“I’m a terrible human,” you say.
And maybe it’s the age difference,
But I don’t see it that way.
Not off the back of one frustrated error,
Anyway.
See, I’ve encountered some truly
Gruesome humans,
Seen people who take every gift and
Turn it to shit,
Toxic at each turn,
Burning the ground around them,
And salting it with their piss.
Even them I’d struggle to utterly dismiss,
Just strip them from my own life,
Never expend any thought on them
Except as a template of How Not To Be
(Warn others if necessary),
And move on.
That’s not you.
You can tell, because we’re still talking,
And I’m all too old for indulging shitheels
These days.
You can tell, because you still have
Real friends: ones who’ll let you know
When you’ve fucked up.
You can tell, because they’ll
Lend you the tools for the next step
Tell you they’ll be there for it.
While I don’t advise you
Ever stop striving for betterment,
Set the baseline in the right place:
Gracelessly neutral – doing no real harm
On the daily, averaging out at…
Average.
That’s it – now weigh yourself honestly,
Consider the things you do
To leave the world a better place.
Consider the things you do that
Leach the world without net benefit,
Then do the sums.
Consider everything,
Be compassionately brutal,
And choose what you’ll do next.
Any truly terrible human will demonstrate
How greedy, solipsistic spirals look,
How even their most “community-minded”
Actions are actually
All About Them,
And how the line between
Perfectionist and despotic is…
A tricky one.
In the course of writing this
I’ve had to pause,
Audit myself at each verse,
Consider the implications
And how I might reverse them,
Curse the nature that sets
Zero so impossibly high,
While keeping an eye on my
Most egregious excesses.
(That honestly wasn’t fun.)
Nonetheless, in the absence of
Post-mortem corroboration,
My conclusion:
I am not a terrible human.
And neither, my friend,
Are you.
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| The statue of Herodotus in his hometown of Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum, Turkey. Source: Wikipedia |
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