The unstoppable, unquenchable chase for it.

The home of a creature, a creature that captured bicarbonate and calcium from the sea around them and used it to grow and grow.

Power over rather than power with.

Smooth, textured, round, sharp, crystalline, rainbow.

When we get power, what do we do with it?

The forms are endless, some even microscopic, microorganisms propelling themselves and their mobile homes through the water column with all manners of locomotion.

Use it to abuse others, to cut them down, to slice up the pie into tinier pieces, to put ourselves first.

Legs, sails, cilia, flagella, wings.

I don’t see the power of holding the mic being shared. I see the mic disappear in a “fool me twice” kind of way.

And the largest shelled creatures, at the other end of the spectrum, the giant clams, growing to the size and weight of two baby elephants.

The forceful kickback of a shotgun, or an AK-47, or a handgun. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Mollusks leading to gastropods, cephalopods, bivalves, chitons and beyond.

Starving out the power grid to bring someone to their knees, cripple their economy, their roads, their schools, their beliefs, their spirit, their hope, even take away the option for the word cripple to be something that could be reclaimed.

All fragile and slippery.

All the tactics and strategy designed to obfuscate what’s underneath, a hurt and hurting human being who was never loved, never educated to see the sameness in the other, never stopping at amassing something that cannot, can never, be quantified.

All safe and sound, everything that they need on their backs, ready to go at a moment’s notice.