Expending an inordinate,
Excruciating amount of
Effort, he was able to
Mistrust and vilify people
Whose sole trespass was to
Live compassionately,
Peacefully, harmoniously.
The gall of these
Interlopers, vying for
Turf, position,
Raze relations, raise a
Wall of concrete reinforced.
Clean up on the outside.
Some look forward,
Others retract.
Those who bear the burden
Of unusual courage,
Who stand in front
Of an advancing tank,
Or speak against the
Wrongs wrought by a
Corrupt despot,
Who don’t follow the
Standard rules set by
Authoritarians who have
No other aim but to
Keep them compliant,
Subservient,
Those are the people who
Recognize the immense
Pressure the machine exerts
On them when they go
Against the grain,
Advancing an unfamiliar
Alternative that scares
Tyrants to the core:
Empathy, sharing, peace.
It doesn’t go as expected,
Not that he had grand ideas
About how things would
Turn out, but it could
Definitely have gone
Better, now dealing with
A disconcerting sense of what
Might have been rather than
What actually resulted and
Must now be assimilated,
There being no other choice.
One by one,
Often in groups,
They emerge and
No one says anything.
Some day in the
Future, when sanity and
Perspective return,
People will look
Back in disbelief at
How human beings could
Let it happen
Yet again.
Musing wistfully about
An eroding golden era,
The stark contrast
Between the idyllic
Charm of the past and
A present gone awry.
It wasn’t always this way,
He explains sorrowfully,
There was a time when
People knew their station,
And everything was
More orderly.
An aging revisionist,
Hanging on to dreams
Of a place that never
Existed except in
His sheltered mind,
Unaware, subjective.
You could feel the
Moment when she
Realized that what
She needed to be happy
Was not the approval of
Some outside person
But her own love.
Trying to make
Sense of it,
No answers forthcoming.
Another mind,
Impossible to decipher
Without help.
Silence,
Absence of
Understanding.
A particular moment,
A decision made to
Move in a direction
Resisted until now.
An imperceptible shift,
Change of course,
Unrestrained, unfettered,
Unemotional, unopen.
Each action builds the moat,
A long swim in an industrially
Tainted pool left for dead,
Lasting an eternity.
She sits next to me and
We talk about
The time we were on
A plane and couldn’t
Stop laughing because
Of a joke we made up,
And the trip we took
To the island where
I learned to swim and
Where we spent hours
Looking for shells in
Balmy tide pools.
We talk about everything:
Our hopes, dreams,
Things that bother us,
Fears, disappointments.
We smile openly,
She vanishes.
