Questions and Lamentations

Life is full of pain, struggle and sacrifice,
It can flip over on the roll of a dice.
Burning, writhing, tearing and twisting,
Whims, demands, requests and insisting.
Co-operating, compromising, retreat and relenting,
Excuses; making and giving, genuine and inventing.

You face unbearable torture and the pain doesn’t subside
But if you lash back, it’s because of the devil inside,
The dagger of love, sharp penetrating and incisive,
Every word, make or break, calculated and decisive.
Every action, inconsiderate or oversensitive,
Every argument, trivial or major, leading to its own derivative
Living is an effort, almost never is it easy,
Where everyone you meet is too innocent or sleazy.

Compelled to be careful about where you tread,
Confused about what it is that you should dread.
Calculative about your words from dawn till bed,
Because what you meant is exactly what you said,
Is this where our evolution has led?
That we are caged until we are dead?
When everything that you have written or read,
Is corrected and marked with lines of red,
When there is no meaning to the values we embed,
When the wrong is, for survival, what we are fed?
Could it have been better to be unborn instead?
Because I feel like I am already dead!

Aviv Nair

4/1/2006