No Baby Ever Comes out Giggling

 

I pity the poor immigrant
Who wishes he would've stayed home
Who uses all his power to do evil
But in the end is always left so alone
That man whom with his fingers cheats
And whom lies with every breath
Who passionately hates his life
And likewise fears his death

I pity the poor immigrant
Whose strength is spent in vain
Whose heaven is like Ironsides
Whose tears are like rain
Who eats, but is not satisfied
Who hears, but does not see
Who falls in love with wealth itself
And turns his back on me

I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass
I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass

********

Dear Kate,

If someone tells you she finds no reason to wake up in the morning, what would you tell her?

You are a scientist, a health care worker, I suppose you have your answers, many and all well-informed.  You will label her and her condition, describe and prescribe, all with genuine compassion, of course, and for her good too, because her condition will need to be resolved, the sooner the better, before it dissolves her.

You might even be so bold to acknowledge and empathize, Yeah, I feel the same way too, but professional enough to stop short of completing the confession: every morning.

We can only speak meaning to someone else's life if meaning has been spoken into ours, promises made and kept, keep being made anew every morning and kept as promised as we die into our nights.  Look around now, anything new, anything interesting, anything worth dying for tonight so that you would live for it today?  I think not.

Not that you don't have stuffs to do.  Stuffs we do have, stuffed as our lives are.  Something is on sale, a "lightning deal," and you plan to deal with it lightningly, right out of bed, something necessary you must have, something needful, to realize the promise of a new kitchen, of better security, a fuller You.  Maybe you are the deal-maker all your life, and after decades of dealing lightnings, now ready to take on the moon, the most fabled promise by poets of old.  You are on a mission.  You have the know-hows.

We all know how to solve X; we just need the will to do it.  Such is the promise of a politician, someone shameless enough to say what we are too ashamed to say to and for ourselves, our unknown variables being world hunger, homelessness, drug addiction, all well-branded injustices and blatant shortfalls of even the best civilizations.  What we can't affirm unequivocally is Why we should even bother.  

Everybody purports to know How and goes to school to purport better, even as we can never agree on Why.  It would be most insensitive, wouldn't it be, if I am to tell you my meaning and assume it is also necessarily yours?  We need to accept each other, "just the way we are."  It feels dirty but we call it "love."

We are in nothing together other than in our dying, our constant craving even as we are chowing down the hunger of humanity on behalf of the world, housing ourselves ever better to dispossess ourselves of the fear and sorrow of being far from home, adding diction to ever more addictions to deny there is no more addition in our lives, nothing newer to pile on top and cover up our old, sad ways, only subtractions, divisions and disintegrations, since we expressed our first agony on Day One.

No baby ever comes out giggling.

Yours, Alex