Love Poem: Maturing Up Together
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Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

Maturing Up Together

When you hear justice
do you also listen for responsive mercy?
Or are you more likely to feel merciless revenge
against uncivilized behavior
swelling vibrant adrenaline 
baptizing your self-righteous bloodstream?

If revenge is your best defense 
against chaotic complexities of anti-social behavior,
If punitive humiliation is this justice you would mentor,
live by,
protect,
then you will be an often disappointed,
and disappointingly ineffective,
parent,
and would best stay far away
from anything in law enforcement
and civil defense,
and gun permits.

Advocates and defenders of justice for all
are deep lovers of intentions and behaviors
positive humored
seeking their notnot negative unbalancing 
of empty cleansing rituals including Society's ecopolitical liturgies,
obsessive-compulsive demoralizing ruminations,
ruinations,
ramblings and echoes of great and small climatic transitions
quaking Earth's moral imagination
steeped in Anthro cultures and histories,
kind and not-unkind.

Justice without mercy
is like reactivating love without peace,
like trying to actually mentor love
without internal and interdependent contentment
that we are in this life together,
all both guilty and innocent of most everything one might imagine,
until we fall apart
to reweave yet another new day,
with notnot strictured Elder shadows,
mercifully thrown together 
as not-not fully grown regenerates.