How nice it is to be acknowledged in this life

How nice it is to be acknowledged in this life
To spare the innocence of the naive
And to ignore the rattled bustling minds, leave humanity with
the slap of humiliation.
With the exception to be loved, being based on one’s needs
and wishes.
A punch to humanity.
How disgraceful it is to live such a life.

To walk amongst men who have forgotten the weight of another
soul,
Who measure affection by convenience
And call it love when it asks for nothing of them.

How easily the heart becomes a commodity
When another’s tenderness is only valued
For what it can provide.

We have become so fluent in taking
That we have forgotten the language of receiving.
So accustomed to being wanted
That being known has become an inconvenience.

A person may lay their entire interior before you;
their fears, their history, their trembling little truths,
and you may step over it
as though a human being has spilled nothing but water.

What a strange humiliation,
to have a heart capable of devotion
and to live among those who only understand appetite.

There is something almost barbaric
in the way we ask another to bare their soul
while keeping our own hands behind our backs.
In the way we demand honesty
only so we may decide whether it is useful to us.
In the way we call ourselves wounded
when the wound was ours to begin with.

And perhaps that is the greatest disgrace;
not that humanity is cruel,
but that we have made cruelty ordinary.
We pass it from hand to hand
until no one remembers who first drew blood.

We inherit the hunger,
the indifference,
the cowardice disguised as self-preservation,
and then wonder why the world feels so empty.

How nice it is to be acknowledged in this life.

How rare it is
to be regarded without being consumed.

To be held in another’s mind
without having to perform for the privilege.

To be loved beyond usefulness,
beyond beauty,
beyond what one can give,
beyond the brief satisfaction of being wanted.

To look at another human being
and understand,
this is not an object placed here for my fulfillment.

This is a life.

And it is a disgrace
how often we forget.