staggering risk in poetry

embrace risk
life will kill you either way but you get to choose whether to die
ignorant and fearful or fulfilled and joyful
risk embrace

living this life isn’t about not having fear in the first place anyway
it’s about overcoming the obsolete fear vestigial in the depths of your mind
we’re not cave-animals anymore
fear of the different protected us then but it is killing us now
we have to let go of that old programming
it doesn’t work anymore in a world that’s
all connected upon a fragile web of mutually-beneficial intermingled heart and mind
in a world where we are all in this together
the fear you hang onto only begets more fear
when you quench the fear in the reptile part of your brain
you quench three times the fear down the line paying it forward in time

risk embrace
life will kill you either way
embrace risk

somewhere deep in every non-sociopathic conservative
is someone who wants to love, to share, to help, to give
but is afraid that there will be consequences that someone’s gonna break their heart
that someone’s gonna steal some useless currency or stuff
that without their in-born privilege they’ll be less special
that they’ll mean less if the game isn’t rigged for their tribe
but there’s something else inside them that wants to love
while they’re out there trying to convert you to fear and hate
trying to make you worship security and having stuff
they make you take on needless attachment
cars, homes, loans, debts, tribal alignments, boogeymen
not out of simple cruelty but so as to justify their own
sublimation of those values just as other people do with religious faith
they figure if they can get someone else to believe then
maybe they can choke down their doubts about their
mystical closed-mindedness for another Sunday down the line
still, strident worldviews on any side doom us all
if you’d rather be ideologically pure than do good in the world
at least be honest enough with yourself and the world to admit it
on any and every side there will be people who think
it’s more important to not be wrong than to help people and
we have to love them through that block because
when the options are one step forward or ten steps back
you can’t leave just because you can’t get fifty times forward today
preventing regression is progress when it comes to helping people
all we can do is help people
as much as we can however we can for as long as we can
there’s one trauma one wound one terror one illness
one loss in every life when you either say
“I have to never feel this way again” or
“no one should ever feel this way again” and
all I can tell you is choose that second path
it took me decades to embrace that second path

risk and embrace
embrace and embrace and embrace and embrace

once a palm reader showed up at the door of the office I worked at
it was the wrong door, she read my hand as apology and it said
“you’re going to be very successful but not for a very long time”
all I can tell you is that was almost ten years ago
on another coast in another life and
only now am I starting to realize what she meant

after life itself
the greatest blessing we have
is the opportunity to change
to reconsider, to improve
to reconsider and to
better love each other
because we’re all in this together

embrace risk
life will kill you either way
risk embrace
in the end it’s maybe
the only thing worth doing at all

Last updated August 10, 2017