Poem: February 21, 2019

The Good Life

I get it.

There are awful broken people
who do awful broken things.

And they do them to the people we hold at night,
or to the people we just had dinner with on Tuesday,
or to the guy who was just minding his own business,

or to our daughters.

And even the possibility is an ache
too grim to take.

And our brains, for God's sake,
have developed to see strangers
for the dangers they might pose.

And to see what is unique and new
and exotic as the red freak flag
that we would take extra steps to escape.

And we can justify our guns and locked doors
because have you seen what those lunatics
are saying on Facebook?

And our anxiety is our evidence of vigilance,
our warning that we are aware and prepared
to defend and stamp out and draw lines and resist.

And we teach this:

The world is not a safe place.

It's the prison we're making the most of.

But don't you long in your walled spaces
to have more than you've inherited,
to discover a missing part of yourself
and hold it to the light?