Ghosts

I saw a ghost this morning,
fleeting, but clearly there,
a flash of Rufus in his place,
as though he still belonged there.

It happened near the anniversary
of Christian leaving too.
And one small ghost became a door
that every memory walked through.

I saw the boy who found the cat,
the years they shared, the rooms,
the ordinary afternoons
we never thought we’d lose.

Then memory widened into life,
unstable and unplanned,
nothing like the world described
by those who claimed to understand.

My parents, teachers, church, and state
all promised there were rules:
work hard, be good, have faith, hold on,
and life would honor you.

But most of what they called the truth
was dressed-up fear and lies.
The curtain falls, the gears are shown,
and something in me dies.

Supply and demand, they taught us,
makes every person free.
But freedom looks like slavery
when hunger sets the fee.

We trade the hours of our lives
for just enough to live,
then wake tomorrow, trade again,
and call it what we give.

And even love keeps ledgers now.
It measures and records.
You’re worth the comfort you provide,
the labor you perform.

Affection, touch, and loneliness
become things bought and sold.
We bargain with our tenderness,
then wonder why we’re cold.

We work to live, then live to work,
saving crumbs against the day
when age arrives and those in charge
come take the crumbs away.

They’ll put you somewhere clean and still
until the dates are gone,
or work you to your final breath
and hire someone on.

“Just wait,” they say, “for Heaven.
Everything is settled there.”
But I have heard too many promises
dissolve into the air.

They tell me justice waits beyond,
that everyone will pay.
But those who harm a million lives
die peacefully one day.

No reckoning. No debt returned.
No balance made, no cost.
The wounded carry what was done.
The guilty are simply lost.

So tell me what all this was for.
Tell me what I missed.
I know there have been precious days
and people I have kissed.

There have been cats in favorite chairs,
a child’s delighted face,
and moments when the space between
two lives became a sacred place.

And I will miss them fiercely
when I finally disappear.

But do not tell me suffering
was why they mattered here.

Do not tell me pain was needed.
Do not call the cruelty grace.
Do not promise me another world
to justify this place.

There was beauty. There was love.
There were moments worth the fight.

But God damn it, it could have been better.

It could have been made right.

—Bryan Brouwer