I'm listening to opposition.
Is there anything else?
The bird perched on the winter branch
cursing itself?
I've got two hands filled with empty,
like distance relates to envy.
And in the quiet stillness of this Midwest winter night
my shoulders become heavy.
My heart flirts with steady.  
My head calculates ready.
You wipe tears from my cheek and nose.
You're telling me to let them flow.
"Don't wipe them away."
I have nothing to say but that I am
afraid.
And I can't even say it.
The words are a bayonet at the end of the gun I hold to my head.
Is there requiem here?
The forest trees made clear in the fog of my disillusion?
The clever twist of fate that thickens my confusion?
Sometimes I doubt if I were made for this life.
I doubt the strings that fate has wound around our hearts
and save for my frown, my face seems to show the world
nothing.
Who or what am I becoming?
No longer the grouch, the fastidious mouse, or the the hermit.
I can not be the addict or the martyr in the skirmish.
And I am not in search of identity. I know me.
But I don't know this place inside of all the waste that has been this life.
I have only two things that are worth anything: their lives.
The courts are waiting, but the jury's still out on the verdict.
Not "Do I deserve them," but, "Do they deserve it?"