Grey: An Environmental Slam Poem

Once upon a time there was a thing called black and white,

Right and wrong,

Clear cut truths separated divisively into hemispheres of fact or fiction,

We all felt this once, the feeling that everything had  to be either concrete or non-existent,

When righteousness was so tangible we could reach out and hug it,

And it would kiss us and hold us and tuck us in to comfortable nights of sleep,

There is no such thing as comfort now.

In the days of our youths, we spent our time marveling at magic boxes that broadcasted images of lovable characters that won,

Good vanquished evil and virtue triumphed over corruption,

and we would root for the “good guy” and feel the serenity of vindication as every “happily ever after” secured us into rosy world views,

Then as we grew older, those characters began to fade,

Santa Claus and Care Bears disappeared into oblivion, and filled in with news networks and headlines,

And our rosy world view, once so filled with black and white,

Melted into a million shades of grey.

Grey, adjective,

An intermediate between black and white as in ashes or overcast sky,

Dull and non-descript, without character or interest,

Sunless, dreary, somber, bleak,

It has multiplied and infiltrated everything.

Grey concrete landscapes,

Grey industrial wastelands,

Grey hanging in our skies,

Flooding down our rivers,

Obscuring skylines,

And blocking out the sun.

Grey spewing from the pyres of capital gain,

Grey filling our lungs, our minds and our future,

Gushing from the mouths of our politicians,

Thickly coating our gospels in slippery falsehood.

We breath it in, drink it up, and consume it,

And because of it we are asthmatic, dehydrated and malnourished, 

And worst of all, we are complacent in being so,

Having been assured by endless hours of advertisement that grey is the new black and white,

The better truth, the clearer choice despite its obvious opacity.

Its time we woke up, because let me tell you something,

The matrix exists and we’re in it,

And our heads are being held under by the greed of people bigger than us,

Who would keep us in the dark to stuff their own pockets,

But I for one, will not succumb to grey,

I will not suffocate and drown in it, I will cease to remain silent and frozen,

I will stop letting the fear of dying make it a certainty,

I will trudge forward and find the surface,

Not accepting hopelessness,

Fighting the apathy to find answers,

Because I know that talking about the wrongs of the world isn’t enough,

We can sit around forever discussing how the world is going down in flames,

But ultimately it will change nothing and we will burn along with it,

There is no longer time for inaction,

If we are not part of the solution, we are just another faceless part of the overwhelming problem,

We must not lose faith that this evil can be vanquished,

That we can find truth again,

That the grey can again be separated into black and white,

Let us dare to be idealistic,

Dare to dream that there can progress in a world shrouded in retrogression,

Lorraine Hansbury once penned that it is easy to think of the world like “there is no progress, there is only one big circle that we all march in, around and around,

each of us with our own picture in front of us that we think is the future”

but it is important to remember that

 “it is not a circle, but merely a long line,

 as in geometry,

one that stretches into infinity,

and because we cannot see the end of it,

we can also not see how it changes.

And those that see the line, we call them idealists,

And the ones that can only see the circle,

We call them the realists,”

I’m calling for an end to “realism.”

An end to the idea that we cannot change,

Because to change the world we must first change our thinking,

Stop the cyclical pattern of hopelessness we get caught up in,

Stop the idea that we cannot overcome this,

Let’s come up with ideas no one has had yet,

Get out of this rut of human limitation,

Because dreams are bigger than we’ll ever be,

And solutions can arise out of the most unlikely of circumstances.

Let us stop moaning and groaning and focus on what we are going to do,

Action is the only solution worth taking seriously.

And the time to do so is right now,

Moving forward, overcoming,

Shaking the dust and finding the right and wrong in all the grey that has taken over,
that shall be allowed to exist no longer.