Half-life

Life often fails to offer opportunities to choose. 

Happy, sad, rich, poor—these things are more fact than function of our fiction free wills.

But our wills still matter, they are not without their power

Yet when choice at last is given, how easily we’re driven

sprinting back to the habits hewn from stony happenstance.

For the one whose song is sorrow

to sing joy would seem so saccharine.

Sacrilegious for the happy to grieve

unfair for the lucky to weep

lazy for the busy to rest.

So we do what we’ve done, been doing for decades. 

Deem no distinction between decision and dictation.

Joy is poisoned with brevity

Sorrow groans, but only guiltily

And we’re all of us left with a half-life of decay. 

Let life be living—shifting from giving us

darkness to light, daytime to night,

On this standing, leaning, laughing, grieving,

terrible, glorious ride.