Are tearing down the young mountains,
Coming quickly to wrap me up.
To come hold me in the night,
When it’s coldest and quietest.
Where my dreams have forgotten what it means to rest,
I go searching for the answering light to guide me out of the plateau.
I look to God, and Nature, and Lust, but all these have glazed over,
Become quite dull and lackluster.
So much was Man’s quest for one thing beautiful,
That it degenerated into what we reluctantly call life,
Through gritted teeth and a heavy heart.
We force our mouths into this foreign shape,
And surprise it with a toxin,
So that it might be stuck in this “smiling” phase,
For we hear that that is the true stuff of happiness,
And in order to trick our mirrors into thinking we’re there.
What was the gift of conscience?
How is it that we came to call it a gift?
Another slip of language, I suppose,
That we convinced ourselves that everything good about us was a gift of God,
And that everything bad in the world is the direct result of a different skin color, creed, person, place, time, thing, event, idea, world, breath, wish,
Of anything outside of us.
When was it,
For all you history buffs out there,
Wasting your time reading my codified thoughts and aspirations and emotions,
That humankind built a wall around themselves to protect from that evil whore, Nature?
I’m not entirely sure I know,
But I’m certainly sure it was when the first ugly ape was pushed out of love.
It was a knee-jerk reaction that lasted until the end of humanity’s time.
There will always be a camp of us,
Le resitants,
Hoping and fighting and yelling and crying and swearing up and down,
That we really are still what we want to mean by human.
“I do solemnly swear that I will hereby undertake it as my mission to protect those things that have been passed over in the lack of shine in sunlight. I will be the champion for words and symbols that cannot defend themselves. I will, to the best of my abilities and capabilities, uphold a personal moral code that means something to me. I will do my best to understand my life and make sense of the random puzzle pieces, instead of attempting to mimic the positions other people fill with theirs. I will teach my children to be different from all the other children they know; I will teach my children to be strong, but not in that archaic, bestial sense that can only display itself through violent acts of physicality. i will teach my children that it is harder to watch Jane Goodall leaving than it is to push someone else off the monkey bars. I will cultivate an attitude of tolerance, thought not necessarily acceptance especially at the cost of integrity, and fraternity throughout all of the human race, and not just the camps that have the nicest tents. I will make my child into a man or woman, instead of teaching them to grow up in such a way that it is their natural appearance to pretend to be a man or woman. I will teach my children how to spell sincerity through application. And I will teach the children of others that will not pick up the torch or carry the burden. I will make this world a better place, for so long as I am on it, this is my home, my love, my disappointment and my Mother.”