Glass, Soul, Fire

We have time to pass before our plane.

I sit, well cushioned.

Sips of orange soda

trickle continuously down my throat.

My parents huddle over the computer

in a stream of offhand inquiries and petty complaints.

Beside me, the golden sunset light

sets my earthy sister’s hair ablaze.

Mine, pulled back, remains subdued.

Earphones rest forgotten in my ears

as I gaze through glass

past the airline boarding dock

and the concrete runway

to where each scattered cloud

is outlined with primal fire

that dates from millennia past.

Enthralled, I sit and sip and watch.

Millennia past, we were already

captivated by our cars and social ladders and bank accounts and menial repetitive careers

but once we were as wild and blazing as the sun

slowly descending in my view.

I reflect on our fixation with glass,

with separation and distinction

and segregation and isolation

and protection and exclusion –

glass demarcating our environments

and glass insulating our souls.

Behind glass, we are animate but quiescent,

content but not alive

in this solitary confinement of the soul.

Life is championed by wind and color and sun and flame,

and so, behind glass, we acquiesce to half-life,

voluntarily penned by this material

which transmits but neuters;

I see the radiant colors

but the passion of the wind and the light

remains alienated,

anathema because is it alive,

prohibited because it is powerful,

distanced because it is dangerous.

I sit and sip and wonder and wander

far into the deep recesses of my soul,

venturing into hidden realms beyond glass,

where lovers twine spirits

in the primal naked beautiful sacred wild,

where life is lived and loved

and people talk to strangers.

Alone, I sit and watch

from an immeasurable distance,

a separation insurmountable by the planes

that launch across the dimming sky.

I watch the sun set

from behind glass and accustom

and smog and technology and mobilization.

I watch from a painfully privileged place

in a heartbreakingly unequal world.

I watch as the announcer gibbers

sanitized bunk on the nightly news.

I watch as men die and women cry

and children fly into the sky

on dreams that lie

because there can be no reality other

than that prescribed by the MD –

take two and call if delusions of alternatives persist.

I watch as dreams of children die

shot from the sky

and old men take $1.25 at toll booths

from wealthy young brats in limousines

on the Beltway of Bloodsuckers

who steal life and time and fire

and convert them into market pressures

and ethereal electronic wealth

and forget what it is to live

or fly or cry or die

because to die you must first

have lived.

I watch my friends spiral

into the pull of conformity and pleasant banality

and no amount of tears on my part

can make them feel or see or cry

can pull them out.

I watch and cry and learn and die

because there is no room to live

behind glass.

I watch until my vision blurs and

greys out around the edges

and my eyes water with sun and fire and tears.

I watch, supremely alone, until our plane is called

and my parents insist that we go.

I watch until the last scrap of flame

is snuffed from the cloud sitting on the horizon

and it is dark.

And then, my soul glassed over once again,

I rise, and turn, and walk.

The soda leaves a sour film on my tongue.