Satire by Michael Curtis

The First New Age Epistle

Epistle I: Why Not War With Sociology

The sparrow is a bird of little feathers,
A bird of even fewer letters,
But of words the sparrow has a number,
Among those numbered here none are dumber
Than Philip's. Not he the king of Macedon
Whom coward Demosthenes pissed upon,
Nor he for whom apostles wrote epistles,
But he who on the air disturbs in whistles.

    When this we heard the poet falsely said,
We sisters saw to him, and he is dead.
With truest care we friends repair the record
Of Philip, he the first, and she the second.
    For, few have spoke so often, or so well,
To so many – ‘tis sad, to some not at all –
As did Philip, the Queen of talk TV,
Who spoke the tongue of sociology
And anthropology, when it would fit –
Or psychology, when reason was dismissed.
1.    The wommon's best testament in patching
Is the quilt: A fact of thoughts mismatching,
But built as one good thought upon another –
Although they seldom go together –
A miracle of squares juxt in position
Which makes for intriguing propositions.
Just so, then, is the work of Philip
Haphazard as the lay of crazy quilts.
For, Philip cannot be an island
When he quilts in patch to stitch the thought by hand;
Covers with a vast array of truths
In confusion when but one should have been used.
Then, as confusion is the state of nature,
And, as things of nature are made better,
Philip has better than a science built
Thoughts, not in line, but better, as a quilt.
    As when with earnest hand he loops to make
The thoughts of Fox, of Lyon, and Ms. Take
In crystallographics – all over the same –
As snowflakes change in fact to ice by nature;
Just so, creatures change from birth when nurtured.
Thus, we know the victim of a murder
Is not the dead one, but the one who done her,
Who was done in his turn by his mother,
Who as we know was beaten by the father:
Thus, those born as themselves become another.
Therefore, we see it is the country's ills
Not the one who shot the gun who killed.
   Another patch he stitched upon the quilt
Asymmetrical, like a modern city built,
We see through Philip's threads how we're to read
The greatest work of the great Margaret Mead:
Her book, The Age of Cuming in Samoa,
Shows how sex restricted will destroy ah
People, thus, and so it seems, an issue
Of realms of myth, of lust, and of ritual;
Of how each gender’s role is determined
By the State, and not by family sermons.
    What daughter would choose to be her mother
When she can wear the pants and be the father.
The son, unmanned must be one or the other,
Or if he chooses, he may not be either.
This of course is where we should aspire,
To live as does the worm, though lower, higher.
To be both one and yet the other sex
Is what we of the New Age think is best.
To Philip then we owe a debt of thanks
For demonstrating how the system stinks.
    And then he stitched the words of Lesbe Strauss
To make what is, instead, a something else.
For wommon never is the cause of war,
No, wommon is the measurement of worth.
Of all the truths of birds, of fish, of beasts,
Of facts of life through forests for the trees,
We here have found a new Columbus –
In truth, an Isabella – who discovered
A world wherein all that is, is found
To be like wommon perfect, whole, and round,
Or fat, or thin, or tall, or thick, or lean;
In short, a world to be what-ere she please.
And as the diamond is the fact of worth,
The fact of her is all there is to truth.
    Another fact of nature – clear as glass,
Which dropped expands into a thousand cracks –
Is: We must paint our faces to be half
So alluring, pretty, or attractive
As Philip when his tongue is on attack.
But as the fish is pretty in the fin,
And fowls in the feather, so are men
Pretty in their kind, yet they must in time
Fade, and what remains is worms, muck, and slime.
    Consider now the beauty of the mountain,
How it from grandeur into mud descends.
Thus, as it is a failure to be mighty
We feminists insist on being ugly.
And this is why, as all who see must know,
That men, and all the pretty girls, must go.
Then the wommon fat may live in nature,
Surviving those who have tried to change her.
Evolution is a quilt of causes.
Thus, we will triumph, Philip, as you taught us.

2.   O Philip, Philip how may we repay you?
Ah, but one way; that is to clip and change you.
No, not that mind as perfect as a wommon's –
The mind in men rare as one in millions.
Instead we'll take the man, and add a feature
That you may be a wholly modem creature:
The Prima Donna of shecology
To live in nature simple, nude, and she;
In harmony, as can be done with science.
Philip come, we recommend you try it.
We'll reproduce with you who satisfy us.
It will not hurt, it's just a nip and tuck.
We'll add some fat, some breast, some butt, and stuff,
But keep the sperm, to breed you when we must.
    O Philip, had Susan only known
The right to vote would lead to breeding drones,
She would be pleased with this democracy
Where the weaker on the stronger feed;
Where just a vote may take the property
Of drones, both legally and totally.
And in extremes we may take their lives,
If we choose, and it's voted by the wife.
Or we may force a man to slave at work,
That we may stay at home and talk with her,
Philip, who taught us everything is free –
More free if we elect ourselves a queen.
A queen to keep the hive, to run the bees,
That we may have our cake and eat our sweets,
Work our men at will and keep their money.
But, to prevent the violence of his sting
We will with modem tools remove his thing.
Then gadgets, and our friends, will give us sex
Since Susan showed us how to use the ax.
    Philip we will make a better world
Where everyone will grow from child to girl:
No crime, no guns, no men, no poverty,
And with no men we’ll suffer no disease.
Then all will live not for themselves, but others,
And all shall be as the other's mother,
Each, the others all we shall look after:
No fights, no quarrels, only joy and laughter.
    And when the men and boys are all removed
There will be better grades made in the schools.
For we will teach the girls without distractions
From those who would beat, defeat, and rape them.
Girls, by themselves give love, they never hate,
They smile with pleasure and cooperate.
    Never more shall we have competition
When free of evil masculine temptations,
Like aggression, and hairy chests. We'll slice
That penis: Put the clitoris in its place!

