What Is a Life To You

What is a life to you?
Do you wake up to love
imagine a future with someone?
A wife or a husband,
a child or ten?
An exaggeration,
but love is different to everyone.
Do you have a cat or a dog,
that you carefully
care for?
Who’s life you would
ultimately kill for?

What is a life to you?
Alarm clocks and paychecks
or midnight snacks
and twenty cups of coffee?
A pack of cigarettes
you hide in your glove compartment?
Or that one note
in a song you love?
The verse in a poem you read
a decade ago that you can’t shake
Or even the 9am radio talk show
that you listen to every day?

Is it the silent onward tick of a clock?
An assurance that time goes on?

What if the soothing
and somewhat irritating
guiding force of a grandfather clock,
the chiming
and the tick and the tock
morphed into something
Something you can’t quite place
but angry
in a not so far away place?

What is a life to you?
Cold metal shifting beneath
even colder hands?
Anger pounding and sirens blaring?

What is a life to you?
Smiles through stupid jokes,
and the smell of rain after a drought?
Familiar eyes gazing into yours
holding something you couldn’t explain
but somehow makes your heart beat faster?

Is it blaring music in a concert hall that
takes you away from your pain
and let’s you escape?
Or is it the careful sounds
of chalk on a chalkboard
carving out your day?

Is it soft skin beneath your fingertips
tracking a course you take every night
and soft breaths and careful grins?
Maybe it’s a familiar scent
wafting in through the vents
like cookies or pie
or home

Is it dreams of a future
where you are all you know you can be?
Success and power and money
but not overrun by greed?
is it safety?

What is a life to you?
Is
it safety?
Is it knowing that when you close your eyes
you’ll wake up
and nobody will have died?
Is it holding a hand through the night,
staring up at the ceiling
wondering
when and how and why?

Is it the feel of grass beneath your feet?
Or rain on your skin?
Is it the sound of thunder striking,
far off but near enough
to remind you you’re alive?

Is it freedom?

What is a life to you?
That you can look up at the sky
and watch as the flag falls
to half mass
surrendering to another
massacre?
Is that life?
Is that freedom?

Is life the calculated draw
of a machine
pulling at the strings
of what holds us together?

What is a life to you?
Is it getting a call just after two
when the police have arrived
and the ambulances still drive
and the sirens still blare
and the blood still pools on the sidewalk
or the dance floor
or the stage
or the school
where someone you love
someone you live for
has fallen
and you don’t know
if they’ll get up?

What is a life to you?
A machine that can’t love
but can only take
or a person
who loves
who breathes

What is a life to you?
A mascot or a color
Is it blue?
Is it red?
Is it a debate you make
Is it proclamations of your rights
and the ignorance of their deaths?

What is a life to you?
Is it forgetting their touch?
Is it turning on the news
and feeling something clutch
at the very core of you
and ripping at all you are
because this is the when
this is the how
But there’s no Why.
Why?
Why weren’t you there?
Why couldn’t you help?
Why wasn’t your side arm
there to catch the bullets
that someone else side arm
shot out at the one you
would give you life for?
There is no Why.

What is a life to you?
Is it an empty gaze
in a bloodied field
that once was a school
that once was a sancutary
that once was a home
or a church

What is a life to you?
Is it the cold metal clutched to your side
when you jump out of the passenger side
of you friends car
and rush in
because this was the one place
the one thing
that wouldn’t happen to you?
You had your protection.
But what use was it?

Was it worth a life to you?
For you to have your safety —
for them to have their weapon?
You don’t see a weapon.
You see a light in a tunnel that just gets darker
but do you see why the light fades
do you see what you’re losing?

What is a life to you?
Is it the careful beeping of a heart monitor
counting down seconds
overpowering the clock in your brain

What is a life to you?
Is it years dwindling to hours
to minutes to —
“We did all we could do”?

What is a life to you?
Is it this?
Is there anything you could do?

There was.

There is.

Lives lost, and nothing gained.
No protection, and no groundwork laid.
“It’s a shame,” thats what they’ll say.
“There’s nothing we could do.”
But we both know there’s another way.

What is a life to you?
Strangers dying that’s one thing
But imagine your love being where they were
imagine a shooter atop a tower
where your side arm did nothing
but permit them the opportunity
to aim down with a cold gaze
cold like the metal against your waist
cold like the machines keeping them alive
like the morgue
and the blood on the ground miles away
cold like the nights
when you lie
staring up at the ceiling
wondering
when and how and why

Copyright © Audri Carlevaro | Year Posted 2017

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