Ajax Kallistrate

In a mad world the voice of reason
sounds like the raving of a
madman and all doors
are barred against
it, all faces
turned
away
from
sweet
Sophia as she
pleads behind a
glass wall ('Poor Cassandra!'
they say, embarrassed for her).

All the towering fears of mankind
are raised in a panic against
the flesh and blood
prophets
of our
time
lest
we be
painted
with the painter's brush.

My god! My god.

They work so hard, so earnestly.
They want so much to be good.
They want to walk a righteous path.
They want to defend the defenseless.
They want to cast aside the brutish
ideals of a savage past.

My god! Woe this embattled youth!

To exhaust such precious strength
and fertility enriching men
who hate them!

My god!

To labor so endlessly, so pointlessly,
building nothing and leaving
nothing behind.

"No one could be so evil!" they say.

Except of course
He Who Shall Not Be Named

unless it's with thoughtless mockery
and derision, a foolish arrow
through a foolish heart
that would cease to
beat should it
recognize
the
depth
of the calumny
that forms the very core
of their ancestral history.

My god!

"Nothing that happened a hundred
years ago could affect us today!"

Or fifty years
or ten
or a year
or a month.

Who remembers 9/11?
Who remembers covid?
Who remembers the bloody
mattresses and the high chair?

Who remembers the Epstein list?
Who remembers the little girls
screaming in the dungeon
in Belgium and the
police officers
who walked
away?

Who remembers the hundreds
of thousands of children
who crossed the
border
from
Mexico
and vanished?

Who remembers the sixty-five
million children mercilessly
slaughtered
inside
their
mother's wombs?

Does Sophia weep for them?
Or does she watch with
indifference as
yet another
young
woman
sacrifices
her blood for the
spectral lights of an illusion?

Has the voice of reason convinced
himself of his own madness?
Or has it always been
this way
and
so
he's at peace,
knowing that those
who know know they know
nothing at all, truly, and are only
driven to seek surety out of their
own kind of madness and will
only discover, to their
sorrow, a different
illusion?

Who's to say?

For my own part, I separate, too
heartbroken to watch young
people work two jobs,
raise no children,
and bear
only
the
burden
of debt for
an education
in confusion and misery.

I am not wise.
I labor under all the same illusions,
plus a few more of my own devising.

I know no truth, not really.
I remember nothing.

I'm a nobody, a serf, a laborer who
will never be allowed to set
down my burdens
after
a
job
well done,
whose sacrifices
only add to the wealth
of men and women who despise me.

Am I pathetic to feel grateful, still,
to be here? For a chance to walk
a righteous path, to defend
the defenseless,
to stand up
against
the
brutish
ideals of this
savage world?

Probably.

September 28, 2026

bureaucracy is parasitism
by waste.

September 26, 2026

A wall that protects
by nature excludes.

September 13, 2026

poetry is an ephemeral boundary
around an ephemeral moment,
a pair of mortal hands
cupping falling
water.

September 11, 2026

That rocky shore,
that hair of bladderwrack,
that crash of whitecaps, that's
where the Hags dwell, those
mad old women who want
more than they can get;
the in-between place,
between the sea
and the shore,
not either
or
both
but neither;
the undefined
hesitation is their lair.

(They can't be contented
but they abide.)

Their laughter is like music
to young girls who want
to swim in the roiling
seas and be wilder
and more
cunning
and FREE;
and so we walk
along the shore and we
laugh too and take deep breaths
of that fresh salt-laden air and
though we might not believe
the promise of their offer
we still daydream of
walking into that
water and
letting
our
long hair
become bladderwrack
and sinking down among
the rocks and the tide pools
and the starfish and the
periwinkles and letting
our voices become
their voices
and
singing
forever to the sea.

September 3, 2026

The places that sing when there
are no people to listen are
the places where our
gods can always
be found.

The mark is on the glass and not
the sky. The smudge is on the
lens and not the eye.

When you let go of it all you have
to wonder: what else is
out there?

Somewhere a field is being
whipped by a hot wind;
our gods are there.

Somewhere a fetid swamp
steams at dawn, thick
with insects and
leaping fish;
our gods are there.

Somewhere a landscape of ice
and snow stands as still as
death, a place where
even water
doesn't
move;
our gods are there.

Places of staggering beauty and
peace, places with their own
heartbeats, vivid with life
that depends only on
itself,
the
spinning wheel,
radiant, eternal, all
encompassing; a doorway
with no door, a boundary with
no line, a pool with no surface to
break, to pass through, that can
never be closed against you,
sealed away, bought, sold,
borrowed, or stolen.

It can't be owned.
It's always there.

It doesn't wait for you, pine for you,
need or want you. It's just there,
when you want it, when you
need it, when you decide
to shed all petty fears
of shame and
judgement

(transient things)

and step inside, embrace what's
here, what we can see...
sometimes...
feel
always
(if we let go),
what we can hold onto,
dwell within, allow within,
what we can become
a part of, if we
choose.

(And we can choose.)

Always.

August 31, 2026

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