How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop?

…

Also, if you‘re so powerful, why does evil exist?

As the ruling Coven of the 100th fold, we were destined for greatness. Rest assured, we took great care to honor humanity. We only turned them into giant apples to be eaten. Their sweet crunches were music to our ears.

As one could imagine, when we located the capsule from the depths of the Hellfire Lake with the absolutely voluntary help of one hundred slaves, we had high expectations. As the hexes were carefully disarmed, we dreamed of the dark magic unlocked before our eyes.

The smoke knocked me out the minute it opened, and when I woke up, I suddenly found out that the sun, which was covered by our darkness spells, actually came out for once. Miraculously, the pitiful humans passing by were not slaving away anymore to our bidding but actually thriving and—dare I say it—laughing at me! It was intolerable. According to the juicy taste of his last words, the greatest spell of history saved in that time capsule was a disastrous spell that inverted everything except for me.

Why would our ancestors make such a time bomb and rid us of the joy of human apples? I can’t tell. Maybe a certain snake might know…

The blackened end smoked out its last ebbs of wood. The candle flickered in the background, but the bitterness between us soured the air. She gave me the match to light up the ancestral lantern, but all I wanted to do was to stab its dead flame into her arms. Lighting the ceremonial ancestral lanterns is a custom of our culture, but this honor felt degrading. What was marriage worth if it was not settled over physical confrontations?

When we first met, she was looking for her friend at a cafe. She made the mistake of running late to their meeting, and her friend was already halfway gone without telling her. She was not the type of friend you want around, but she had no choice but to stuck with her only friend left. I caught her attention by shifting close to her and asking about how stressed she looked. Her entire body jolted when I spoke, and it was later on they I learned that relationships have never been easy on her physically either. Perhaps it was this guardedness that warped her view on relationships.

Her black hair fell down to her waist, and her eyes were the coldest blue there was. It should have been a warning sign, but no warmth could have convinced me that I was making a wrong decision. She wanted to leave me behind the moment we talked, and it took a good half hour before she relented and gave me her number. She wasn’t pleased with me, so I expected a random person on the other side, but to much misfortune, she answered.

The flame lit up only when she started to imagine what a good life it would be to marry a surgeon. No more career work—just be a stay at home mom. Her interest in me exponentially increased when she became aware. She wanted a family at the most minimal cost her lavish lifestyle. I thought meeting her expectations would be in the true warmth underneath it all.

We engaged, and when the day came, I always threw up due to anxiety. No one interrupted our ceremony, but some days, I wished some random homeless guy just ruined it all. It would have given me enough time to reconsider. Loneliness may have been more preferable than this.

In our culture, it is looked down upon to divorce, and even as the flames died so quickly and her smile became more cruel as we discovered there was no hope for kids, we stuck along with each other. I was the stale bubblegum stuck on then bottom of the school desks. I took the burnt match and smelled the dead essence. I twisted it with my hands, threw in the grass, and wished the lantern of the dead carried me away.

Nightfall

When the rolling waves do come in

So do my steps fall back into infinity

This moonless night befalls me

The only light—the glimmer of my tired eyes

The ribbons have frayed

The papers burned away

The fragments pierced together

Crystals—

Time has pressured them as they lay

So I thought that can only be the way

But alas

This last puzzle?

A meaning trapped in paradox

———————————————

Midnight

No questions nor answers tell

The moment of its trigger relinquish

No tears nor silent scream

Register when the bell tolls

Of gears and cogs

This heart of issue

Rolling around

Can emotion ever be divined?

Toy nor prison

This last maze of mind

Attempt is failure

But failure never tried

No entrance nor exit

But victims all the same

What shall I make of this

Am I even sane?

Does the threads of my tapestry

Begin or ever end?

Do the patterns of this flat painting

Ever storybook the frame?

