resisting the urge to look

[fflo]

Don't look, I tell myself, and so far I haven't, since the second time I read that recent bit that seemed unnecessarily cruel, not to mention had me composing in my head the slam-style rant "As If," whose lines all start, like an exercise in Whitmanesque anaphora, with those two title words, some of them running on and on, building momentum and defiance with their cut-through-the-crap zinging clarity & spiffy turns of phrase, yet encompassing before their settling to a finish a flash of the diehard compassion I can't deny and would have to include, it being, after all, a correct-the-record kind of soapbox performance, so righteous it'd remain dope authentic even were I compelled to smoke and drink cheap booze, straight up, in a beret on a cabaret chair at a round black café table in dim light, beforehand and after-words.

But I am curious. And I don't know that I won't look again.