Flying worm; A confused confession?

I came upon a flying worm today. Suspended just at eye-level, he was twisting his way higher and higher into the air, even as he swung wildly from side to side. He looked like he was boring a hole into the sky. Looking closely I noticed he was attached to some unknown point above by one thin, spidery line, apparently about to become arachnid appetizer.

In a moment of proud and joyful humanitarian instinct, I swung the stick I was carrying and freed the worm from above so that he fell free in the soft grass.

As I walked away, self satisfied with my small gesture, I knew that in the balance I had probably deprived some spider, who might of needed it badly, of its hard-earned meal. Maybe even a hungry mother with waiting children who might now die a wasting death along with her children and a whole line of spiders. And then what had I done for the next victim, should there be one, who might otherwise go free of a satiated spider?

Then a worse thought occurred to me. Was it in fact a worm I had freed or a small green catepillar spinning it's own web in the early moments of metamorphosis? Had I deprived the world of one of its great little beauties; the flight of a butterfly?

"Thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought". It would probably be going too far to make this some analogy of liberal versus conservative thought on action in the world today. UN versus Bush or activism against terrorism versus individual rights. True, it would have been better to have had better intelligence on the distinctions between worms and catepillars. I will only say that I am consoled by the thought that the worm or catepillar has no way to consider its turn of fate to be either good or bad luck - morally right or wrong - or even any real thought at all. Nor will the world mourn the flight of one butterfly when I might have just as likely made room for another (though in popular times one can not be too sure about the Effect of a butterfly). However, this should not be said about the children of Iraq.

The Means of Ending

In the old argument of
means justifying ends
We should remember
it is no more than a delusion
To think we can determine the ends
And therefore it must be the means
That matter
Or rather the method
Since it is the way we take,
the time, the care, the love
That rather than shapping the ends
Shapes us and those around us
In the only time
of the present.

Up Yours

Did you know against God's first law
It was a phallus
The Hebrews stuck
In the very center of Yahweh's temple
When they abandoned Him
Before Nebuchaneezaar came
And swept them away?
Is there any wonder
They needed reformation?

How long after Moses received the Law
That no man should commit adultery
Did Solomon, the Hebrew’s King of Kings,
Gather a 1000 women to his bed?
Is it any wonder that God should look away?

For we are drawn to the earthly,
In denying Heaven,
Searching for the animal in us
The lost and the faithless
Seek their excitement and their joy
In the throbbing upright symbol
Of power and fertility and dominance

And so we are led away into a captivity
Of our own making and choosing.
Until the sensation of the Night collapses
And the morning dawns hard and cruel
In chains.

Japan in Sweden

Lonely clay lantern
Indented in the snow
Like a heavenly body
Curves Space-time