adam stanton

I remember saying once –
once, a long time ago, it seems –
that a thing does not grow,
cannot grow, I meant,
except in its proper climate.
What climate is this, then,
that man has created
and tainted with his filth and evil?
Nothing good can survive here;
nothing, then, should survive.
I should not survive.

That, that man –
can he even be called a man,
with the things he has done
in the name of power, or politic? –
that man has opened the door
through which I will walk to my demise.
His fall has preceded mine;
our fates, thus, are destined
to forever intertwine with
strands of blood dripping from
a loaded gun.

But how can I shoot this,
the cold metal tool in my hands?
The same hands which have
brought life where death was imminent,
and which have made music out of silence.
Perhaps, though, this has always been
the fate of an idealist such as myself.

For so long, I believed in black and white
and their presence in everything,
pure like the keys of a piano.
The white of the doctor’s coat
was always the simple answer for me;
what is more basically good
than saving the lives of God’s Creation?
If that good should come from evil,
can it ever truly be good?
I am doomed to be colorblind
to society’s shades of gray.

Even dear Jack –
my friend, my only friend –
flinched from my gaze
like a guilty schoolboy caught
with his hands covered in red.
Oh, how I wished to keep things light
between old friends like us,
but he always feared the ice
that lay dormant and judged
from the light blue of my eyes.
Maybe he knew, somehow,
what I have been capable of
all along.

This gun, the one that I hold
in my surgeon’s hands,
is all that is left of me.
It is funny, too,
and I could almost laugh
but for the sound of my heart breaking,
because the gun –
the barrel, the trigger, all of it –
is Black.