Hate
by Odin Roark

Hate was his enemy now.

He had changed,
but the world hadn’t,
and he could not find repose
in this perpetual chaos.

He was merely one man,
but accepting war,
starvation,
displacement,
political narcissism,
and power mongering as the norm
clashed with his sense of right and wrong,
spelling out nothing but self-destruction.

His eyes roamed the small rented room.
This was home now,
the trappings of unsatisfying success far behind him,
the harsh reality of truth his only companion.

His walls of collected books had become but history’s repetition,
his one window to the outside framing a world crumbling,
dotted with a kill-riddled landscape of man’s evolution,
creating an armed anthill of madness,
perpetually shrouding itself
in a bestial stalemate of poisonous cloud.

He gazed at his door of egress,
requiring only a simple stepping outside,
allowing his own imagination as compass
to determine direction for his escape.
But where might it take him,
and what might he find at the end?

Could a gentle journey be possible
through this roiling populous of dis-ease,
where so few saw clearly;
so many remained lured into the caliphate of hate,
where the rejection of reason,
made primal the folly of right,
all wrong seemingly so seductive.

How sad, he thought,
this world going mad,
not recognizing rancor as the enemy,
creating the quintessential singularity of destruction.

He pulled the shades
and lit a candle, his only trusted light,
choosing to ignore for the moment
that it too would eventually extinguish itself.