I saw the world through shards of glass.
Insufficient reflections
were fragmented introspections.
I could not see the totality of my delusion.
I saw the world through shards of glass.
An unbidden visitor,
a revenant of reason,
warned of an imminent destruction:
the collapse, the implosion of illusion.
“Run!” he said ,”Keep your eyes straight ahead!
There is nothing for you here anymore!”
But I faltered as I fled.
I stopped and I turned back
for a reminiscent gaze
upon a conflagrated past.
I did not know this sight would be my last.
My hand outstretched to grasp
one more second of borrowed time…
… stopped.
Flesh and bone became crystalline,
tear drops cracked into powder.
I saw the end in shards of glass.
Tag: society
The Least of These
He said, “Deny yourself and follow me.”
but we fell so short in that instruction,
one might conclude we did the opposite.
The renunciation of pleasure
became
the pleasure of renunciation.
Self-denial became the virtue
and ceased being the means to attain them.
Cradling this deformed
and stunted soteriology,
our gaze only ever turned outwards
to accuse one another
of the sins we had invented.
Still, He was calling, “Follow me!”
Yes, there He stood: the least of these,
on San Pablo and Divisadero.
Did we see his divinity- his humanity?
No, we could not even see his privation,
it lay just outside our myopic casuistry.
We could only see the sin:
the indulgence and the addiction.
“Depart in peace.” We said to him.
“Be filled with the evidence of things unseen.”
Then we took up yet another offering
for those impoverished, yet believers,
in faraway countries.
Humanity (The Man in the Alleyway)
Is it lost in the miasma of your resignation?
Where is your humanity?
Was it discarded with the last of your inhibitions?
Where is your humanity?
Does it flail somewhere between my compassion
and my need for your accountability?
What a travesty the former is beholden to the latter,
for there is no sincerity in mercy
that is bound by terms and conditions.
Oh, it is an arrogance born not of ignorance, but of understanding.
For the demon that twitches in your neck
and burns in your febrile and sleepless eyes
once twisted and burned in mine.
But I banished that which I had summoned
and arrogated a tenuous claim to sanity.
Blinded now by a myopic gaze into the synthetic light of this modern reality,
I cannot see, God help me, I cannot see,
oh stranger, oh fellow creature,
I cannot see your humanity.
Poetry by Adam Nevarez 