Top Dog

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

““Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.” Mao Tse-tung

"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. If they are equal, they are not free.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"Cry Havoc!, and let slip the dogs of war." (William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)

Now, world politics thrives on half-truths and straight-faced lies. Vladimir Putin’s pre-war denials about Russian military exercises bordering Ukraine amounting to preparations for an invasion and no cause for alarm bells to be ringing around the world...are clearly a classic example political strategy.

The bad news is that such strategies are as common to the darker side of human nature as the air we breathe; the good news is that the majority of us can taste its poison on the tongue and spit it out, hopefully before it can do any mind-body-spirit irreparable harm.

TOP DOG

There are places we can run
whenever conscience pricking us
to flee criticism,
even retribution in some cases,
where a wisdom
of years and its learning processes
have lost their way,
led us astray into a maze of its intentions
and our own ambitions

Mind-body-spirit finds itself
pitted against its own kind, resolved
to assert itself
one way or another, no reasoning
with morality
for exploiting vulnerability in any shape
of form, so long
as left alive to tell the tale, the world agog
at its being top dog

Ah, but few top dogs succeed
without help from allies in thought, deed
and end-game;
the latter achieved, among its spoils,
those same allies, eager
for a place in archives of human history,
found blighting as many
landscapes of so-called 'peace for evermore'
as battlefields of war

Who seeks to know where angels fear to go,
needs but follow the trail of a human ego 

Copyright R. N. Taber, 2022