Fear

It devours you. Us. It devours US.

Why not embrace it? Progress crawls, and our time here flickers.

How tempting it is to surrender, to relinquish goodness.
Letting go of fear sears deeper, like acid on the flesh—
Scorching us to our bones. The crucible of effort.
The reward? A malfunctioning expectation, a hyperactive void.

Sit, sit, why don’t we grasp it?
I wasn’t sculpted here, carving my speck of purpose.
I achieve, possess nothing, a promise owed only to myself
in this fleeting present, granting myself something.

Fear, fear, it’s here, always lurking.
Promise only the fate of the fittest, the status of the richest, me.

Who is nothing but free, free, free,
to morph into what you desire. It’s so easy.
I could be A or Z, anything in between—never foreseen.
We aren’t destined to comprehend, not yet.
Reality blasphemous, truth tragic.
All of us clawing, screaming, whispering, gleaming—
Reaching, striving, questioning, dreaming.

Poor silly streamings of extra-retinal shrieking.
Come on, let’s ride this being.
Even when, why, why, why should we even do this?
Why is our binary everything grieving?
To evolve, to seek understanding,
Who are we to not envision other ways we could be?
We can be! Remarkable all we don’t grasp.
What a shame, shame, shame, to not live like we were born.

Or are we?
Everyday somethings and nothings, hideaways.
I can’t pinpoint when the bullet flies by our hearing.
Can’t you hear me? When I am the only one who should listen to me.
But see, won’t I see me? Do you see you?

All set in your pristine little gift box, a spectacle,
To crush it all underfoot and look… lord everything so,
Extreme and simple. Ah, binary again, fickle we play.
We walk away, skip, run, jump, or—
Soar, we can now, from peak to peak, and then the fall.

And what more to say but to forge the brain in ways
That will drain you, break you, remake you.
And then it becomes what you choose.
Choose, or don’t choose. How else could we ever fear?
To live by fear, live with fear, slay it raw with thought.
Think. We forgot. Lost or not. Ready.

I’ve been told I should only share my writing if people pay for it, as if creativity had a price tag. But honestly, if I charged for every thought I had, I’d be broke—so here’s a poem shared freely because art, like laughter, is better when shared without a fee.