The Answer To Everything To A Child (For Glenn Beck) Poem by Stephen Bennett The Playjurist

I explained that the huge towering hill top brick tower,
which contained and was the VA hospital was not
a school, then explained what it really was.
When he asked to know why so many windows
had turned on lights, and I said how being sick
was a thing that went on all day and night,
and I asked inside myself, growing tired of talk, why
does he need to know about this? What empty space in him
am I filling and filling with what?
I got it finished up just to not embarrass myself.
And what did he gain? I wondered...

Does he know anything around him other than what
I explain? But then in an earlier subject a going back
and forth discussion of whether a helicopter was
only one craft returning or, if we were seeing two...
or maybe three was a seminar by the two of us,
rather than a lecture by me.

And then his brother had to know the time it took
for a run on the track at the ball field round
the far corner and back. Forty five seconds
by my thumb nail spot on the face of my watch.
He didn't think to wait for my "on your mark".

I lost my sweep hand in the arriving dark,
but he still ran around the park and asked
what his was time, so I made numbers up
reasonable to use to measure himself or compare
how what had just happened was opposed to everything else.

Then I saw that a made up "minute and a quarter" maybe true,
maybe false, actually referred to what God had just given
to those two and myself, and marveled at how it could seem
so amazingly, just exactly the same as anything else.