We Do It Until We Don’t
Sometimes it seems as if everyone
in the world is lonely, all of us
shuffling around, slumped by the weight
of our singular lonelinesses. As if
we all drank the same sad tea.
As if our loneliness also makes
us blind and deaf to each other,
unable to see that everyone else
is as broken and blemished as we are.
Every time we think we find
an answer, some path to wholeness,
it turns out to be another dead end.
How could we all be so lost together?
Sometimes there is a light inside
the loneliness. And it grows
and it grows more and more intense,
as if to say, “There is so much light.”
But that is not the answer we were
looking for, and so we go on searching,
carrying our loneliness like a basket
full of dark black stones, somehow
not noticing that we could put it down
any moment, even now.
