Do not fear the authorities

if you have nothing to fear,

dictated St. Paul from prison

in a mid-first century year.

But St. Paul had no knowledge of

the NSA and their voracious need –

a vision of going the extra mile

to slake their unquenchable greed,

a greed disguised as need that evokes

images of fiction’s dystopian style,

that of the prophetic absurdist writer

Franz Kafka’s no smiling win-win “Trial.”