A Space Exists

A Space Exists
 
Between the push and pull of fear, desire,
A space exists for wisdom, peace and love.
And in this space the waves of grief and joy
And all emotions, thoughts can come and go.

And yet, beneath those surface waves, there still
Remains a zone that's calm and unperturbed—
For currents strong may roil below the waves,
But there are depths in which we still are free.

But when we try to hold, preserve, maintain
The transient joys, entrapped by fear, desire,
We bring then woes upon our heads and those
Of others, losing sense and sanity.

And see—we’ve built ourselves a monstrous world
That runs on fear and greed, and so is fraught
With all the evils that the two, conjoined,
Engender, wreaking madness, mayhem, woe.

The vices that have long been recognized
Are seen as virtues, virtue viewed as vice.
Until such views reverse, we won’t regain
That space in which to breathe and see again.

We cannot know what happens far away,
Or even in our city or next door,
Except from what we’re fed—that filtered feed
That’s then polluted by the feeders’ views.

And so we each are more and more entrapped.
We’re caught, conditioned; then, as zombied slaves,
We race upon the tracks that power the mills
Of Mammon that are grinding all to dust.
 
And though the tools exist, for some at least,
To see beyond the bounds of space and time,
So many still are blinkered in their views,
As goads, incitements work to steer the herds.
 
What hope exists, except that each can still
Attempt to shed these strong constraints of view?
No liberator comes; no hope exists
Except from what we each can try to do.

No revolution can succeed until
We see the wheel that each is turning too.
No evolution towards a saner world
Can be, without that pivot each must do.
 
A space exists between the push and pull
Of fear, desire, in which our vision clears.
To clear that space of snares and clutter, we
Can labor, with our grants of strengths and years.

We each can try, in small and humble ways,
To change the world that all of us have built.
It isn’t god or nature that dictates
What humans do. Our minds are snared and trained.
 
Without the promise that we will succeed,
Without the premise that the work is light,
We each can labor, breathing deeply, while
We work from darkness towards the hope of light.

There is the outer world and that within,
And each affects the other in its turn.
There is a little sphere that pens us each—
But in ourselves the bounds are ours to reach.

We can’t control what happens in this world,
We can’t foresee the future, yet we each
Can still enjoy, within ourselves, that peace
Residing in that space that each can clear.

No matter what tomorrow takes or gives,
No matter what the past has done or been,
There’s still the moment that we’re granted now
In which to turn towards dark or towards the light.

2016 August 25th, Thu.
Brooklyn, New York