We are finite..! We are temporary..!

The bone that you broke in the first grade
Will soon be turned to dust
Dust that will not serve a purpose
Dust that will make up the ground someone marries on
Dust that gets stuck to the pant leg of a child who played too hard
And loved too fiercely

The girl whose lips you found peach trees in
Whose eyes found you on that bridge
And whose scent identifies her
As she sneaks up behind you
Will never be recorded
Will one day cease to be read
Will loose her scent over time
Until her security is found in new fruit
In the nostrils of a star crossed lover

And the boy who you spent hours for
Pouring into a cd
Filling every electronic database
With the screaming sounds of your love
That still wasn’t enough to change his mind
Won’t impact the universe in any way
But the girl of 3000 will feel your breath
In the sobs you whispered to your pillows

Our language
Our culture
The men we built libraries out of
And the women we brushed under our feet
Until they forced us to look at them
Won’t matter
Their struggles
Won’t matter
And their fears won’t matter
And who can say what equality will look like in a hundred years
Or when we are all covered in the ash of the apocalypse
And death is our only friend?
We’ll be reduced to a textbook
And then to a sentence
And then to a word
And then to a grouping
Of the thousands of words and sentences and textbooks
of cultures that have been here
But exist now only in the remnants
Of our coagulated human experience
That bloodies the floor
Of the bathroom we still cry in
Even though the tears will dry
And our problems will be reduced to nothing
Until they’re picked up by future wanderers
Who have no words for the emptiness left inside them
Do you understand?
Every pin drop in a silent room
Every day we waste or fill
Every song we’ve sung
Screaming or weeping
Every ounce of what makes you you
Your identity and your pursuit of anything more
than what you’re currently experiencing
and your secrets and lies
Will one day
Be no more real
Than the first name
On the tombstone
In the graveyard down the street

Do you understand?

We are finite
We are finite
We are finite

But we are heartbeats and metaphors
New ideas and old adages
We are young and breathing documentaries
Cameras with a bloodstream
And our brains may turn to mush
Or maybe someday they’ll turn us into projectors
And play our lives at cinemas
Until they learn the meaning of what it is
To be a part of the human experience
A part of a continuing story
That erases itself to replace itself
With the same feelings on new faces
With new toys and new heroes
But same mantras
And same tenacious will to survive
Despite everything that tells us not to

We will stop our living
And stop our way of life
But we will never stop existing
Our footprints will never be erased from the earth
Even if the earth has fallen into cataclysm
The ghosts of our memories
Will cling to the outer reaches of the galaxies
Ad infinitum
And when the stars too fade
And all that is left of our existence
Of our starry nights
And suicidal tendencies
Will be

Nothing

And yet still, we live
That is what courage looks like
And I’ll be damned if we are labeled
As anything else