Sweet Talk - poems

I put together this little zine of poetry around Christmas 2012. Since it's unlikely that I'll actually keep up with reprinting it, or that there will be a need to do so, I decided to post it here on my new writing blog. I did make a few changes (most notably with Quiver, which was originally called Moon Stone and had two additional extraneous and embarrassing stanzas).

Follow the jump break to read Sweet Talk:

Us vs Them

Earlier this week, in response to the recent events in Boston, comedian and actor Patton Oswalt posted a thoughtful and heartfelt response on Facebook, which was shared by approximately 253,000 people.

Since then I've been thinking about Patton's words of reassurance regarding Boston and the overall nature of humanity. It's a beautiful, rousing sentiment, and I wish that I could just be like, yes, you're right, "the good outnumber [the bad], and we always will," but I can't. I don't think it's as simple as a minority of broken, bad people lashing out against the overall good. 

Personally, and I'm sure this isn't something that's going to be a very popular opinion, I've always felt that as a species we don't really like ourselves, or one another, all that much. Instances like the one in Boston are at the extreme end of the spectrum, but there seem to always be degrees of "Us vs Them" in everything we do and say. 

Now, that term "Us vs Them" is so malleable, I find that it can be used to describe anything from interpersonal relationships to family dynamics, from cliques and social patterns to hierarchies in schools and jobs, from conflicting religious beliefs to rival political parties, from pitted countries to...well, you get the point. It's even in Patton's statement, the good...and the bad. 

It's very animalistic, Us vs Them. It's also very opportunistic, which is a survival trait that all animals carry. And we are basically animals that have developed our technologies quicker than our own abilities to use them responsibly. 

I think as higher functioning mammals we give ourselves way too much credit. I'm not saying all hope is lost, or that we should just embrace our inner beast and run amuck. I just think that we need to reconcile this inner conflict that we all feel by recognizing that we aren't the Good, with a few Baddies ruining it for everyone else. We all fall somewhere on that spectrum that I mentioned. We all see the world, to some degree, as Us vs Them. If we can reconcile this inner conflict, then and only then can we possibly hope to reconcile the outer, surface differances that we let stand between us.

To read Patton Oswalt's original post please follow the page break...