John Lariviere Poet Free verse

When Ice Cubes Become Unnecessary

We should ask each other
not how we are here
but why we are here.

The how
is already answered.
The why
drifts like smoke in the corners of our minds,
visited rarely,
if at all.

That is where God slips in.
We pretend to know why
because we cannot
or will not
understand it any better 

So we weave stories
call them truth while 
Religion teaches comfort
dressed as certainty,
as ee listen to voices
that know as little as we do.

To ask why we are here
is to stand in the shadow of death.
It can arrive at any moment,
yet our brains
are built to look away.
Living requires
a practiced denial.

But what of those
who have already gone?
Do they learn, in the instant of death,
the reason for their lives?
Or are we left to believe
it was simply their time—
that they had completed the unseen task
we call living?

And what of suicide—
when the ending
belongs to one’s own hand?
No one understands it
until the thought
comes knocking.

Who are we to judge,
or even to mourn,
a choice we cannot fathom?
We ask why and how
and reveal only
our fear.

Death frightens us
until we recognize
its kinship with suicide:
silence.
And sometimes
silence feels like peace.

Then there is the one who remains
when by all accounts
they should be gone.

Why am I alive
when I should be dead?
Not how am I alive,
but why?

We rush to say:
I wish I could have said something.
That was selfish.
They seemed so happy yesterday.

But happiness often arrives
just before the final step—
bright and fleeting,
a calm
before the quiet.

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