Between Poem by Michael Nabert

Twixt.
Between:
A chasm,
a raw wound.
Between:
Crucial,
an ill defined space
that so much depends on navigating.

Between.
Between the world we want
And the one that is
Between who we strive to be
And see ourselves become
Between the way we think things work
And the way they actually do
Between the things we understand
And unknown unknowns lurking
Ominously ungrasped.

Between
Between ignorance and knowledge
Psychopathy and altruism
Right and left
Unthinking identity politics blindered thickly enough
to obscure even acknowledgement of basic fact

Desperate dangerous, razor edged between
Between deescalating, communicating, or uniting
And violent tribalism
Willing to harm itself to lash out
at perceived enemies.
Between moments, one word, one gesture, one symbol,
can jarringly turn one future into another

Daily news writes the brutal Between large
As ideologies clash
on a field of established facts
some belligerently disregard,
But the facts remain,
They lay there, stark,
unrelenting
Increasingly horrible to look upon
As we continue to accelerate
Beyond the wrong fork we took
between futures.
Between Star Trek and Mad Max
Baffled and horrified as
"Leader" after "Leader" invariably votes
For more Mad Max for everyone's children

Looming,
Credible
Demoralizing:
A glimpsed darkness between.
Not ultimately between futures
But between a future into no future.

Between action and inaction,
between fear of doing nothing
And fear of doing the wrong thing
Between fear of harsh consequences
For unpopular movement we urgently need
And the eternal consequences
Of not doing those things

Between
Hope and hopium,
The one crucial to psychological functioning
The other an optimistic fiction we delude ourselves with
Between
Hope and fatalism
Increasingly flavoured distastefully too like realism.

Between
Knowing what to do
And being able to do it
between
Torrents of misinformation
Sloppy thinking
Cognitive biases
Trying to judge relevance
In gushing firehoses of data and noise

Between yesterday and today
Between every drop of oil burned
And every drop of blood it costs
Between yesterday and tomorrow
Every intensifying heatwave, flood, storm or whatever
Every day between reason and belief
Between careening onwards with business as usual
And challenging global systems on a fundamental level
Every hour wasted evading that discussion
Every hour wasted on argument rather than action
Every hour digging the whole deeper
And every one of us
Another pebble in an avalanche that has already started
It is too late for the pebbles to vote
Not to cascade
Into this uncertain future
And playing the odds of falling
Between the proverbial cracks on the way.

Between.
Between the moment we cross the tipping point
And the moment we realize it
Between the moment we lurch over the lip of the abyss
And the moment we make impact
Time dilating around us
As neurochemicals burst like fireworks
And the way we pay attention changes

Between what did I do
What didn't I do
What could I have done
And what will I do now.
Between yes and no
Light and dark
Between me and everything
Between me and nothing
Between a primal moment of cosmic terror
And letting go to feel free
And all the feelings between them
I seize the moment
One more moment
Hope or not
Between choices
I choose.

I choose.
Now.