Recycled

Wasteland

Take this wasteland, make it young, abundant, SURPRISING!
As if the ocean dried in one big gulp, and my stomach got the shock
Of feeling the squishy, jelly, slimy, sensations of all it’s inhabitants
Before I belched it up and floated to the top , a void known for challenging whatever.
We are living in a time of survival by chance. I could be the something in a dream
That happened to you or I could be the something in the dream that did not.
I wish I had the power to elbow the clouds out of the sun’s way,
To push the virus’ back into the throat of the animal they evolved from.
To make the innocent’s screams and words of pain heard by
The fateful world. I too am just a man who takes sunrise and sunset
As a sacrament. I wish could leap into empty bellies and fill them.
Unfortunately, I am made of real dreams. Sparks that ignite
Into full fledged fires every great once and a while. The cancer patient
Who I prayed, hugged, loved until cancer decided otherwise for now,
The soul who should never have returned to this earth, but the seas parted
On that day and they were allowed back in. I wish I could be a moon
To accompany you from that one thing love took from you.
I wish I lacked a sense of finite. I could be a moment
Which could not be caught, lured, popped, stuffed, owned, or mounted.
Instead, I’m this landscape. It’s irrefutable time decimates me.
Bombs have been dropped. Humans have extended their influence,
And someday my papers will read ‘’Dishonorably Discharged.”
The do not swim sign will go up, and I will stand glazed but focused,
Ruined but named, memorized differently to the present generation.
Polluted, I guess. If that is what becomes of me,
I encourage you to dissect my inadequacy, find out what scarred me,
Poisoned me. If it is in the name of kindness and human love,
Each day was significant as a human being. If not,
Learn the alphabet of my errors, write them out, memorize them,
But do not sit with them and recite them over and over in blame.
Learn from them. Understand dreams are not collectives.
You design the hours with your own hands.
Minutes can expose cracks, seconds can expose miracles.
Wastelands can become parks. Make playgrounds,
Flowerbeds, and the sounds of laughter from what I could not.
There is nothing that cannot be revisited,
Only things we choose to look away from.