Perhaps we will ask the millions who lived before you
How your life has been worthwhile
And take a poll of those perished by campfires,
Starlight and moonlight as to your glow.
We can make inquiry of countless lives
like sparks spiraling in the dusk,
Blazing for an instant in the bracing evening air,
Extinguished with not even 15 seconds of awareness
On God's Granddaddy watch hanging from hip trousers of time.
You say that you matter yet what have you truly spoken
(And what fair scenery have you traveled in your mind)?
If character is cut like stone
upon an unyielding block of consciousness
Then the lines of suffering
have not etched deeply enough
To awaken your soul with a geography
barely drawn from experience,
As if you had moisturized your life
against scars of authenticity and valor.
And if you are like a field waiting to be planted,
Then where are the roots reaching into the dankness of darkness
So that brilliance can blaze forth from your eyes?
I am nothing.
My opinion cannot matter.
Yet when I gaze upon you I would hope to see
That you are not polished and exfoliated like the others,
Born, then dying into a void of getting by,
Not fighting, not making a mark, content
To confuse beauty with a state of being unblemished.
This is not character. This is cosmetic Barbie.
Don't correct the shadows with slices of cucumber
So when Kali severs your head to wear upon
Her necklace of grinning skulls, remember ..
We reminded you. We implored you. We asked
on bended knee
That you sink completely
To the ecstatic agony of life
and marry genuine experience,
Even to drown
And to be reborn ..
Lest you only
skin the surface,
A frothy bubble washed away by the next fickle tide.