Material Implication Blues Poem by Noah Smits

Days that rot relationships are quiet,
unassuming, framed by unseen dawns
and sundowns stuck in shelters.
Leading Actor
(name, self-given, Western)
fails to see
the tragic irony:
denial breeds despair,
untended hardships pass, neglected,
in each contact added once,
incessant want.
The moral atmosphere
is thronged with causal arrows.
You emerge in it, a spider.
I have done you harm unspeakable,
concealed in cast conditionals,
torrential flowing blame for absent help.
My flailing, atrophied volition
chooses petty things.
I drink
and distant humans thirst,
each conscious, sacred, real as I,
who, glancing up,
can feel their mouth-roofs parch
and watch the causal arrows fly.
I doze
and those I love endure calamities;
the wallet in my pocket,
full of sorely sought relief,
ascending, falling as I snore.

Our gravest sins are not our actions
but our negligence.
To stand before the Lord and plead,
"I haven't done a thing, "
is true confession.
Only universal love
could merit praise,
if, say,
the bloodshed caused in every instant,
that ubiquitous effect of brutish selfishness,
the overarching theme of our condition,
could itself become a cause.
What might it say, if blood could speak?
What might it do, if blood could act?
How might it pacify the authors of the lesion?
Might it smite the causal fletchers?
Might it find some other means
to predicate elusive justice?

I could never dream of Paradise alone.
The only way I'd find
to clear the moral atmosphere:
annihilate the causes.
Seize the grinning man with earplugs in the death camp
with a yo-yo in his hand and food and rifles at his side—
admonish him!
I'd want to see him tarred and feathered.
Fetch the pillory,
and hoist the monster up!
I'd find the blameless folks in town,
say
"One tomato each!
Profane words, spitting,
throwing rocks, and
the excretion of organic matter
on the perpetrator
isn't just permitted,
but encouraged.
Fire away! "
—but as the sun would sink
and cast a crimson shadow on the central village square,
as Mr. Apathetic Killer'd squirm inside his stocks,
a little sore but yet unharmed,
that's when I'd know.
The village houses no good people.
All stay hidden in their homes,
for when they glance upon the pillory,
a spirit seems to say,
"That should be you. You would have done the same."

We live convicted, you and I,
beneath the evening's purple sky
where swarms of causal arrows fly
as through the weary world we trudge.

We pray and tremble, you and I,
that by some grace in great supply,
before or after we two die,
we may not have to face the Judge.