Joshua Keiter

We are learning loss more with every day
Without knowing what we might be losing
We could imagine the things people say
Life and death irretrievably fusing
Into a journey no one wants to take
And whose stories even carefully told
Diminished by those in power as fake
Our feelings buried deep beneath the fold
Until they’re trotted out to score some points
Reminding us to them it’s all a game
Even the hunger we feel in our joints
For some kind of justice someone to blame
Leads us to one obvious conclusion
Methinks they doth protest no collusion

I don’t know how long it will take to heal
Scars or moments we would rather forget
Time is all we have to borrow or steal
Ourselves against rising tides of regret
The past is a country we can’t visit
The future a house in need of repair
Pieces scattered into a composite
Of wholeness for which we cannot prepare
No one has a plan or waits to be born
Into a world that does not yet exist
Our thoughts coalesce while taking a form
That shadows still do their best to resist
The darkness will have no choice but to give
Life to the light by which we grieve to live

The continued apocalypse requires
An increasing level of resilience
Found to be anathema to humans
If not extrinsic to corporations
Content to go on selling our feelings
Back to us for profit we’ll never see
As long as we can make the pie higher
For someone we thank you for your service
You who are the true heroes among us
Achieving what we never would ourselves
For we poured concrete into our bunkers
Long before toilet paper left our shelves
A week of hope on TV can’t replace
Cynicism keeping us in our place

Possibilities ever out of reach
All the leaves wither singing each to each
What’s past is past not even the future
Could improve the artifice of nature
We all age at least one day at a time
Some moments last and leave us all behind
What traces left are destined to outlive
The rest of us take all we have to give
Another season ends as one begins
No one knows how to tell what day it is
We are ingredients that do not blend
Before our starting points will meet their end
Why we are born in the middle of things
Yet in our ends still is our beginnings

There is a light that shines in the darkness
And the darkness has not overcome it
Even though looking into the night sky
The ground lights have tended to obscure it
The stars have so lost their luminescence
From our perspective the immensity
Of our insignificance compounded
By our solitary close-mindedness
Once in sickness I thought the stars above
Were loved ones peeking through eternity
To say that distance is unseen by sight
Nothing can separate us from silence
Knowing we are so deeply truly loved
The darkness surpassed by light from above

The world breaks everyone and afterward
You are stronger in the broken places
It is not only where the light gets in
But how darkness out of embarrassment
Runs from a burning building screaming fire
The healing itself is a sleeping scar
Pressing snooze as it slouches back to bed
Knowing the unconscious has a language
Untranslated as the nightmares dream on
Through the acceptance of being awake
As the world embraces the breaking sounds
Surrendering the emptiness to be found
The loss becomes another part of you
Not only how to feel but what to do

How do you make a broken family
Whole? The same way you make a person whole.
A community is not precisely
Composed of individuals working
At cross purposes to not get things done
In empty rooms where no one dares to tread
For fear of one day waking with the dead
Family begins when you reach the point
Of finding these eyes before you as home
Of hearing a voice as your own heartbeat
And knowing you cannot make it alone
Though the universe forces you each day
Through rooms that may unmask your unmaking
A heart made whole even as it’s breaking