3.    But how, you wonder, can we do the deed,
Put in the egg and yet retain the seed?
How to create a creature soft and small, yet
Hard enough to work and to invent?
    Well, this we did by studying how bees
Fly, and how they organize society;
How they sting, and also why they breed,
And found: The busy bee need not think much
If with estrogen you spike his lunch.
Thus, we no longer need to re-invent
As all the goods of earth are mostly spent.
Thus, all we need to do is to maintain;
For this drones have no need of brains. They need
To keep the hive, the persun of the Queen,
Or many Queens, with many drones to seed.
We studied long and well and then discovered
It takes ten drones to be but one Queen's lover.
    By tinkering with the XY genes,
We YXY'd and then we found the mean.
Sometimes they come out wrong, so we abort them,
But otherwise we change, divide, and sort them.
So, as you see, we've made the perfect system,
Where society survives without assistance
From those who would make trouble and invent
Machines and things that pollute the planet –
We wommons never could be blamed for that.
    O! We in harmony will dwell with nature,
Descend until we are like other creatures
Naked, simple, cold and yet at home
Happy with our honey and our drones.
    Mam, therefore I know you will be pleased
That you yourself will be the first of these
Drones. But, you must, dear Miss, retain your wife,
Or rather be a slave to her for life.
So smile and forget the Right's of Man,
For who needs rights when there are no men?
    And to what do we owe this glad affair?
The lessons that you taught us on the air:
That we wommons can arrange society
How, and where, and when to what we please.
And what we please, as you who feel have known,
Is: That for the good testosterone must go.
Go! With small-pox and the Do-do bird
Into the past, where it never more can hurt.

4.    Picture now the greening New Age city:
Trees, and huts of straw, and wommons smiling,
Naked she-males for the wommons working
At their feet, the dirt, and changing diapers.
The air is clear, though cold, there are no heaters,
No cars, no roads, no lights, no traffic,
Just the night, and chants, and stars, and magic;
Mindless drones who hoe and rake at farming,
At work in fields, in huts, in woods a plenty:
For what once took but one man now takes twenty.
    Here we have them herding round the Queen,
Attending to her wants, her will, her needs.
And there is one with sinew who is sewing;
No plastic now, nor thread of cotton growing,
So he must use the dead drone's skin and bones,
Well kept by him in the many tidy piles
From the huts of grass about a mile,
So that the Queens are not disturbed by smells,
But close enough the drones may come when called,
And come to do exactly as they're told.
    The grounds and hut belonging to the Queen
Are always fashioned pretty, tidy, clean,
And always ready should the wommons meet
To have the chat we call The Quilting Bee
Where is discussed in language soft and gentle,
How to retain an order matriarchal,
And who did what to whom, and then how often;
Then laughs and cries and smiles to all are offered.
When this is done, the rock encrusted Queen –
Who represents the high authority –
Throws open each her robes that all may see
The womb, therein the State where grows the baby.
Chained, a drone then bows into the scene;
In hand, the rock-cup filled with Luke-warm tea
Made from the leaves gleaned from the local weeds.
    The goddess bends and smiles, for she is pleased
With you Philip, and the frilly words you preached.
O, all the world has come to pass as we've foreseen
In the future when all things are green.

5.   Above, as you can see by illustration,
We need not suffer wars within a nation,
Nor need we fight in wars with other nations,
For we will be the Mother of all Nations –
Which now is known as the United Nations.
And she our Mother will like a Mother care
For all her children, be they dark or fair,
All alike and one under the Law;
The One above to rule alike the small,
The smaller, and the smallest: Her children,
Each more but less than the needs of millions.
    Philip, we will make the perfect State
When war and men who make it go away.
But now, we must some many millions slaughter
That we enlightened live in peace hereafter.
What though a few may take the plan to task,
And ask: Why must peace come by blood and death?
We shall but have them read this, your thesis,
And they'll be sure to see its many reasons.

                                           Michael Curtis