Ajax Kallistrate

The wire-frame monkey tells the
threefold tale of a nation driven
to its knees by the weight of
a hundred years of torture,
a people conditioned to
rebel against the
instincts
that
kept us whole,
kept us together,
until starved of all
sustenance we imprinted
on the chemical scalpels added
to our daily feeding by academic
experts who neatly sliced
through our natural
reticence and
straight
into
our
brains,
cutting away
right from wrong
and washing us clean
of the sin of rebellious
bloodshed with esoterica
our wise forefathers would
have scrubbed clean with fire,
branding us with hypodermic
needles shaped like puzzle
pieces designed to
unlock the poison
of doubt,
drip
drip
into thoughts
long scrubbed of
conviction we foolishly
dismissed as superstition

-- You must trust us because you
can no longer trust yourselves! --

and the monkey's eyes were met
by steel alone, disconnected
from its race as we have
become disconnected
from our race, and
when
the
conductor
lifted his wand and
the curtain rose, the stage
was set for a second
toxic inoculation,
and the worst
of all

-- Look! --

and we looked and our senses
were overwhelmed, shocked,
and we clung to one another,
our innocence stripped away
by the time-dilated eyes
of the monkey,
and
the
megalomanics
bombarded us with
unholy comparisons

-- See what you are! See what your
people have always been! See how
worthless! See how degraded! --

and we pulled the cord ourselves,
strangling, severing body from
spirit, a hard lesson in slavery

-- Trust us! Trust us! --

and the claws slid into the gloves
and the third catalyst settled
into its grave, taking with it
all that had been
bequeathed
to
us
over
countless
millennia and,
bled dry, we suckled on each
substitution offered by the parasites

-- substitute labor, substitute homes,
substitute families, substitute
offspring --

and now we wait, calmly, sedately,
at the mouth of the chute for the
stick that will drive us
uncomplaining
into
the
grinding
gears of the machine,
forgotten fodder, we

-- poor monkeys! --

poor monkeys without even a
wire-frame mother to soothe
us with a metal teat, unable
to grieve a catastrophic
loss we can't
remember,
and
raised
to embrace
an aseptic sterility,
we turn blind eyes to
a glass bulb and we weep,
we weep.

August 27, 2026

it'll make you pencil thin

it'll make you sharp

it'll make you brittle

it'll make you dull

it'll make you short

it'll make you long for a graphite world
of black and white

it'll erase false lines and let the dots
take flight

August 27, 2026

The most dangerous man in the
world is the man who can feed
himself, feed his family, his
people, his tribe.

The day he concedes that power
is the day he condemns himself,
his family, his people, his tribe,
and all their descendents
thereafter to perpetual serfdom,
to living on their knees before
those who control their daily bread.

Ours is not the burden of the fault,
but the burden of the correction.

Our families are kept as livestock.
The next step is to turn them into
machines. Automatons. Brainless
golems. Servants, slaves.
It's already happening.

And so we must ask ourselves:

Man or machine?

Eat or be eaten?

Hunt, farm, own, and control?

Or
be hunted?
Be farmed?
Be owned?
Be controlled?

Be fed? Or feed ourselves?

Feed ourselves, free ourselves.

Feed ourselves, free our families,
our people, our tribe.

Feed ourselves and take back our
power to determine our own destiny.

August 22, 2026

Hate is the purview of the helpless.

WE ARE NOT HELPLESS

Remember that. Remember it all.

Think. See. Share. Speak. Do.

Notice.

Remember:

Hate is the purview of the helpless.

We are not helpless.

August 22, 2026

I woke from a dream of a memory
of a story you told me: you had
a yellow dog who ran loose in
the woods and the neighbors
hunted him.

I asked you and you laughed and
you said you never told me that
story, that you never had a
yellow dog.

You told me that the dream of the
yellow dog means I'm chasing
happiness, that I'm held back
by fear, by doubt.

Fear, surely. Doubt, not anymore.

I can still see it in my mind, the
yellow dog flashing in and out
amongst the trees, a lab maybe
or a golden retriever.

I've never had a yellow dog.

Dogs are sentinels in the cards,
the guardians of boundaries.

Dogs bring messages of hope
and good tidings.

Dogs are happy creatures, cheerful,
optimistic, bounding through life
with affection and joy.

