I.
What of those who are dragged away?
What of he who is torn
From chalkboards by his feet,
Nails, desperately trying to maintain a grip,
Gouging paths through the black,
From where he is
To where he wishes to be.
Kicking, he screams
But his screams are drowned
Out by the sound of his nails on chalkboard,
A sound which all around him
Have been so finely
Tuned to ignore.

And in the end he realizes he
Can never keep hold
Of such slippery valuables.
So most simply,
Terribly,
Lets go.
But when he looks down at his hands,
Nails bleeding and broken from his struggle, he
Finds not the end,
But faced instead with a gun.
Pointed towards him or away,
Either way it shoots pains him equally.

And so he prays to God to save him
But the only god he will know is Death,
And he is told by His pale messengers,
“To live is to die”
And far too often that mantra
Is taken too seriously
Too prematurely;
For if one truly equals one,
Why do the sirens of Elysium
Blare only one song,
When so many more are more
Worthy?

II.
And what of those who have found Elysium?
What of she who is allowed
(Expected)
To tear at the throats of others.
She who lives so blindly
In the light of success
She can only measure her own
By the failure of others.
Because so long it has been since
She had any sight.
Because it was her great-great-grandfather’s father
Who first began
Setting up his opponents’ chess boards
With only pawns to play with.

And so she knows no God of Death.
All she knows are the bars
Of her cage
Which she takes for granted,
Not knowing what lies
On the other side,
Nor how soft the bars are.
From within the cage He
Seems so distant,
Abstract,
But it is a cage nonetheless.
So as she is brought to the pits
To fight more fiercely
Than any generation before her,
He follows closely behind, waiting.

And, unable to bear the cage any longer,
She conjures Him.
And He laughs
And takes her in His arms
As she fights, welcoming
A few more like her
Along the way to join.
And He laughs at them, He
Laughs because to live is to die,
And so many people try
Every day
To live.

III.
And what of their castle, which is filling up too quickly?
What is a castle to do
When all of its occupants insist
On kicking the walls down.
One brave man suggests,
“Maybe we stop kicking the walls?”
A few turn to look,
But not all.
Some will even nod their heads eagerly,
But turn around
And go right on kicking the walls.

And an even braver man
Has an idea.
“What we need is a flood
Or something
To wash all of us out
Of here.
That’ll do the trick.”
Nobody pays him any
Mind, but he wonders, and waits
For it to happen, knowing
It has before; the previous occupants
Left scratches on the wall paper
And scorch-marks in the kitchen.

And every night they are soothed
To sleep by stories.
“The walls of Helm’s Deep
were breached.
So too, were those of
Minas Tirith.”
A man will recite,
“But the realm of man
Was not lost.”
And so they go to sleep content.
But every day, the arrival
Of the Rohirrim seems less likely,
And on our Earth,
The dead stay that way.

IV.
And what of you?
What of the poets who write this together,
Uncertain of what path
To take, which is “right,”
But certain that that uncertainty
Will only feed the flames.
I, for one, will break
Into first person, because
After all this time, I have learned
To stray
From the path
If I want to.