What Is a Life To You

What is a life to you? Do you wake up to love imagine a future with someone? A wife or a husband, a child or ten? An exaggeration, but love is different to everyone. Do you have a cat or a dog, that you carefully care for? Who’s life you would ultimately kill for? What is a life to you? Alarm clocks and paychecks or midnight snacks and twenty cups of coffee? A pack of cigarettes you hide in your glove compartment? Or that one note in a song you love? The verse in a poem you read a decade ago that you can’t shake Or even the 9am radio talk show that you listen to every day? Is it the silent onward tick of a clock? An assurance that time goes on? What if the soothing and somewhat irritating guiding force of a grandfather clock, the chiming and the tick and the tock morphed into something Something you can’t quite place but angry in a not so far away place? What is a life to you? Cold metal shifting beneath even colder hands? Anger pounding and sirens blaring? What is a life to you? Smiles through stupid jokes, and the smell of rain after a drought? Familiar eyes gazing into yours holding something you couldn’t explain but somehow makes your heart beat faster? Is it blaring music in a concert hall that takes you away from your pain and let’s you escape? Or is it the careful sounds of chalk on a chalkboard carving out your day? Is it soft skin beneath your fingertips tracking a course you take every night and soft breaths and careful grins? Maybe it’s a familiar scent wafting in through the vents like cookies or pie or home Is it dreams of a future where you are all you know you can be? Success and power and money but not overrun by greed? is it safety? What is a life to you? Is it safety? Is it knowing that when you close your eyes you’ll wake up and nobody will have died? Is it holding a hand through the night, staring up at the ceiling wondering when and how and why? Is it the feel of grass beneath your feet? Or rain on your skin? Is it the sound of thunder striking, far off but near enough to remind you you’re alive? Is it freedom? What is a life to you? That you can look up at the sky and watch as the flag falls to half mass surrendering to another massacre? Is that life? Is that freedom? Is life the calculated draw of a machine pulling at the strings of what holds us together? What is a life to you? Is it getting a call just after two when the police have arrived and the ambulances still drive and the sirens still blare and the blood still pools on the sidewalk or the dance floor or the stage or the school where someone you love someone you live for has fallen and you don’t know if they’ll get up? What is a life to you? A machine that can’t love but can only take or a person who loves who breathes What is a life to you? A mascot or a color Is it blue? Is it red? Is it a debate you make Is it proclamations of your rights and the ignorance of their deaths? What is a life to you? Is it forgetting their touch? Is it turning on the news and feeling something clutch at the very core of you and ripping at all you are because this is the when this is the how But there’s no Why. Why? Why weren’t you there? Why couldn’t you help? Why wasn’t your side arm there to catch the bullets that someone else side arm shot out at the one you would give you life for? There is no Why. What is a life to you? Is it an empty gaze in a bloodied field that once was a school that once was a sancutary that once was a home or a church What is a life to you? Is it the cold metal clutched to your side when you jump out of the passenger side of you friends car and rush in because this was the one place the one thing that wouldn’t happen to you? You had your protection. But what use was it? Was it worth a life to you? For you to have your safety — for them to have their weapon? You don’t see a weapon. You see a light in a tunnel that just gets darker but do you see why the light fades do you see what you’re losing? What is a life to you? Is it the careful beeping of a heart monitor counting down seconds overpowering the clock in your brain What is a life to you? Is it years dwindling to hours to minutes to — “We did all we could do”? What is a life to you? Is it this? Is there anything you could do? There was. There is. Lives lost, and nothing gained. No protection, and no groundwork laid. “It’s a shame,” thats what they’ll say. “There’s nothing we could do.” But we both know there’s another way. What is a life to you? Strangers dying that’s one thing But imagine your love being where they were imagine a shooter atop a tower where your side arm did nothing but permit them the opportunity to aim down with a cold gaze cold like the metal against your waist cold like the machines keeping them alive like the morgue and the blood on the ground miles away cold like the nights when you lie staring up at the ceiling wondering when and how and why