So much violence

  Death, destruction, and despair

A world of chaos

  Sinking closer to oblivion

Corruption and greed,

  Leading to the things that cause anger and frustration

 

And I am none of these things

But I am also not immune

Leaking into my dreams, like an unwanted specter 

Dreams of a threat against myself

  Or oftentimes even worse, danger toward those whom I care about the most

     Leading to an equally violent response, to save self and the survival of others

         But then realizing afterward that this, too, has somehow perpetuated this vicious cycle

Violence begetting violence,

  Hatred fueling hatred,

     Regardless of the cause or justification

And I understand the misery of this world,

  Experiencing vicariously through these nightmares, the torment of mankind

     And realizing how and why it is almost impossible to reverse this process once it has begun

Feeling like a ship that is taking on water,

  Being battered by the solemn waves of injustice and ineptitude

     And wondering if it's just a matter of time until capsize occurs

I skim along the surface of the real and unreal,

  Between the waking and the dreams,

     Between life and a land of distorted representations of life

There are walls here that separate the two,

  And on the one side is what only seems real,

     With the other side being what I somehow know is ultimately, actually real

It's like a two-way mirror,

  Where you can only accurately see through to the other side

      When you are standing on the side that lets light pass your way;

          While only revealing reflections of things to anyone on the opposing side

And if this wall should ever break,

   If the two-way mirror should shatter or forget which side is which;

      Surely that must be the gateway to things such as madness and dementia

But even behind the most fortified of walls,

  It seems the darkness of the world around us

     Always seems to find a way in

Even the strongest walls are not impenetrable

  And the strongest of walls are also sometimes

     Those which contain the most fragile breaking points

So I fight to hold up the walls and stave off the things that cause harm

  All the time taking caution to not become stone myself

     Or to engage a barrier so strong that it eclipses out everything,

         Including the light and the things that repair harm, rather than cause it

And I join the masses of thousands as we all try to manage --

   As we all to try to cope in our own different ways --

      With the deafening sounds of the cries of innocents

For the death of innocents is the death of innocence...

And I feel that we have all somehow now become guilty of this transgression

  Even if just by being present and not doing more to stop it as it happens 

     A harbinger of the worst of things to come...

A world that no longer knows where to look for solace

  Where to turn for comfort

      That no longer knows what to believe

(How do you have faith in humanity when "humanity" is the cause of all this pain?)

And I hear the voices of the godless,

  Those who were never able to believe in what they could not see...

Or those who saw the things that they did see,

  And believed that no God could ever allow for such terrible things to happen...

Standing side by side with those who simply deny that there ever was a God, and shouting out that they do not believe, and even threatening this God of unrealized shadows to somehow manifest himself so that they may denounce him to his face...

(But if you believe that He does not exist, then to whom are you actually shouting?)

Always one extreme or the other, and it's always the extremes that kill...

Either a belief in nothing, or a belief that is so absolute and rigid that it cannot be questioned without fear of severe retaliation...

We kill others for not believing

  And we kill others for believing too strongly -- if that belief is not the same as ours.

By not seeing the common ground, we see only the differences, and then let our unchecked emotions lead to the exaggeration of those differences, until they are magnified ten-fold beyond what they most generally actually are.

Polarized; the entire world and every person within it slowly becomes more divided into one of the extremes.

Either you kill in the name of the God in which you believe, or you choose to not believe at all.

And in the end --

Is it better to kill others, or to kill your own soul?

Better to denounce the beliefs of others, or to simply denounce your own God?

In a world of such polarized extremes, these are the choices we leave ourselves.

Insanity, disguised as faith and rationality that only a truly distorted world could ever accept as either.

Only a world that accepts a worldview so skewed could ever believe that this is what could ever actually be wanted by another person; another nation; another continental population; or any type of God.

This is the world we create for ourselves, based on our own choices and fallacies of greed, short-sightedness, and fear. And yet, we blame everyone but ourselves, even when it is ONLY ourselves that we can truly hold accountable, and when it is only ourselves that we can decide to change.

A change of heart

  A change of principle

     A change to move forward without forgetting the lessons of the past

A change to make change, rather than persistently traveling down this road to ruin

  Due to the fear of the unknown

     And the fear of being the first, rather than one of the common

And maybe it has to has to get worse before it gets better;

  The darkest night before the dawn;

     And let us hope that this night does not become our day

A nightmare becoming reality,

  As reality slowly turns into a nightmare

            (Epilogue)

Behind these eyes of silence,

  Behind these eyes of steel,

There lies a thousand currents

  That remind me of what's real

A pointed kind of seeing

  Keeping focus on the day

We'll peel away the tangents

  Of confusion's deadening gray

We'll open minds to greater things

  And open up our hearts

To find a way to stop the hate

  That tears us all apart

And in the end, find victory,

  Find common ground and love,

Replacing birds of prejudice

  With one pure, peaceful dove.