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Recorded Reading (2:39): https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/69og670l0mvng4pqtk3mf/A-Word-of-Explanation.mp3?rlkey=aykhgjjl2dssmziw9gxn11wnu&st=vo7231ii&dl=0

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A word of explanation, my friends and readers, in case you’re getting tired of my currently prevailing miasma of poetic doom.

There is never a day when I will be listened to more on the subject of my harassors than I am listened to right now.

If I frame my situation publicly as a crime bust, authority is free to dismantle as much of the crime network itself as cannot pay to be let off the hook, and leave my personal perpetrators at large to continue holding a barrel over my light. Or worse.

My own presentation at this crucial juncture must point not to an individual culprit but to systemic tolerance of his works.

Just one one hundredth of what I still experience each day would be considered unacceptable by almost anyone free to walk our society’s streets.

If I will ever break out of this baked mud ‘mid which I have lived, surrounded in darkness ~ if ever I and my developing nation can agree on a new and better relationship between ourselves, for the good of present and future generations planetwide ~ it is now, and as strongly as I can speak, that I must.

“Complaint” generates more of what is complained of.

By contrast, statements of dispassionate and thoroughly examined truth tend to generate their opposites, if one thinks about it for a minute…

So I am, with my little spate of cultural negativity right now (something, you may have noticed, in which I rarely involve myself poetically ~ preferring to write, when formally, from higher levels of synthesis altogether), as they say, “striking while the iron is hot.”

May there be many more sunbeams and rainbows, and much less cultural commentary, coming from this pen ~ soon.