Allusion,
Illusion, Delusion
“The joke, which we seldom see, is on us;
For only true hearts know how little it
matters
What the secret is they keep…”
[ Auden, “Secrets”]
There sits, now, a thing on my heart,
a secret not so much protected as denied:
that there’s a loneliness I crave, I dread.
Not that I have wasted my life, the part
though never the whole, but pretended
too much to ever be happy in public, alone.
This
trick never works:
where
you’re convinced
that
walls papered with
rejection
do not repeat
the
words: thankfailure
you failureopportunity
failurefailfailureagain.
It was always dying.
Not
in the way we all are:
of the cancer silently growing or a heart that
breaks
or an accident no prophet would have predicted,
but because it was built on (at best) wishful
thinking
& for the worst on willful pretense.
So it goes.
Three Lives
“A handsome child is a gift from God,
And a friend is a vein in the back of the
hand,
And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.”
[Robert Bly, “Living at the End of Time”]
Two lives are livable,
the third destroys.
What home allows,
though crowded,
small, & full of ghosts,
is a degree of self
that cherishes
truthfulness.
The constant gift
of anticipation,
a child provides
a lesson in honesty:
constant
growth is not
sustainable
but its opposite
is anathema
to god & to man.
**
What a friend adds is beyond measurement,
but in absence, constricts, like hand to fist.
Not in anger clenching, but so much riding on
compliment, supplement, affirmation & faith
there’s bound to be a point a bubble bursts.
Pride,
insecurity, delusion & doubt:
the sacred secrets shared in kind:
But illusion crumbles so sure as grandeur grows,
aloofness follows & then: renewal,
respite, & reprieve.
***
Standing alone in a loud corner,
the awkward happiness of others
smothers any hopefulness
of the possibilities of the third life.
Two lives are livable:
there’s here & there’s there.
The looming life,
lived somewhere between
slowly destroys itself,
its false promises of acceptance,
the suggestions of fame
disintegrate (without ghost).
Sometimes it’s clear:
it’s just time to go back home.
The first life thrives through the wound.
