Reasons To Live

 

When I raise my eyes from this mug of foam

And catch the shadows of scum riding on

Smokey light,

Or gaze into the terraces that line my mother’s face,

Overwhelmed and apathetic to those specks of blue—

The color of hope—

 

I flounder;

Broken, between the gaps of

Unanswered questions.

For what is breath and lungs and

Blood-pumping ventricles? And what does it have to do

With me? Must I breathe?

 

But breathing—the conscious act that chooses

To see the ember in the soot

And fan it into flame. Like

The day you learned to read,

Which more aptly seemed

The day you

Unlocked the world.

 

Or that sweet flood of value

When eyes lock across a room and

You are sifted like gold from rock.

And you know and are known,

Beyond word, thought, or act,

Casual and wonderful: unconditional.

 

That dull ache like emerging hunger

At the back of your throat

From the release of tears

Which seems at first a plausible card

For sympathy, until age argues otherwise,

In the emancipation of emotions perceived.

 

In the same way, laughter,

Bipolar as a wave crashes and crumbles

At the everyday dust injustice brings—

Singing in the rain;

 

A mystery undefined as grief—

Stuff you cannot chart—but you try to anyway

Because you belong to humanity.

But out of all this, this thing, perhaps,

Is the force that drives me forward:

 

Reconciliation

Beyond comprehension,

Extravagance nailed to a twisted tree.