William Bonney Wasn't

In the times before the current ontology being right was easy; a gift from a dextrous God. On the other hand, the world was beautifully sinister. The ‘metaphysics of the sinister condition’ propelled Immanuel Kant to conclude, that: ‘Looking at your right hand in the mirror you see a left hand, identical to right, but unable to replace the other, which, like God is right.’ Wittgenstein, a patient soul, was rightly amused and replied 200 years later, (that’s the kind of guy he was: prepared to wait a couple of centuries in order to deliver a dexterously sinister reply), ‘A right hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned around in four dimensional space’. (Neil Armstrong, Captain Kirk and Doctor Who have ordered two paisley patterned pairs each).            

Machiavelli absconded from this digital count, citing an ‘a priori’ engagement with the Inquisition as a not unreasonable excuse for his point of departure. Aristotle replied: ‘Might is Right’ was true Philosophy

and fitted the world like an un-left handed glove, but he didn’t want to hang around to debate it, because his brilliantly sinister protégé, Alexander, played a very destructive ragtime with his band and was quite decidedly a great southpaw, who got dextrously cross being labelled ‘sinister’ and imagined himself to be rather charming, in that mirrored image kind of way.

 

Julius Caesar like Jimi Hendrix before the fall

Playing a right handed empire upside down

Until only decadent ruination was left

Second handed down to instant history

Carved in stone upon an ancient broken glory

The experience never left his soul alone

Unlike it left the beautiful Saint Joan

True righteous in all her blossoming

Left to solitary incineration at the end

Leonardo always painted in the mirror

Reflecting images from right to left

And made the distant appear quite near

A smile gazing in the closer distance

But there’s miles of mystery in the eyes

Everything else is just as he rightly left it

Beautifully left vertical on the right horizontal

Restoring your faith in renaissance artistry

Bounarroti worked the Sistine ceiling

With God outstretched in dextrous touch

Toward Adam’s innocently sinister reach

In that other Eden; Adam was left handed

Not dissimilar to the artist and the vision

Set high above the holy sepulchred floor

With its tabernacle likened door

Left so far and distant down below

The hell of all those dazzling heavens right above

Inspired Napoleon to abandon his rags

For a brightly coloured bespoke coat

And a gorgeously tailored left-ways hat

The woven garb to free a continent

And safeguard the very precious joys

Of Liberté, Justice and Egalité

The food, wine and song of democracy

In a very left handed kind of way

That was so right-on you loved him for it forever

And Moscow never looked the same without him

It’s much more Left Bank now in its Russian ways

Catherine thinks it’s Great, and in that style she left it

Then left was right an’ wrongs were righted leftly

Until everything left was rightly wronged in cruelty

And left a scar that rightly shamed a century

Nothing lasts as all things pass to dust and history

Yet the phoenix flies in the face of burning misery

While the ever salient Homer left us his republic

And his equally luminous sinister revelation

That Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler

But worst of all, Ned Flanders were all lefties

As it is in the end, so it was in the beginning

The ever brilliant Elvis has left the building.

Author's Note

Go on, I dare you

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[alanwgraham]

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