Still Here

Spent all summer bathed in monitor light
Search engine hits like soft kisses
The endless sound of keystrokes
My bittersweet serenade

Over the years I have come to need
This aching hunger
When I gaze at the world
All I see is sickening complacency

The soul of a social psychologist
Can slowly grow numb
When his friends are not out in the sunshine
But instead tucked away on hard drives and digital databases

Ever since ninth grade
I’ve known what emptiness feels like
When young and the people you love suffer
The common currencies lose all value

I was a hunter
Searching day and night, unquenchable
Mauling my prey for any quantifiable clue
Any insight that could save us

By fifteen I had left God behind
I had to do something
My eyelids never safely closed
The world was just too much for this little boy

In the intervention literature
All that matters is change
This scrolling on the mouse is just a perpetual prayer wheel
Calloused knees, begging to see others improve

I was born again in those days
The times I felt pain
Were just fingers pointing to the Moon
Reminding me that I am but a reflection of the world

I worked twenty-four hours a day
Cataloguing the ways to make peoples’ lives better
The stress of caring sometimes made me want to collapse
My worried heart, forever afraid I would have nothing to say

The line has always been blurry
Between self-improvement and bettering the world
If I want things to change
I need to always become better

After an entire summer of staring at statistics
Determining the predictors of improvement
I learned most not about the science of human behavior
Instead, it was always about the scientist

If I didn’t believe I could get better
This skin would be a lot colder

December Theme, a Trifle Late

December Walking
The air outside is so cold
it makes me cough with my first breath.
walking the three blocks home I
feel myself shrinking from the frigid wind
hunkering down in my fur-lined coat
wishing I could slither inside my skin
or underneath the matted snow
and hibernate like the gophers do
with full bellies and dreams of spring.
The ice is thick and tricky beneath my feet
one wrong step and I will fall
I wish for the gracefulness and ease
of a skater showing off on a frozen lake
but instead I shuffle along with the tiny, skittering steps
of someone just trying to get home.
I cross silent streets of white
climb up mountains and down again
take tiny comfort in the steam of my breath against the scarf covering my face
twitch my tingling fingers so they won't go numb
and useless as twigs
then the keys are in my fumbling grasp
the lock gives on the first try
my
door is open and warmth is there to hold me.
I unfurl, I grow tall and languorous
with relish and relief
I stretch, I jump and spin, kick off my caked boots and dance on the air
I preen and purr like a cat.
Then I sink into the comfort
of feeling human again.