Dividing Up the Blame
There is no religion for the whole of “god”,
just some small and all-too-human scraps.
We are not equipped to know the universe,
nor much more than we hold in our laps.
There is nothing that is end-all, be-all
that we can imagine. Only fools
seek a formula that folds it all in;
we know not the game, or half the rules.
There is no united, single pathway,
nor a sole, most sacred mountaintop.
All we see are ripples and faint echoes,
not where things begin or where they stop.
We are at the shore of a great ocean,
thinking that our buckets hold the sea.
Salt dolls sent to measure depth and distance,
we dissolve. That’s how it’s meant to be.
There is nothing sacred that is separate;
just some shattered fragments, nothing more.
That we cannot put them all together
doesn’t mean we’ve failed. There is no score.
It is not religion that imagines
some connection that escapes our sight.
The small gods we carve out in our image
leave us blind and deaf out in the night.
There is nothing missing from the picture;
only our misjudging of the frame.
Drawing rigid lines between each other,
we each die dividing up the blame.
25 JUL 2017
07.24.17
The Presence of Today
We either seek to view the world today
through some past generation’s worn and tired lens,
or try to filter what is past and gone
with some new, modern sensibility.
In either case, the picture loses sense;
we only see with skewed perception what we like:
a world that suits our purposes as is,
or one that our reforming might make right.
And while we fight and scrape to prove our case,
what happens to the time that is?
The Now, the only time that is, is lost
and gone before we live its span.
What is the point of living in denial?
The world is what it is; each second’s span
is neither from the future or the past.
It slips away like water in your hand,
and your contention neither gives nor takes
a jot of weight to yesterday’s long gone
nor to tomorrow’s not yet been
if you neglect the presence of today.
24 JUL 2017
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