Seven Windows Redux: Thomas Reaches Out Poem by Daniel Brick

Thomas to Jane:
If this were a beautiful summer day, Jane, I could point out its beauties to you one by one, and then you would take over and be the finger pointing at the many things that charm us and convince us of the goodness of our lives. But just look at our world - you can barely see anything it's so occluded with smoke and waste. Is there any place left for us to see and know the sweetness of things?

We have nothing left in nature to point to and say, 'You see that flower, right? You see its passionate red petals, its intense yellow center? Well, I am that vibrant red and yellow when I sit beside you.'
And if you could, you would point up at the sky with clouds tumbling
over each other and a great wind we cannot feel down shifting those
white masses across the bright cerulean blue, and you would say to me
alone, 'That sky reveals your power over me, and I trust (I know) it
will only protect me and never hurt me.' How we will glow inside the day we say these things to each other!

Jane, when I look inside my mine I see only flowers and you. I don't see other women crowding the street, or that model advertising trivia on TV, or that actress pretending to be a real woman. There's only you, and you fill every space within me with delight and desire. And
I want the delight to become passion and the desire to become fulfillment. This society doesn't want a man and a woman to share those things, they want us to go after dry pleasures that keep us
apart from passion and fulfillment. They are killing delight and desire, and we have joined their action with our inaction.

Jane, I want to say the word LOVE to before it vanishes entirely from
every human encounter. I want to speak the words that contain LOVE in them. I want to hold you and cherish your loveliness. I want to feel
the pangs of being lovelorn and lovesick until we can seek our joy in a love nest of lovemaking. I want the word LOVE to cling to you and me.

Jane, you can trust my words because they come from my heart. It's like the Native American belief that a thin thread of blood connect the heart and the mouth, so the mouth cannot speak an untruth. I am speaking with that blood thread connected to my heart. I want another
blood thread to connect our hearts so that we always live in truth.
And then the summer, the flowers, the clouds, the sky with its clouds
will be inside us, and in this impossible world (dare I say it) we will be happy.


Thomas to Samuel:
Samuel, look a us living these separate impoverished lives. Doesn't it disgust you we have become so weak? Don't you want to lash out against the ones who have reduced us to this poverty of spirit? LOOK AT US.
We live without friendships. There is too much suffering, too much
distrust, too much exhaustion for us to cultivate friendships.
for how many decades has this condition been the norm? How much longer
will it prevail? We must find answers to these questions. Because without friendships we may still be human beings but we won't be
humane beings. We have to reconnect those threads of friendship that used to bind men together to pursue common goals. There are so many
things we can only revive by working in tandem the way men used to.
Like our 'Once upon a time' democracy which has withered. It's a corpse. There are so many corpses scattered through this society. Aren't we close to being corpses ourselves?

We have no joy because we have no one to share it. What difference does it make if I work harder and earn an extra hundred dollars, or an extra thousand dollars? There's nothing to buy with it.Everything we do or is done to us is done to make us retreat further from each other
into a loneliness and isolation so powerful our consciousness can no longer deal with it. We are numbed. We are no longer men among men.

Samuel, can you tell me what it means to be a man? ... Men share
beliefs. They believe in the values of life, work and being. That's who we are. We live together, we work toward common goals and we have our being in the world. We're not meant to be shut away in our apartments, never congregating, never being together in large or small groups. This society doesn't want us to remember our simple, honored codes of conduct. It wants to keep us isolated, short-sighted and terribly alone. And it leads to just one end - we no longer exercise
our freedom.

Freedom is a vast empty space we wander in, disconnected, fearing meaningful contact, cut off from the support we need to give and receive from other men. You see, it's not freedom at all. It's a wasteland. How have we become so obtuse, so stupid and myopic that the beautiful word FREEDOM no longer excites our male pride with energy and delight? Freedom is our birthright as men. It is up to us to defend it and pass it on to our sons. It is time for us to reclaim our manhood - our shared belief in Life, Work and Being in the world, once again to be the proud owners of that great word Manhood.