Walls That Humans Build

Walls That Humans Build
© Surazeus
2023 12 19

You choose to misunderstand what I say 
because you want to refract secret truth 
to bend reality straight through your heart 
so you can feel the center of it all 
expand from static ideal state of hope 
that distorts how our minds perceive the world. 

When I accept the peach of untouched hope, 
which you offer me from dark of your home, 
I fear you will expect payment in kind, 
but I turn from trap of comfort you offer 
to walk rough road of freedom to my grave 
that waits for me somewhere in paradise. 

Yet here I pause on bright desolate coast, 
between the ice-sharp mountain range of faith 
and the shifting-sand beach of primal hope, 
to paint landscape of the world I perceive 
that maps wild rugged terrain of my heart 
with smears of color on the slab of wood. 

I cannot cartograph this world of dreams 
without depicting walls that humans build 
to parcel landscape into nation-states 
that trap teeming tribes of aggressive hope 
within surrounding walls of paradise 
that tangle frontiers inside border lines. 

I draw national borders on the map 
with red blood of warriors and guardians 
whose winless battles on those fields of rage 
reveal where they last clashed to gain control, 
but left their comrades rotting in the mud 
where wheat and flowers bloom now from their skulls. 

The shining Heaven on the hill of power, 
where we protect our families safe from harm 
to eat and play with freedom of our will, 
is haven we enclose with walls of stone 
that transforms into prison of blind fear 
when guardian kings become tyrants of greed. 

I hang my painting on museum wall 
so strangers seeking ancient truths in art 
could decipher my weird symbolic code 
through esoteric scriptures of lost tales 
when they see how my brain perceives the world 
as atoms swerving blindly in the void. 

Through art I generalize our complex truths 
to simple statements of conceptual riddles 
that twist false answers into diatribes 
which demagogues employ to hypnotize 
people fighting wars over fertile lands 
till all walls are destroyed by timeless truth.