Overlay

I'm still spiritually wrestling with greater minds
who tell me the world is simply what I am,
what I bring to the table, my expectations, my understanding or lack of it,
my desires, my fears, my beauty, my ugliness...

That it's all just me projected out onto some screen.

But I tell you that horror and atrocity stay,
stick, remain, for a very long time, and that
I don't think I am responsible for it all.

I wanted to show you something about how horror
impacts good people who go to work never expecting
what will confront them, change them, scar them
forever and about how they try to live with that.

An overlay of tarnish is lowered onto the map of these lives,
the topography of reality has changed.

And then you walk out into a cold night
brightly lit by a large sympathetic moon
after the few cars drive off
it is so quiet on the village common with it's
old big white black-shuttered New England houses
the dark woods and the sharp clean air.

You try to make an overlay of this scene
for your own map.