This is a work of fiction.
image by AI; my own prompt
I shield my heart from tragic news,
From warnings of what’s soon to come,
And lock away compassion’s fire —
It’s safer now to just be numb.
I dread to think what others know
Beyond the headlines’ fleeting glare,
For every truth I let inside
Strips hope away and leaves despair.
I dare not ask you how you feel,
For truth might break what strength remains.
The answer might unseal a flood
Of long-forgotten, hidden pains.
Too many lost, too many wars,
Too many children left alone.
Too many ghosts now haunt the truths
I once believed my heart had known.
Yet every heart that learns to close
Pays dearly for that cold disguise —
A smaller life is purchased there
Beneath the reassuring lies.
And every day I hide from life
Some living part of me grows small
The price of self-protection is
The slowest, saddest loss of all.
And though the world can break my heart
Beyond what anyone could bear,
The deepest cut of all is my
Becoming too afraid to care.
The world is filled beyond its brim
With slaughter, cruelty, guilt and blame
Until each whispered tragedy
Ignites another spark of shame.
My sleep is stalked by anxious thoughts
That never loosen, never cease,
While anger, envy, guilt and dread
Conspire to murder inner peace.
I turn away from pleading eyes
And close the shutters of my soul.
I walk away from love itself
As brokenness consumes me whole.
So I withdraw, ‘cause feeling less
Appears the safest place to hide,
As quiet desperation stirs
The silent scream that roils inside.
Yet every time I turn away,
Withdraw from life’s uncertain flow,
A lesser life is all that’s left —
Afraid to ask, afraid to know.
And every day I hide from life
Another part of me grows small.
The cost of self-protection is
Not noticing the world at all.
And though the world will break my heart
Beyond what anyone can bear,
My greatest fear, my sad lament
Is that I’ll be afraid to care.
Music renditions, from Suno AI:
Solo Singer-Songwriter Version; Solo Blues Version; Duo Blues Version.
Here’s a repeat of my caveat on AI that accompanies all my posts on the subject:
1. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. When it’s used properly and carefully as a tool, as an aid to learning and creativity, I believe it can be very useful, and enormous fun. But most of its large-scale applications (like replacing jobs and facilitating wars and surveillance) are ill-conceived, immoral, incompetently designed and conceived, vastly overreaching the capabilities of AI, ecologically disastrous, socially disruptive, and extremely dangerous.
2. The staggering amount that has been invested in AI has absolutely no viable business case to justify it. It represents possibly the most astounding squandering of money based purely on imagined and improbable future developments and blind faith, in history. Those who have studied this have concluded that this massive bubble will soon burst, and those who’ve invested in it will lose their shirts. At that time, the window to use AI as a learning and creativity tool will quickly close forever. Our playing with these essentially-free tools now is not going to aggravate its abusive uses, nor will it have any impact on the timing or extent of the coming AI crash. So my view is: use it while you can; it will soon be gone.
