Family Business - a poem

There's something strange as we sit and eat our breakfast, lunch
and dinner. Strange that our thoughts are not on our taste buds
not on the flavors, but on the thoughts that are collectively
being thought on similar circumstances. As we go through motions
of existence, knowing that anticipation is stuck on our lungs
and in truth our breathing is falsified, and we attempt to laugh
and smile, to be genuine to ourselves before the waiting had begun.

This is typical of the days that follow news, personal news, family
news, that we are to contemplate tomorrow when we know very little
for today, and the flashbulbs of questioning cause us to go back
in our minds to our personal memories because we have been somewhere
resembling this place, before. As our food lands on our tongues,
we know we have had silent meals like this once upon a time, and it felt
as though the exiting of those events was the last word on all that business.

That it did not end there, that the period was only an ellipsis is perhaps
the hardest part of difficult times, that they tend to come around again,
and poke at us, and prod us, and we are forced to pay attention. Yet, the hardest
part of all of it is going about the normal day to day, knowing that normality
is going to be there. We want to send normality away, but somehow
we are unforfortunately accustomed to this news, and so we function
somehow when all we want is the world to stop so this, this can be found
out, and sorted, and to get to the point, but we wait, and wait, and wait.

Thinking on loved ones is toughest to do, wondering who needs
to be stronger, who needs to relinquish their floodgates to freedom,
and who has no need to fall apart. When we care for one another,
we cannot help but hurt for those who hurt, to fear when others fear,
to be consumed with rage again, and again at the unfairness of life.
Yet, we hope, and we continue to hope, battle weary, and driven
to see tomorrow back to its true state so that we may eat breakfast, lunch
and dinner in the peace we always did, but for now, we chew our food
with contemplation, and we recite our mantras in our head, and compel
ourselves to function, for we know a truth: we are fragile, flesh and bones,
human. So let us feel human, even though it hurts.