What they have they give away
without hesitation, without
condition.

They look ahead only to the next
moment. They provide what's
needful, what's asked of them,
and more.

Am I chasing happiness?

Even in the middle of these dark
woods, this pathless place where
there are no breadcrumbs to follow?

Were the neighbors the parts of
myself that so fear the unknown
that they fool themselves into
believing they can shape the
future, bring the gods them-
selves to heel?

I woke from a dream of a memory
of a story you told me.

Maybe I'm chasing happiness.
Maybe it was just a dream.
Maybe someday we'll find
the yellow dog.
Together.

December 23, 2025

Surrounded by cowbird chicks
in sparrow's nest, gaping,
greedy mouths,
I contemplate
my losses.

Every childhood home, every
friend, my parents' marriage
and then my parents.

Every secret place of nature
that had for a time (which
is all time when you're
a child) held me
captive with
its spell.

All gone now.

Abandoned in middle age, I pull
together a household in a
stranger's house, cook
on a stranger's stove,
disallowed by weight
of contract from
hanging even
one picture
on the
wall,
my
walls
(their walls)
decorated only
by nine images of
imaginary houses, grand-
fathered in (I'm lucky we're
allowed curtains; shh don't tell
them), the doors weathered by
generations of the spiritually
homeless (like us),
anonymous,
and when
we
depart
we'll have
nothing to bequeath
(except the curtains, as there
were none when we moved in).

I think about this only because
Degrelle brought it up.

A stranger unknown to me,
a man who died the year
I graduated into home-
less adulthood, a man
who fought and
suffered and
longed and
loved and
died
in
a
world
so beyond
my comprehension
I can't conjure it up, a stalwart
soul who contemplated what
might forge a stalwart soul,
and his first thought
(among hearts)
was home.

Not home address or where you
spend most of your time
(which is certainly not
home for me),
but...

Home.

House, furnishings, cupboards
(what a lovely word, cup board),
and all that surrounds it,
forest, lake, stream,
shore, horizon,
field, hill,
path.

We are explorers, he said,
we are travelers. We see
so much, but the heart
sees all and wants
only home.

Want is a good word too.
To want is to lack.

We want a home.

We who are vagrants in a world
that's been reshaped around
us to exclude us, we who
have been dislodged
(another good word,
listen to it: dis
lodged)
from
our
context,
deprived
of our history,
our ancestors,
and above all, a
place of our own, a
place to call home.

Rootless.

Homeless.

We want roots.
We want to go home.

August 11, 2026

Everyone stares straight ahead
and says

'this is the earth and the sky
and the horizon and who we are'

when it's just a black mirror,
a glowing screen, a curtain,
a shadow play, a wall upon
which a false reality is
projected

because

we've been taught to NOT look up,

so

we MUST look up

because

this artificial world has been built
around us to deceive us,
to trick us into NOT
looking up, NOT
noticing

them,

because

if we look up we will see
them for what they are

and

we will crush them
underfoot like cockroaches,

so

above all, they MUST NOT be seen

because

they are weak,

because, after all,

deceit wouldn't be worth
the effort if they were powerful
enough to enslave us by force.

August 5, 2026

All I want is that collapsed horizon,
all daydreams layered atop one
another; translucent, aglow
with a new shape, a
new pattern, a
new story.

We don't need much.

If we can't afford to stay warm,
let's live where we don't
have to.

If we can't get out into nature,
let's live where we can
invite nature in.

If we can't grow our own food,
let's live where we can
at least grow a few
tomatoes and
herbs.

Let us have the happiness
that dogs bring.

We don't need a bigger canvas.
We need brighter colors.

We need sunshine and fresh air
and the sounds of birds and
frogs and tree branches
in the wind.

We need a little place in the
country. We need to get
out of the city, away
from the devilry.

We need a quiet place.
We need our own place.
We need a reasonable
horizon, a reachable dream.

Either way, I walk alongside him,
at his pace, in the direction
he chooses.

That was the promise I made.
That is the promise I keep.

August 5, 2026

when you are the light
there are no shadows

August 1, 2026

What pitiful things we are!

So easily abused, tortured, corrupted,
controlled.

If I were a god I would not love us.

August 1, 2026