Necessary

Drones frantically work among the honeycomb, For each knows his purpose under the queen, The great dictator of their life and wellbeing, For each is fed by the knowledge, That within the endless cogs and bureaucracy Which never be made totally clear to him, He is necessary. To the life-giving water and the ripened fruit, Again, to the scalpel and man-made syringe, Even to those who idle on thrones Made of glass and broadcast voices Set to topple at the end of a fragile cycle, We say, necessary. But to those who bleed rivers of ink, Who have hearts that beat in time signatures Mirroring the fugues and requiems they create, Who twitch with some effortless magic on the edge Of a fret board charged with their very own sweat, And to those who pour their heart from their chest, Liquid and soft but beating still in order to cause color And paint an empty universe, We say, nothing. What need have we for words that weep, That dance across the mind like an ancient drumbeat, In the concrete and electric future? What want and demand is there for those Who use the earth itself as an extension of the soul, Who move mountains with their tone? What purpose does that unknown dark beyond hold As time moves on, aching across our mortal lives, For those who provide, through art, the light? But if the utopian future finds this lacking, To be trimmed like an olive branch By the hands of an animatronic efficient God, Can it be contained? Can we silence the irreverent tapping, tapping The metronome rhythm of the soul Wrenched forth into physical being? And even then, will grasping hands still reach For the last hope they see from within The iron bars that they have locked themselves in, Or will they cling still to the rope of reality And wear their noose as a necklace? If they do, what lies ahead? There is an unimaginable future Unseen, unrecorded For the hands that would have it turn From a mortal existence to an immortal myth, Set in stone to be passed through the ages, A story which tells of this future where The cane of the broken-hearted And the cast of the cast-off No longer lies to break the inevitable fall From dreams into the waking world. The last page of this story is left Despairingly, ominously, Blank. In fear of this last page in our history, A history not only of wires and sparks But of sonorous yet silent thoughts, We hold on to that in which we may never Be recognized as crucial and immovable Though it is as much a part of us As the bones and blood beneath our skin Though we may cry alone, we may see alone, We may feel alone and we may write alone, Alone, perhaps forever alone, and yet, We say, necessary.