kutkolors

as a boy, much smaller than others my age
I would sit upon the edge of the world
listening to it crash upon its beach, all foam
and mystery, feeling it creep, slowly up to my
feet, threatening to tickle my toes, pulling
the ground from beneath me one millimeter
at a time, wondering how I could get back
to that island paradise that was my innocence

my mother would say that I would develop
an ulcer by the time I was ten if I continued
to worry so much about events that were
so far beyond my reach or understanding,
but I realized, even then, that my emotions
understood far more than any intellectualizing
could ever hope to achieve

small shoulders, too small for the concerns
of a world spinning out of control and yet,
were they any smaller than those of the nubile
thai teen whose daily, and sometimes hourly
battle with protecting her body and soul, or the
scrawny burnt brown mexican kid selling chicklets
to feed his brothers and sisters and grandmother,
or the aged russian grandmother who no
longer has feeling in her fingertips due to
subsistence farming because of government
increases in food, or the veteran left behind
to starve on his native streets once he was
brought back from the native streets where
the evils that men do in the name of righteousness
and freedom and religion and entitlement and
ego and fear and there is really no reasons for
what goes on

our humanity is slipping away from us like that
beach slips from under me with each passing wave
we say goodbye to a little less of us, but I believe
it is not too late, there is still time, there is still
time