Love Thy Neighbor
All you truly need is God, they say
as if life could ever be so simple.
I stopped hearing God’s voice when I started
realizing that I could no longer trust myself
to the people I once thought closest to me.
Blind to my rage or deaf to my cries,
the fact remains that there is an evil
creeping into this belabored heart of mine,
and all the alarms I’ve been throwing out
still fly unreceived through all the skies.
Give me an answer:
how loud does a man have to scream
to raise himself up from the cracks of society
so many step so casually over,
or are the cracks what make up early graves?
The harder you have to fight just to survive
is the further you may fall from your morals.
The man who gets collectively ignored
can one day become the most sinister ordeal
if he fails to keep his humanity whole.
Behind every monster or tragic headline
is a person who was meant to love the broken more completely,
for nobody breaks without signs of weakness
no matter how good they are at hiding.
Perfection’s a myth, even in the negative.
There, self-reflection becomes my immaculate salvation;
the ability to receive my own alarms
which then translate into a sense of purpose–
to listen for the echoes of failure in a heart,
being so intimate with how it breaks.
4 thoughts on "Love Thy Neighbor"
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“Behind every monster or tragic headline
is a person who was meant to love the broken more completely”
This gets to the heart of everything. Broken is just the beginning. Love it.
Just the beginning and still a long journey once started. Thank you for the comment.
💙🕯 feel you in this one, Philip.
Thank you so much, Joseph.