Love thy Neighbor

7 miles from where we live there's
Broken bones and jarred up wishes -
Where, where, where?

Across 7 oceans find praying beads
Shacked still shots of poverty
There, there, there.

Un-noose the whole world inside out
What's unentitled
Don't trickle down to

Institutions, revolutions
Unconsciousness to constitutions
Trip line mines and centuries
Rip skin off and underneath
We're blood protesting and unseen dimensions
Emptiness not filled by what we know
But with what we don't.

Right side wronged
Cast wrong aside
Abridged definitions to what's undefined
Plead not for answers but forgiveness -

Leaves us blank and crying,
What else have we been missing?
What else have we missed?

Blinded to extermination
Memorial timeline generations -
Children gone before they're grown
Old dying stories living still untold.

Indivisibility divided by
Street steel blocks and
Clashing sins
Holy grounds and versions of diverting opinions
Cross intersections and a disregarded resurrection.

We know what's now but not who came
Don't know tribulation or
Our neighbor's name -
How can we love them
When we judge them
Deny them worthy of salvation
Knowing nothing, really, of our own creation.

We observe two dimensional reality
Yet inexplicably we perceive three
Sight of faith given to believe
Trinity given but too proud to heed -

Choosing ourselves keeper of our own small space
Forgetting we breathe
Involuntary pulses and unchosen races
Though at different times and different paces
And left unnoticed is that
We're all stumbling, running in the same direction
Toward infinite gates that teach us
To love the hated and
Hate the hatred.

Slowly we get it.

That our distance from them is the same.
That we're the neighbor living 7 miles away.
That maybe we're the souls they're trying to save.

Pray with me.
Don't leave us blank and unaffected
Help us connect the disconnection
Help us unjar our jarred up wishes
To forgive us our lineage of unforgiveness,
To live the answer we demand from each other
Of what else will be missed
If we don't love thy neighbor.