©Jeff Franks — March 1996
Principle or opportunity, stance or stumble?
These are definitions of inheritance
for the humble and the self–effaced?
With what do we fill our hands:
useful tools of conscience,
or bloodless weapons of agnosticism?
These decisions are constrained within human volition —
the right to be wrong.
Collectively, we each peer at cryptically coded doors.
Images of portals to rooms dark and deep,
situated without apparent order,
suspended in the present hour by unseen artifacts,
connected by unseen threads to a ponderous future.
The questions abound — easy answers are rare.
Do we leap at the knobs,
or do we grow indecisive roots
waiting on the meticulous step
advancing us to a safe bosom?
Do we slice our signatures
across frozen confessions with impetuous skates,
or cautiously avoid the thin ice
sacrificing a quick pace to reach a defined objective?
Are our lives merely unending kinetic exercises,
moving by their own inertia
to undefined conclusions,
or do we live in brief defining episodes
initiated by dilemmas
punctuated by decisions?
Are we embroiled in ever ending and beginning
unprofitable disclosure,
or are we resolute in our acceptance
of a creation devoid of human recourse?
How we answer is who we are,
and who we are is an answer unto its own question.
We are related without relationship:
separated by womb, circumstance, language,
appearance and genitalia.
We are passengers, switchmen, conductors, engineers and
the man leaning on a hammer.
We are rail and spike; timber and gravel.
We are one and we are none,
and in all this contrived confusion we remain,
whether affected, deterred, hampered or victorious — here.
Here, always here.
Here to finish what cannot be left undone.
We chug and slip on the inescapable rails,
unable to reverse direction.
We progress with the measured momentum of time
to identical destinations;
our baggage is only happenstance — incidental.
Some have a map in their hand.
Some have a compass with needle pointing where it will.
Some have been rocked gently to blissful sleep.
Some are gazing into the field —
a grazing cow preoccupies them.
Some read stock quotes and futures predictions,
and make their hurried calls.
Some listen to a confusing noise,
tapping their feet like a swift second hand.
But, in all our individual enterprises
we remain — riders.
We ride on mechanisms not of our own device,
but carried by devices
of our own mechanism.
Oblivious, that all the while,
beyond our fragile atmosphere,
uncountable stars are burning with subatomic precision —
contained within a vessel that has no plausible title.
Presumed to be an orphan
because we cannot contemplate siblings.
And with the defiance of irrational children
we acknowledge creation and its wonders with our mouths —
and with our minds and our hearts we disavow a creator.
How complete is our ignorance?
How blinding is our arrogance?
How unenviable our position?
Were the solar winds but to yawn — or scream,
and a hostile breath hurl an injurious insult in our direction,
with warning in advance of the calamity
would we dare to ask our nonexistent father for assistance then?
Or would we in unison, with the defiance of one on death’s row,
curse the coming darkness and the hand of the executioner?
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