Tenderness in The Pause

I read this incredible poem today. And I weeped at its infinitesimal beauty. Tenderness by James Crews. Here it is - .    Tenderness   You know how a half-buried stone in the yard will clear all the snow from around itself, little by little, leaving only a hollow of warmth and a cushion of moss you want to rest on, until winter finally ends? That's how tenderness works in us, some heat rising up from beneath, then spreading outward to touch the lives of anyone who comes near - slowly, softly, making a safe place for them to stand in, melting away the coldness that gathers around us.   It’s remarkable the way anger and desire and desolation and longing  and love work inside us simultaneously. It’s a unique human ability to hold all of this inside at the same time, wrapped, more often than not, in an envelope of tenderness.   And I think the only thing which makes us go on, in spite of all the hardships of heart that we face, is with that amazing hope that life will sort it all out for us. But the fact remains - to believe in this living is a hard way to live.   What makes people to persevere through their exhaustion, when in the name of hope there is nothing more than a recurrent duplicitous (dub plis  I tuhs) dawn? What makes people to keep their believe intact? That there is a road which they will turn and there will be different outcome to look out for?   Why are there not more suicides?   There have been tropes written on dimly-lit lifes which seem to be forever on the edge of insanity. But which look normal in their daily breath, the illusion of ordinariness making them mesh into the continuum of quotidian grey. This is normal - until it is not.   Suddenly there is an explosion- people snap and destroy things, lives - often their own. The alternative is even worse, there is an implosion, and aching bodies become islands of doom, as they suck all that is good and bountiful into their black hole. Entire landscapes of hearts stand barren - eviscerated rather than destroyed, rendered hopeless than killed.   Cru