I, Vesuvius, boil within
at your self-righteous condescension;
decision to distance based little in truth,
fact or reality. Dripping in pretentious
judgment, you
are so sure of yourself.

            For your own good, you say,
make me
out to be a reckless, dangerous
woman, random in flow
of madness that harms
indiscriminately.

                        In this, you err.
You do far more harm than good.

I, Vesuvius, would allow
hot lava flow its steady progress.
Like words that want to trickle out of my mouth or pyroplastic blast that would spew forth and turn everything to stone,

            turn you to ash even as you
preach precaution yet avert your eyes
from danger in the mirror. But the world
needs not another statue to ignorance, and so my rumbling subsides.

                   You matter not.           
Or so I tell myself.