usually, you’ll get no argument when you say that
it’s critical to choose good
over evil. but if it were easy to apply that,
there’d be no need to argue about it endlessly
after the choice.

you’d just act, you animal,
limbic and limber in whatever movement followed,
be it attack or embrace. you’d sit back afterward
and lick the wounds from the battle
and forget it ever happened.

instead you trouble yourself with proverbs
that became cliches right after cain
tried to explain why he reached out that first time to abel,
trying to convince yourself that love is hate and
hate is love.

so admit it. evil needs an ass-kicking.
you don’t so much desire non-violence for all
as you wish that different people were dying. kill the
homophobes, the racists, the bigots and haters, exploiters
and rapists — admit it, admit it, your version of love
would allow this and you’d only hate yourself a little for it,
and only at first.

that’s all there is to it: we say the good is easy to choose
and pretend we can’t understand why evil is so present
in this world, but the truth is that we act first
and let good and evil sort themselves out later
when we’ve had a chance to rest
and wipe the blood from our mouths.

we learned this when god chose a blood sacrifice
over the gentle fruit,
then put his thumb on cain when he did the same.
what was good, what was evil?
that ought to be an easy one.
he’s god, after all.