Byline: Deep Breath

Buford Youthward
stockcap@hotmail.com

Some things need saying. Not written out, but expressed in breaths.

Disruptions erupting in far off lands become medicine for the media. But it makes more sense to hate on the megaphone instead of the messenger or the message.

The too few with too much need to taste the stick the rest of us live with. It never evens out though. You can only and always trust yourself to lift you up or put you down. Nothing changes. We keep breathing.

Love can kill dreams. We've all witnessed and seen it. We go on carrying away stones, building stone fences. The promises and compromises are just mortgage payments made on our hearts. And we keep breathing.

The filling, the pudding isn't always worth a giggle. Karma redistribution provides a distraction for my detractors, cover for kings and maybe a bit of custard for the cunning. Still there's breathing.

What is fun is not necessarily fulfilling. Paper-mâché puppets propped up, plop around like bags in the wind. It's easy to see the romance of personality cult, how the masses sick of bureaucracy assign allegiance to the single figure that cuts through the smog preparing a religion for the masses, a mass for the maligned. Yet we breathe on.

The danger of extreme emotions is their ability to cause buckshot rampage or linear focus. The disgusted and demented find the arts too late or never make it to the library in time. Breathe.

People that only hear what they like tend to like only what they hear. Which is a shame. Barometers of taste should move beyond prejudice. Just breathe.

A new idea slapped on an old comic strip is an older joke. Freedom of speech includes the right to be silent, the right to experience the consequences for the silence. Try taking a bite out of crime but don't ask about what happened to McGruff the Crime Dog when he snitched.

The unsaid truth, the reward that is the journey has a way of leaving us breathless.


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