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.

This poem is about: 
Our world

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