theme: possibility, title: rhyme within reason in misc. flash fiction

In the Realm of Possibility on the shore of Lake Whatweknow, sat a king within a castle guarded by a more-or-less probable moat. From the peaks of the Expectations to the low Despondent Sea, his regency oft peered out from a high spire and thought “how lucky that this all belongs to me.”

But outside the Realm of Possibility, roamed wild packs of dogmatics, equipped with a thousand divide-and-conquer tactics, armed to the skins of their teeth with sharp polemic axes. If they had their way, they’d see all Possibility left in tatters, by ballista and trebuchets filled with munitions cast from spent Impractical Matters. Grudges and expectation’s confusions, great ideals and low delusion, causes-lost and rigged midway games, awaited an assault on Possibility’s battlements just the same. Even if it took them to a man all left behind, and every fact destroyed in the grind.

The Realm of Possibility and its liege soon enough found resolution, first second third and fourth walls, finally no longer under a status of wait-and-siege. Mortar-blast iconoclasts, battering-ram ideologic hams, their people held lamb for slaughter against waxing waves of the naively driven misty-eyed extremists canonized as mere cannon fodder. Rock-hewn buttresses, just the same as reason, soon washed away like melting waning straining ancient glacial waters.

Reality never pleases neophytes and knaves, progress in place of instant gratification could never suit them, they’d prefer instead to dig everyone their graves. Camelot razed behind him, paddling like hell from the edges of Lake Whatweknow, his protectorate lost in the flames from whims as mad dreams inflate so, was left only to row, disappointed but had to take a breath and just let go.

He thought on Hamlet’s birthright, regrets crippling Danes of Futures Past, remembering the value of nothing, nothing ventured, nothing gained, we’re nothing at the start but also nothing ever lasts. Revolutions always eat themselves, even ones that tumble nations, revolution that vicious cycle, the lust for impossible utopia will consume itself bloody again next generation.

Leave to them their ouroboros of unattainable highs and unsustainable lows, forward’s the only place they’ll never know, discard their cycles of recycled revenge, find the other side where the flood-plain must sometime end. Take shelter from extremity, sail until the morning you can spy on horizon’s eye some new Realm of Possibility. Maybe there he’ll meet up with you and me.

In the end, left as Achilles to lick wounds and heal, a once-and-sutured king who held not much more than his clothes and this simple lesson: after a fashion, all of our stories are true, but as to whether they really happened is more-or-less meaningless or moot, but still mostly up to you. The more important question to ask is, what worldly good did your pretty little narratives do?

Myself, I’d rather work within the Realm of Possibility to make things better than grasp to cling wrapped fantasies of what will never be, that’s a choice we must all make, but how about you?