Last days,
coming out of our favorite state.
Blissful ignorance,
bleeds colors
muddying the palette,
turning everything
shades of grey
and brown.
We can’t see the difference
between the shit,
and the mud.
Even up close,
we wade in it,
bathe in it,
cover ourselves,
as if hiding in the Earth,
and call it, “Beauty”.
Standing in the field,
naked as the day we were born,
waiting for the rain,
that first sniff of new life
to come and wash us clean.
It is slow to come,
too slow,
and by the time it does,
our cover of brown mud
has dried
into an almost impenetrable shell,
and the rain just beads right off of us.
By now,
we can’t even smell it,
we can’t even feel,
or taste
the foul corruption
that has become our new skin.
We can only surmise
that the sky must hate us,
for it sends rain
that we cannot taste,
and cannot feel.
Sensitivity lost
to even the touch of each other,
we recede deeper
into our dark, stinking shells.
Somewhere we hear
the sharp impacts of hammer blows,
as one of us uses a rock
to smash their way free
of their self-made prison.
Under the baked-hard shell,
the cuts and bruises bleed
from the effort
and soon, they cry out
in what surely must be
the most excruciating pain.
We have long forgotten
the sound
of someone crying
for freedom.
HG – 2022
