Quatrain for a Glass Heart (A Poem)

Why do the men die?
Why do the women weep?
How am I to tell them
We all only sleep?

My head is on fire,
My chest carries a brick.
How on earth do I convince them
This life’s only a trick?

Let my barbaric yawp sound
Across the roofs of earth and sky.
I want them to hear me.
God knows I’m not sure why.

Limitation laughs at me
Should I care at all?
If out of a hundred,
Only one lamb should fall?

I know most of my kind
Don’t give a damn
For the rejected, ragged sufferers
Stumbling through a raped, ravaged land.

A thorny rope tightens around my soul.
The heart’s blood leaves each eye.
Because their dead faces I can’t forget,
No matter how hard I try.

I clench my small fists
And I curse my heart’s unnecessary size.
I tell my soul “be still”
When the blood flows from my eyes.

Lock the eyes away, 
seal them up tight,
I don’t want to see
Every poor man’s plight.

My insides are wailing.
Heart says, “handle with care.”
But how can I help it
If it is fragile as air?

Heart screams for the people.
Each lives like one dead, 
Eyes shrouded in suffocating cloud,
And a cruelly veiled head.

I lose count keeping track.
I cry for each one.
There are too many.
Would it have been better if we were none?

Dear God, I’m set to implode!
But who cares what they think?
I will not let my resolve
Push my mind over the brink.

This heaviness binds me,
but I am not afraid.
That pulsating longing
will come to somebody's aid.

It will not be useless.
My hands will not swing.
there is someone out there
whom unto God I shall bring.