I've been working on bringing over Letters.To.Norm, which the People's Peaceable Assembly Line had hosted elsewhere during the project's peak activity.I'm not done, but found this one (below) to be more-or-less free of any sociopolitical time indexing elements, save perhaps tone (which, being political expressions often ostensibly reactive to certain media-driven propaganda items, dear Norm's Reports of Suspicious Activities typically contain; see), and thought it might be fine in the present and all out of context as a way to a) have something to post today, and b) let you, dear reader, know about the reports of suspicious activities.
(just in case, w/r/t "with apologies" label, ref. - ed.)
first they came for the suspicious activities,
then for those with conspicuous proclivities,
then they came for the strange and deviant,
then the banal and mundane, the garrulous, perilous,
sometimes scurrilous quasi-religious festivities, the
ceremonial deities and deep residual individualities;
with perspicacity they then dragged off
levity, parody and audacity — sarcasm clung
with tenacity inside the sacristy, but they
gassed it free eventually and it was gunned down
by the sea while trying to flee
like a romantic antihero in an action movie;
then they came for the proper nouns, the adverbs
and certain suspect verbs; the adjectives
were massacred, but it could not be described in words;
then they came for habit, ritual and schedule,
they came for the day to day trivial activities,
they swept up riddling, fiddling and thumb-twiddling,
pacing, racing, grace and spacing-out;
the idioms and gestures were summarily lined up and shot
(and left to rot);
finally, they came for those of us who
were left, and there was nothing left to do.