Downstream

A room. Or a table. Behind doors we don’t see.

A few people decide. Not you. And not me.

No one who will carry it sits in those chairs.

No voice from the thousands. We’re never there.

 

It spreads farther than clouds. Like oil on the ground,

set loose by a handful, then passing around.

They summon a burden with no rightful claim

except what they’ve taken in all of our name.

 

It moves from the few who don’t heed its edge,

who drive it forward yet quietly hedge.

A distance maintained, a safeguard they use,

a protection they keep that we don’t get to use.

 

They call it required. They don’t look twice.

Never into the faces absorbing the price.

And so it is sent, without being called,

to lives that had no part in it at all.

 

And some who have shaped it,

clear-eyed in their pride,

step back from the outcome

or thin out its tide:

 

Concrete walls.

A guard at the step.

What they loose on the world

they won’t have to accept.

 

I was not in that room. I had no say in it.

None of my thoughts had any place in it.

I did not design it. I could not say no.

Still, I inherit the path that they chose.

 

None of us counted when counting was done,

yet each of us carries what few have begun.

What started contained by a table, a wall

no longer resembles that moment at all.

 

The room is gone.

 

The table is gone.

 

What remains does not stay with them.

 

It stays.