———————————————

Late

Each rounded layer cracking

In the edges of this black stone

Do the waters cry through

Summons of the past fading away

All blank canvases now

To tell no more of you

No traveler will find me

No weary hero will see me

No specter of the future

Shall haunt me

It’s just me now

No stars to guide

The whispers of the gardens

No longer sound as sweet

The monsters of my childhood

No more than anger seethe

What trails that I walk

Now have me as lead

Lonely frontiers

I understand you now

So too does the silence speak to me

———————————————

Asleep

These last years shift the seconds of dreams

No edge nor boundary

The brushstrokes blend

These bitter hues

Turning back time

To where I began

Meant running toward

Frail eternity’s land

Struck—

The hymn codas once again

But the notes carry no heavenly repose

My own voice carry the lows

The lonely and final repeat

Weaving these impossible measures

For some grander symphony I will never know

Stepping in time to this mad waltz

I thought I was doomed

To this

To me

Suffering fate’s loom

———————————————

Dawn break

But fate and faith are a duo

Light and life within

Darkness divided

The rays come true and through

It’s just me now

No stars to guide

It’s just me now

The dawn burning eye

Never will I know the truth of this

Even as the puzzle falls apart

Beneath it lies another mystery

Layers of perpetuity

But as I sing the memories of the past

The future so faithfully comes forth

The Harmony of the End?

No—

Of Tomorrow

Not for me nor for you

Of the days of all of us

———————————————

Mourning

Acceptance of the laughing tragedy

Are smiles so bitter

Sweetness in lieu

But once began

Even with no end

Do the kinder words

Come falling through

Paradox me this

In the deeper waters

An answer in riddle

So shallow but so simple

But all the more true

Even as the silt did rise

The waters never did forget

Of the darkened stone

Do fall apart and drag away

Did the clearer rivers flow

For another today

A bygone conclusion

A solution so absurdly obvious

For happiness, for peace, for serenity

For me and for you

All of us

Humming within

———————————————

Zenith

The story shifted

The narratives transforming

The past ever so gentle

The present writing

The futures of blue

Where the sun shines

My brighter eyes

Goodbye nevermore

As the stone rolls away the waves

I do say

Hello to another form of you

Even when all is lost

We never do lose

The permanent junctions of

Crossroads formed

Where others came to you

And you to them

Where the path taken

Is a thread woven

Perhaps gold and green tomorrow

But never without its true hue

Our histories speak

Of the words of the present

Showers of wisdom

Brought colors of yore

For Hope

Of wings and feathers

Aeternus Deus

From me

From all of us

I’ll never forget

My promise to you.

When I opened the door to the night

The darkness rolled in and enveloped me

Outside, while the trees swayed and the wind yawned

A thousand pieces of stars came showering down

For each fractal cutting into the night air

Fire captured and floated in spheres

Rainbows caught in the moment,

Shining down—these ethereal creatures

A last good bye to the visionary

A sweet night befallen

Once upon a worldly time

She came into being

She sat at the bottom of the world

And saw nothing but the sun at noon

The sunshine told her that she could

One day embrace a better world

So she climbed and she climbed

And one day she saw the world

For the first time

For a while the sun did shine

And she danced on the plains

She yelled for joy

And sang the praises of the world

And one day

The mirror broke

A thousand pieces shattered before her

And she was back at the bottom as before

For an eternity she mourned her loss

And for an eternity she cried

Only after a flood of tears built up

Did she finally climb out again

But the mirror was broken

Things would never be the same

So she pieced together what was left

And said goodbye to the sun

She sits on the plains at night

Breathing in and out

And embraced the quiet moon instead

One look at post-modern thinking

One more drink of beer for the day

They might argue for subjective truth

But what blasphemy they do say

One look at atheism today

One more hand to the head

How can anyone, let alone millions be like so

His atheism saw God as nature led.

One look at reality as conceived

The amount of shock on his face

How can there not be natural order

In this human race?

One look at learning and development

Besides the unheralded progression

Of learning for the popular masses

Surely, you must be joking of such regression.

One look at truth and epistemology,

Oh boy, he looks like he might cry

How can anyone know through senses

Only reason can prevail—oh my my!

One look at what some people want,

A destruction of the line between church and state

No—this is where I shall make my stand!

No intersection because that is what I hate!

One more look and I don’t think he’ll still stand

The modern world is just too much

And Spinoza is no fan

Poor Spinoza, dug from his grave

Says goodbye and jumps right back in

“There is no retribution enough to be saved!”

And out he goes—there are no more debates for him to win.

When I drop a ball from a building, its acceleration would be around 9.8 ms^2. Is that an objective fact or subjective? Most people would say objective. I wonder what the opposing side would say. If reality is truly subjective, how could it be that gravity is different for everyone? Well—maybe there are some subjective elements that influence this fact’s existence. After all, the existence of this fact is based on a body of people, who are subjective, being specifically interested in the acceleration due to Earth’s gravitational pull. Bodies of scientists have continually updated the information we have found with substantial arguments and disagreements over time. Even though the fact itself may not be subjective, the surrounding culture and entities that study it and build off from it are, indeed, subjective.

