Feeling Gray Poem by Anam Rizvi

I’m feeling gray.
I wish it were so easy.
So easy to divide, calculate, nostalgically recreate people into little slaughter boxes of black and blue and white.
Good and Evil and diabolical, true and hypocrite and the scum of the Earth.
I wish it were so easy to cut them down with words.
To forget, obliterate the unbidden past,
Which haunts and eludes
While the rising wave of hope that quenches and deludes till.
Till we wake up from this sea of clinging memories and look around us to find only shadows like clawed walls,
Like stains of blood left after a cold blooded murder.
If only, it were so easy to punish the “bad” and reward the “good”.
If only we were bad and good. If only.
If only seeing others punished,
If seeing others tortured and sad and unhappy could give us our peace.
If only seeing them suffer could make us happy.
If only the bad and the good and the outcast were the bad, the good and the outcast,
If only they did not mix these shades of pink into purple and gray into white,
For gray can be black and gray can be white.
And the greatest surprise of all,
We’re no shade at all.