Pull out the knife in your spine!

It's severed your river and you're drying up.

Take the pins out of your eyelids!

They make you stare and it's time to blink.

Pry the staples from your lips!

They keep you silent and it's time to cry out.

Surrender to the defiant flame that flickers in the dark depths of your guts,

incenerate those heavy robes that bind your dance,

and run into the night sky, sharing the moon's bare glow.

"Blatant fraction is the church and state!" cried the aging priest from his towering pulpit.

His finger was outstretched to its fullest extent, which resulted in a shepherd's crook shape. A dry lower lip proceeded over his many chins, and his spectacles carelessly rested on a short, stubby nose. White hair grew sporadically over his cranium and out from his ears.

"Without prayer, how do we expect our students to succeed? Without recognition of our Lord Jesus Christ, how do we expect our governmental leaders to govern us justly?" he posed to his flock.

A small, young girl hesitated with an answer and then stood up quietly and escaped the grasping arms of her mother, finding herself in the middle of the lofty building's aisle. She slowly raised her hand and waited for the priest's recognition.

The priest, ready to shout out his own answer, stopped with an open mouth when he viewed the blurry image of the girl through his thick and greasy lenses.

"Ah, and what does one of God's little children has to say on the matter?" the priest asked, directing the girl to speak.

The girl hesitated again, and then sputtered out her own question, "Father, is God omnipotent or impotent?"

In a world of green cities and red paths, there lived the people with mantis limbs. Their long outstretched spans allowed them to draw into them almost anything they ever desired, so when these people would come across a moment when one of their desires was outside their reach, they would rant with terrible tempers.

To credit their ignorance, the people with the mantis limbs didn't realize how their world with green cities and red paths operated. Hidden underneath their very feet was a subterranean world that was key to the upper world's existence. Within that underworld lived a dark liquid mass that saw to the maintenance of the buildings in the green cities and the structures of the red paths. The liquid mass also provided the people with mantis limbs with almost everything they could ever desire, but of course this was unknown to them.

On one ill-fated day, a person with mantis limbs was diving after one of its desires. In doing so, the person inadvertently pushed into the thin ground of the upper world and found the liquid mass in the underworld. The person pulled and pulled until all the liquid mass was taken from the underworld. For a long time the people with mantis limbs studied the liquid mass and made it do their bidding, but with every command, the mass diminished.

Eventually the liquid mass became nothing at all and the people with mantis limbs were left without any ability to have their desires fulfilled. This new emptiness made the people rant with even more terrible tempers and they soon found themselves tearing each other apart. The cities turned gray and the paths turned black as there was no liquid mass to maintain them, and soon the whole upper world was littered with empty shells of the people with mantis limbs.

To the functional ears,

Walking the top of a wall that borders the luminous glow of promise and the decaying shadows of regret is to say the least, a tedious task. Certainly there will be tense moments with slips and near failures, but even if one should misstep and find themselves in a erroneous cavern, all is not lost. Hope always lies in the focused eyes, the silent mouths, and the functional ears.

Cheers,

GreenBill