Playing These Cards

Should I play these cards?

Are these things I really want?

Or are these merely dreams, lost in the lust of rage?

Or a song, waiting to be sung,

Aloud, among eager young listeners?

 

Hard, it is, to understand blind rage,

Though naturally it flows from a mature mind.

Yet it cannot help but be fueled by love

Of some kind

Because the emotions are, in fact, the same.

 

But what is it we actually sew?

I mean, do any of us actually take account

The response

To what it is we put out there

Into whatever ether we suppose there is,

Or is not…

 

Are the souls we are given,

As if on a buffet of humanity before our eyes,

To be taken into our heart of hearts,

Or merely sloughed off

Like so much dead skin?

 

And  how exactly do we know?

 

Show I play these cards?

For this life is not a matter of wild cards,

Because we are dealt pure stud poker,

In truth…

 

Yet we think there is some skill in gambling,

Though there is nothing but chance,

Which is a word invented to disguise

The very will of God…

 

And we have the gall to think that somehow

This is all left to some random convergence of events,

Knowing in our very DNA

That He is the Dealer,

And our account is blindly emptying

Not before our eyes,

But in our sweaty fear

Deciding

Whether to play these cards.

 

Copyright 2013 by Andrew T. Durham