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John Martin's avatar

I like 'the labyrinth of my vanity'. For that's precisely what it is, isn't it? We need to build cathedrals to something else. Something more important than ourselves. Then, when somebody attempts to deny or destroy it, we can appeal to something other than wounded self-love.

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Tom Merrill's avatar

I hear repentance & grief in this, for belated realization of commission of the highest of crimes.

It would help, as many thinkers have observed, if the inculcation of superstition were banned from education in the most impressionable years.

Experience, observation, independent reflection on these, might help in stemming the bloodtide.

Mercifully euthanizing life of every kind would help achieve a doom-free future, and restore all stolen peace.

The poem's imaginable theme overrides, for me, its oblique, classic, "artistic" style.

Sometime write the same theme absolutely forthrightly, in no uncertain terms. For example:

A Loose Translation

You ask why they love their murderer.

Because its wish is their desire.

You wonder how that could be.

It set them ablaze with wildfire.

You ask its reason for doing that.

To eat you alive and entire.

You wonder why life keeps providing.

Engorgement of parts made to sire.

You ask what inflates those prompters.

What made them its bloodlust's supplier.

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