I bask in the shell you chose
And for just one moment
I remember looking up to you
Wide eyed and astounded
I helped move the TV into your trailer
I remember Adam, I remember the dogs,
I remember you
What happened?
What years have you endured that you
stand in your mother's yard, under her tree,
declawed, defanged, dessicated
so small
How dare you look up at me,
How dare you break away from your crypt,
You were a cautionary tale.
I
I can't find myself to be angry,
Not in the way that I used to be.
Besides,
You've done ten rounds with another demon
And those bruises won't fade.
They'll seep into the deep set lines of your face.
I thought it was her under the tree.
We fear they may yet be alive.
All the sick-minded dead
all those prone to evil,
their essences not gone
but still in our heads.
We must take the good with the bad.
If we are all the very image of Light
then we are also that dark mirror
that will not look at itself.
In the before and after they reside yet,
all those collective, collected, uncorrected,
phantoms of ourselves.
Fear not, a house can be fumigated,
snakes defanged, swept out of sight,
out of mind.
Their energy converted.
Those poisonous inmates of ours
in time, will eat themselves.
A two-faced snake my self-love paralyzed,
Whose toxic fangs impurely freeze my will.
The one all past events remakes despised,
The other future wants will ne'er fulfill;
Regret resents my past to make me languish,
While doubt my future wrecks and makes unsure.
I should prevent my own apparent anguish,
Yet doubt/regret combined proves quite the lure.
This mix, despair, invents a mess of tricks,
My famine's foison in its blest appeal;
Defanged and pure, this wretched drug addicts,
How like a potion does its poison feel!
Addicted to self-loathing's desperate bliss,
With blithe despair I tempt this serpent's kiss.