Butterflies and Hurricanes

The other day I committed murder

I picked up a can of insect spray 

and killed a couple of cockroaches 

I watched them panic, losing muscle control

then toppling over, writhing, belly-up

spasming to an eventual death 

I thought about that afterwards

I didn’t feel much when I decided 

to kill them; not much really

it felt like a necessary evil 

they encroached upon my space

spread allergies and diseases 

and honestly, they looked ghastly 

In fact, the WHO calls them 

“Unhygienic scavengers in 

human settlements”; and that’s  

a statement as unsettling as any

And then another thought followed

unsettling me just a bit more

Is that what happens to us 

when we ambush, lynch, rape

torture, and kill people who 

seem like they don’t belong 

to our idea of an ideal world?

The human capacity to murder those 

who are not very different from us

because they seem scary or savage

is a trait that scares me more than 

anything else in the world