* By What Right? Do We Live Do We Die? (A Study Questioning Prejudice And Intolerance) Poem by Terence George Craddock

The fly bothers me
with its buzzing,
its flight about upon
my naked
sun soaking up skin,
in this restorative moment
sustaining need
for unseasonably hot autumn
sun soaking relaxation.

The fly bothers us
several flies
buzzing alighting
upon my bare legs
my knees.

I will not tolerate it
I will kill it. Kill it.
Them. All of them.
Does it have a right
to live? Do They?

It disturbs me.

A fly. Flies.
Have but a moment
to live
to die.


The man bothers me
us
with his smell
his unbelonging
personal hell.
My. Our. Tolerance.
Does not allow,
for him, for cultural crushed differences,
for ethnic discarded reality, in which he lives.

The man bothers me
the drunks,
the gays,
the gangs, the fighting,
the dysfunctional dishevelled lives.

I will not tolerate it.
I will not accept it.
I will reject it.

I turn my back on it.

I should not have to look at it.

My God!
What is to become of it?

They are disdained dregs
disrespected distanced
of dispossessing discarding society.

I will kill them with indifference
as surely as I kill the fly
with my irritated intolerance.

They have but a moment
to live to die.
We have but a moment
to try.

They have no part place
in grandiosed
all inclusive humanity
when theory
impacts upon reality.

Tell me by what right
do we live do we die?


Copyright © Terence George Craddock