Fault Me on Cliche

I promised someone I would drop the dark act. Write about sunshine and flowers and puppy dogs and cute children with cute things in their cute tiny fists.

So here goes nothing:

Three hundred girls under the age of sixteen are molested by the pious.

Eighty thousand die in Asia.

A blind woman is beaten half to death on a bus.

A fifteen year-old boy sits on death row.

And I'm crazy

For trying to write about beauty.

But a promise is a promise.

So I sit down at my computer and pray a simply prayer:

God.

Close my eyes.

Open my ears.

Clearly I can't see beauty

So shut my eyes

And open

My ears

Nose

Mouth

Hands.

I hear cries of outrage at the rape of the innocent

And smell the dust that rises from the movement of the shaken earth,

I taste the sick bile of righteous indignation coupled with forward movement

And feel the ache for a loved one. A mother or father or even just a kind stranger

My God,

What have you done to me?

The entirety of my being splits as light and dark pour out of me.

I so badly long to see the good. And the beautiful. The flower and the babies and the blah blah blah.

But in the absence of sight, I smell and taste and hear and touch

All that is.

Good.

And bad.

And everything in between. Everything that truly exists. Everything with meaning and substance and something worth feeling.

God.

Thank you for experience.

Fault on me on cliché,

But this is the best I have.