Did it take us long to walk over to the broken people,
Letting our compassion change us for a while,
I have not become a saint with an act of kindness,
I am still looking for my oasis in this wasteland,
Everything else is a passing breeze.

The sorrow that filled them in those dark hours
Was my elixir, as I walked forward,
writing my testimonies in the lives I meet on my way.

I have felt grains of sand with my fingertips, my blood
is fatigued, in its course through my flesh,
My veins are distended, toughened, and yet,
They do not tear, and this limbo between
Pain and liberation is Peace within a calamity.

My soliloquy is a bare rasping breath of wind,
Coursing through the streets which led home once,
But are now the lanes of memory, stale in their impotence,
Stinging in their truth, that my existence left behind marks
in the water I bathed in, in the bed I slept in,
in the books I read, which I held,
in the bandages I bled, over the wounds I tried to heal.
On the flag I tried to save, I have wept, Longing
for this journey to end, so I may rest a while.

The diseased have suffered their sickness with stoicism.

I have tried to heal them, succeeded,
failed with a few,
and wondered in the power of Mortality.

My oasis lies in the peaks of the wasteland, I can see it now,
A haze, a sliver of sunlight in this dark wasteland,
Past this murky slush of relationships,
Beyond the cliffs of defeat, and past the rivers
Of Self-loathing criticism.