Approximations

I think the beauty in living comes along when we shirk our heavy coats And our white-knuckle approximation of old, flake-away skin, which we have Stapled back onto ourselves— The faces we’ve taught everyone to believe: Just dumb enough and just nice enough; Just guileless enough to look acceptable. Can’t you smell the rot of that dead thing? We smooth down its edges to hide the way it’s peeling, rising, rejecting, And we tell ourselves that its desiccated pallor is lily-white, not lifeless. (Don’t they mean the same thing, anyway?) You and I both know how they hate it when we look human, And humans hate to be hated. (We are a social animal, sir. We are made to heed the eyes of the collective.) Maybe it’s self-preservation, because certain words are untouchable in the company Of creased mouths and rearview rosaries, And our families can never know that we sit at the keyboard and write about sex in ways Good and bad, out of curiosity, or despair, or Out of humanity so red that we feel we should be disgusted. (Ma’am, I fear to tell you, I dreamt of Eve last night, and she tasted like salvation.) If we’re too smart, or too primal, or too anything, really, We invite scorn to fathom us until we’re withered, So we dilute ourselves with small words and blithe observations, And we don’t notice ourselves gouging pits out of our eyes to plant the seeds of HOA-acceptable sterility, which creeps its roots in and violates the mind. What would happen if no one hid behind their dead skins? Are we really so scared of what we’d say and what we’d hear? (Mother, if God began to rot and the sky bled ichor, Would you stand out and drink your fill like I would? Father, if an angel came down with soft eyes and long throat, Would you sleep with it like I would? How human could you teach it to be?) Somewhere inside, every single one of us harbors a monster, an animal, a God— Rip away the skins of dead faces and reveal the shining new, older than life and So deeply mortal that it’s holy. The beauty in living comes along when we remember the weight of our humanity Separate from the collective and fresh without our approximations glued overtop. (We are an evolved animal, sir. We are made to shed the skins that don’t fit.)