Stitch-By-The-Numbers
by Odin Roark

What is it to see,
but never emerge from the dark?

Thus is the weave
many only see as stitch this,
stitch that.

Children marvel at color,
its movement,
its rudimentary perception,
not knowing control mongers await them,
famished gluttons who gloat over
adults obviating color’s consciousness,
the sentient discernment of red and yellow.

So many of us risk the pain of colorless thread,
while too few discover learning that
surviving is not a black or white stitch
to cover one’s mistake,
even as sensoria’s ear drum,
banished eyelid,
silenced tongue,
all prisoners of contrived storms
wallow in destroyed expression
its blasts of toxic oxygen
life-breath’s drifting gift
the once always present
sense of truth,
or not,
wants only to cling to the “now,”
to be woven,
to be engaged in some kind
of completion.

Risk awaits

Perhaps hesitant to thrust
one’s needle of entry,
but nevertheless
always at the ready,
actuality's hardened muscles
ready to serve,
to discern honesty,
as the only way to survive.

How courageous,
this consciousness willing to risk,
knowing to cower
is to embrace that unsafe place,
ignorance's wanton indulgence,
an anesthetized subsistence
that merely watches as
life’s stitch-by-the-numbers populous
continues to imprison itself.

The fortunate few weep,
as so many needled inserts
arrest but colorless tears.