8.8 Yet

by Eric Chaet

Probably
between the time
I manage to pull
these thoughts
& words
out of the storm
of my mind, life, time
& the time in which
you come upon
& consider them
I will have suffered
more deprivation
& humiliation
& others who pretend
to do what I am doing
will have won acclaim & wealth
& many technological initiatives & effects
will have further transformed
the landscape of the doings of humanity
& the most cynical & deluded
of my time & the times between mine & yours
& of your time
will have seized power yet again
claiming to protect everyone else
from the most violent of their generations
whose rage or uncontainable anxiety
they will either pretend not to understand
or they will truly not understand
because they will despise understanding
& because of their roles as protectors
they’ll assume the right
to suppress whatever threatens their privileges
& to allocate all they imagine is most valuable
in their own direction.

It’s improbable that these words will even have reached
the storm of your mind, life, & time
& I can’t claim some anthropomorphic righteous sky Ally
of whom I have knowledge personally Revealed
so it’s only a slim possibility
that these words & I & you
& what you do & refrain from doing
& how I do what I yet will do
& how you do what you will do
& others like us in this respect
tho maybe so different in so many other respects
& so isolated from us
among others of different tribes, classes, exigencies
that we never find one another & ways to cooperate
it’s improbable, but possible that
yet
we will turn the evolution of humanity
away from war in every sense
toward cooperation
I don’t mean pale denial
of who, inconveniently, given our circumstances, we really are
I don’t mean hypocritical or deluded masquerade
or marching in lock-step to some dogma
we don’t dare transcend
as growing trees burst their juvenile bark
but working among one another
as we work in the midst of our own teeming capacities
& also our wounds & neuroses
relics of our earlier, less-comprehending, more fearful days
we must heal, transcend, or manage
for the benefit of one another as well as ourselves
I hope & strive that it be so.

///

///

Picture: U.S. Dept. of Energy