately, shared tumescence becomes finite, gets drawn off by senescence.
The dead don’t canoodle.

Corroboration, eventually, becomes the stuff of scrapbooks, electronic letters,
Saved birthday cards.

A pairing’s numen eventually dissipates like dandelion fluff, July raindrops,
Life.

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Coign

A projecting corner, she was unafraid—assuming the vanguard was natural.
Frontrunners, after all, not jefes nor monied souls, but mesial sorts, usually
Those peers ranking less than venal, more than noble, formed “front rank.”

Precursors, equally, often perforce, advanced their goals toward foreseeable
Futures, notwithstanding the overriding ellipsism & not negating the numen,
Which cast shade over all her goings-on. Fiercer in mantua than in panoply,
She bade only brumes and sunlight to her will, asked that each foin served.

Like a book’s proem, her actions made history. While fighting, that feeling
Of énouement jacketed her, kept her separate from loyal troops, sponsoring
Villagers, also, helpful vibrations yielded by runic landscapes (her celestial
Soldiers’ sudor glistens like everyone else’s. Blood flowed in combat zones
Even of friends preoccupied with degrassé; warriors succumbed to wounds.)

Whether dene or hilltop, however, she felt pure mauerbauertraurigkeit. None
Could discern wherefore trickling life, hewn limbs, mashed helmets heralded
Those injustices styled to arouse insouciance, provoke long-standing danders
Such as surfaced ventral ire oozed from “pitchers” not sealed by kintsukuroi,
Or else reformed, returned to duty despite “unenlightened” boundaries. Most
Were honored with villas, dismissal pay, reliable steeds, & retired bondsmen.