This subjectivity is more prominent in the social sciences more so than the traditional “hard” sciences. It’s hard to disagree about the acceleration due to gravity, but it’s much harder to say there is one objective social reality. If someone experiences racism everyday as a black man, that is a different experience than a white man. Their sense of reality in social life would be quite different. The black man would feel degraded and threatened by the racism he faces while a white man may not even consider the possibility of being mistaken for a criminal and shot down.

Reality as subjective or objective depends on what subject area you wish to enquire about. Differences in social reality often come about due to structural inequities. While one may taken for granted being able to freely run down a dark street at night, another would consider it a death threat. Other information like the facts about gravity are less debated, but the true mysteries lies in between fields or the meta-level questions of science. Who gets to define what life constitutes? How are things categorized and why? What constitutes enough evidence for something to be considered true? All of these questions challenge us to think deeper about facts. There is more to the world than pure positivism.

The age old question of whether we truly have free will is a question that has many implications for criminal justice. If we are to fall into the deep hole that no one has free will, then what then of consequences? Every lawyer will just defend their client as having acted because of the collective past experiences of their life.

If free will does exist, how much can we ascribe to free will and voluntary decision making compared to decision making influenced by our environments or past? Can someone in a psychotic break be responsible for believing in delusions and sabotaging relationships? Can we see that those growing up in poverty are more likely to struggle financially because of their circumstances?

Regardless of what the neuroscience says about free will, the lack of existence of free will or the presence of free will both have an influence on criminal justice. They bring into question who can be held responsible if at all for their behaviors.

There is, however, an interesting result of how one thinks about consequences based on where one stands on this spectrum. For those who ascribe circumstantial evidence that excuses an individual, these people are probably more likely to think big picture. A person’s actions are moulded by others. It takes a village to raise a child so why not a village held responsible when a child does something abhorrent? What about all the other people in their life that could have intervened but did not?

This perspective can be more empathetic and understanding in certain cases, but it is also difficult to balance. On the extreme end, the consequences can be dire. If a lot of people are responsible, what are their consequences? It would be difficult to ascribe responsibility in an almost arbitrary manner. There would be many arguments going at once regarding who should face consequence and how. It would enlarge the bureaucracy and also prevent a fast and speedy trial as they are bogged down by the extraneous details.

It would, also, be considered deeply unfavorable by the general population and pose threats to privacy. Who is to say a neighbor is somehow responsible for a murder in the next house over when they did not know anything about it? They would need to invade privacy to “keep watch” like a guard to prevent negative consequences happening to them.

On the other hand, if one is very anti-deterministic, it might make one very harsh and leaning towards punishment. Why give anyone any leeway for their behavior when they should have known better? Doing wrong when one doesn’t need to says everything about the character of the offender. They would need to be locked up for possessing lesser than ideal character and continually tracked until the deficit is fixed. This perspective also has racist undertones as different races were once considered morally inferior. To feed into a punitive system would create a cycle of arrests and serve punishments that don’t deter crime but are given out as a consequence of not being “good” enough.

Of course, one can imagine a non-punitive system that is predated on free will, but it would still look away at systemic injustices and the big picture that influence one’s behavior. Would anyone dare say that a hungry man is not understandable to steal if they have no other way to eat? Even if the consequences are lenient, it misses out on the larger issues. The bigger question is: why is this person going hungry in the first place?

It is clear to me that taking the extremes of either side lead to short-sided thinking. It would be better to balance opinions on a case-by-case basis and not resort to extremes to solve the issue. The middle, however, is always murky and some people fall further to the right or to the left of the spectrum. Which is a better worldview largely depends on how people understand crime. Is crime largely motivated by past experiences or due to a character flaw? It is the position of the author that it is better to lean more towards past experiences as a large motivator for crime rather than a character deficit as the adage, better to let five guilty people go free than to imprison one innocent, is a similar logic to how I see it. It’s better to be lenient but fair with consequences and not ruin a life if the crime is largely redeemable. This means that the person shows remorse and genuine desire to own up their crimes. Those who show no remorse and no desire to atone are those who I believe it is better to be less lenient on as they pose an ever present danger of reoffending.