I Want To Know What Happened Poem by Julia Luber

And tonight the animals paraded. With so much dignity and predisposition.
And is that not what we LOVE about animals soooo much?

They act like they look.

Their look seems to tell their life story. Their complete disposition.

And we feel an edge of guilt when we go to this place about ourselves-us humans.

We feel bad, or at least some of us do, when we reduce people into stereotyped persuasions-
practical souls cast out of molds in the looks to personality and disposition department.

We feel like we have sinned when we understand human beings as easily as we do animals.

They must be more than what meets the eye.
They must have a good reason regardless,

And we want to give everybody credit for having a complex story behind their whole identity.
And it has become so important to our civility that identity be respected.

And none of these words seemed to mean anything about what they mean now.
Something happened somewhere along the way. Something caused this identity epidemic and somebody somewhere knows what happened.

We were all circling around the sun and experiencing its sweet heat when something stopped and all this hoopla about humanity and identities just had to surface and happen and occupy simply everything that something is now about.

But it wasn't that way before. It used to be about something we couldn't simplify and make
so generic.
It used to be about something acceptable beyond language and maturely beyond
comprehension.
We understood ourselves far above how others decide to understand us.

But that does not seem to be the way that people are these days.
That is not how this world is working.
It is like we feel so guilty about deciding the nature of animals that we have
brought it upon ourselves to stereotype and typify ourselves in the same way-
agreeing upon Identity as the new 'trick.'
And I have problems with what the world is like these days.

I think something is crucifixially uninformed and spiraling deeper and deeper into something
that I do not like at all.
Who fixated us upon identity?
What happened? I want to know.