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To Those Beyond the Crossing (A Poem)

 I exist in a time of monsters,

Where to speak of one’s own loneliness is utter blasphemy amidst a world of wreckage and cruelty.

A world where tracing the patterns of reality reveals a picture so grotesque it makes the blood run cold.

And so we dwell and take comfort in simulations,

Hiding behind our numb black screens as we seek to shield ourselves from the inevitable.

But it will find you.

The harshness of it all will find you,

Even as we all search for the same fleeting tenderness and beg in vain for it to stay.

For you are history, we are history,

And history shows no mercy,

The brutal world into which we are thrown screaming at our births is without pity.

From the inevitable and normalized cries of children in no-fly zones,

To the inevitable and normalized knock of the landlord posting that eviction notice,

From profitable work schedules broken down into ten-thousandths of a second,

To those abandoned as “surplus” humanity.

There are those who would cross the threshold, leave this twilight existence,

Bid the gates of a new world open,

Enter the uncertain darkness in search of a new dawn,

Enter the void that exists between the strangulation of the old world and the promise of the new.

But the journey is so far,

And it is hard to live between worlds,

So easy to fall into spaces without air on this alien journey into the unknown.

To have one foot in the old and another in the new and to be torn across that jagged line,

Like an ox on a fence, one struggles forward but at the same time is dragged backward.

Strong enough to survive,

But unable to escape the crushing horrors that drove them to take this painful step into the unknown.

The kind and just future we long for appears sickly and muted by this tortured present tense.

We are all mired in filth.

The filth of a sick society clings and pollutes us, like mercury poisoning the waters,

Even as we strive to cast down that which sickens us, emerge from the cancer, and find the redemption we so desperately crave. 

Even the greatest survivor emerges from their disease hardened and can only climb to the mountaintop and look upon a glorious future they will never live to see.

Oh how the men and women of that shining future would look back with pity upon the would-be revolutionary if they knew.  Those of us down in the gutter, who stare longingly at the stars we can never reach.

But when that new generation is finally born, in a world of bright color and welcoming, loving arms, those born after need not trouble their dreams over us.

For we will be but the stones beneath their dancing feet,

The solid and secure foundation for their joy, upon which their happy thoughts should not be allowed to dwell,

Except to occasionally paint over our dull and faded faces with their own brightness, life and laughter.

Retroactively making redemptive masterpieces from the broken pieces of our hard exteriors,

Beautiful smiles smoothed over the grim expressions that in our time we were forced to wear.

By their gentle hands, our old fears and confusion become certainty; the unshakable courage of immortal heroes and young gods preserved forever in the laughter of our children.

For when this new generation rises up, its feet planted firmly in the soil of the world of tomorrow,

Free from the monsters that haunt our dreams and menace our days,

When they raise us up, we drowned men and women who came before the flood,

We who could not make the crossing into this new life, weighed down as we were by the boulders that the cruel old world has hung around our necks,

They will not judge us too harshly.