The Wall

It came into being slowly
Like a weary traveler reaching shelter
It lumbered from not to there.
It was made of sighs
And so-sad things
And poetry, and giggles,
And companionship and tears.
It was children, and nursing mothers,
downcast eyes, and sorrow-lined smiles,
And old, deflated soccer balls.
Hefting itself up, piece by piece, it sat for all to see.
A wall.
Created, brick by brick, with hand-written letters all shoved in-between,
flapping like waving hands in the breeze,
the wall grew.
Soon, all anyone could see
Was dust, and grime
The sweat-stained brows of workers,
The sweet fields on postcards.
The distended bellies of babes,
The ramshackle houses spilling out of the river, and onto the banks, and up in the mountains,
and
people, people, everywhere.
Every brick contained a hundred hands, shaking,
a thousand well-hidden malices,
a million stifled coughs.
Peaking out from the corners,
fabric, and strange-language-ed song;
the threat of disease,
the begging for work,
the threads of uncounted impoverished lives.
And still, the wall grew.
Shuffling, and sliding, rasping, roughly;
Painfully, painfully, it moved into place.
We sat and watched it grow.
And like the mad, we tended to the formation, swarming.
Every crevice was filled with a dollar.
Every sigh, sealed with a bill.
We took pennies, and euros, quarters and nickels,
We took paper and checks, credit cards and gold bits,
and shoved them wherever we could.
Soon the wall, from our side, was so green,
so shiny,
so rippling with camouflage,
We could mistake the verdant scene for growth,
like plants had taken root in the seeds of those sad bodies
and flowers bloomed where once there was just ugly.
and poor.
And we'd rather not see that thank you very much.
How long does it take for a dollar bill to decay once it reaches the earth?
Sated. Rotund. Placated. Obese with the victory of hiding the poor,
We wait. Slap-happy,
Filled with blind ambition.
We exist for one purpose.
Our explanations end in "self."
Our existence ends in "self."
Our humanity ends in "self."