Cruelty and Kindness

What is retribution,

If not a never-ending cycle of revenge?

They say it is a penalty inflicted out of vengeance for a wrong act,

But they also say two wrongs don’t make a right.

So, can revenge ever reach completion,

Or will the whole world turn blind?

Who deserves retribution,

If not everyone for every wrong they’ve ever done?

Is it reserved for the homophobes, the racists, the liars, the cheats?

Or does it extend to the lazy, the manipulative, the privileged, and the foolish?

Does it even target the lucky?

Who determines retribution,

If it no longer exists solely with lawmakers?

If we now encourage others to design and enact their own form of retaliation,

And as a public judge whether it was fair,

Is it still retribution if we then punish the offender we helped create?

What is retribution,

If not cruelty extended,

Stretched out and continued long after the original offence?

And do you really believe petty revenge could hurt that type of crook?

No, the cruellest gift the Good bestow upon the Evil is time.

Time is the enemy of unhappy people.

The Chimes of Freedom

‘Which one of us would do it?’

            ‘He targeted my daughter. It should be me.’

            ‘You’d really…?’

            ‘Could I actually just go in there and…? Let me think. Smother him? Yes, yes I could.’

            ‘We might not need to, Natasha. I’ve not been feeding him.’

            ‘You’ve been cutting back on his meals?’

            ‘I’ve not given him any food in seven days. Just water.’

            ‘He’s looking very gaunt, Annette. Do you mean you’ve been deliberately…?’

            ‘I want him dead. I hate him. This way we just say he wouldn’t eat, we say he…’

            ‘Refused food… we say he didn’t want to live any more with the pain of the cancer… we…’

            ‘We wait two more days. He can’t last out if we starve him.’

/

            In his studio they looked at the paintings, many of them of themselves in the first flush of puberty, thin, uncomfortable, unhappy, all naked. Natasha remembered him painting Annette many times, then her turn came. She didn’t quite know what was going on. It’s art, darling, her mother insisted, keep still for Daddy and stop complaining. Her mother had practically pimped her. Creation from exploitation? That wasn’t art. Post-Jimmy Saville his reputation had crashed. Now he was reviled by many, his works removed from galleries. Quite right. Burn them all. A vile paedophile.

His sister though believed they had aesthetic value, said each haunted portrait revealed her mixed feelings: fear of her father and her unbreakable connection to him.

/

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My curse is …

“I don’t fear death,” said Polypherous, “I fear not being able to say something original about it.”

As he sauntered across the freshly blackened road, its newly laid tar still odorous, to Quinit’s bakery on the corner of Beach Street, where the paving stones were still reddened by the blood of martyrs, and overflowing flowers in iron baskets bedecking the sills of tiny apartments filled with shouting boat-wives, hung like curtains, affording cool in the midday heat, he turned to Archegoron walking alongside, and asked him, “Do you fear death, Arch?”

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