the Rouge Muse

Killing was an act of contact.  It was messy and spawned existential questions along with real, visible, grotesque pain and suffering.  People started thinking of ways to keep the blood off their hands while still being winning participants in power plays of exhilarating life and horrifying death.   People started using stones in mobs of collective, oppressive insanity.  Later they used their eyes, fixating on degraded humans fighting to the death, being crucified or burning at the stake.  Eventually they brought picnic blankets to protect their legs and their food from the ants, watching the human animal swing from a tree branch while being set on fire.  Other eyes used more than distance to separate themselves from the spectacle-they looked through lenses, pieces of glass, capturing reality while removing themselves from it.   Swords were attached to guns, but then the guns began to exist alone in hand as a finger pull and sore shoulder coincided with two explosions–one cause, one effect.  That sore shoulder was too bothersome, though, as was the rightful risk of combat, so they found ways to play God from the heavens, a modern new testament to humanity’s destructive consistency.  These same vehicles that delivered bombs to foreign lands brought the lands’ resources to us, accompanied by too easily ignored accounts of the murders that afforded us our entitled comforts.  The distance between killer and casualty widened, the two repelled by the excuses of accepting accessories to a crime that does pay, but that lost contact has not quelled those same questions as we daily and absentmindedly cup purified water and wash the blood off our hands.