Et Cetera

Let us lie
and say we are unhappy
with our lives: the lack of money,
the unrelenting longing for
love/sex/contact, our voices unheard,
thoughts unacknowledged,
et cetera.

Let us lie and say we want
a colorless
world.  That we imagine our groups
catapulted over the walls
into erasure, imagine heritage
a myth. Imagine the lies
we could tell ourselves
about no boundaries, total freedom,
and other things: et cetera.

And so, forth
into the breach we make
by rejecting the fact
that most of us struggle
to stay alive,
wishing to preserve
the lives we have or make them
better, not to transform them
int other lives, or lose our current selves
to perfection:

let us lie and say
no part of us is happy
to be what we are now.  Let us lie
and say we desire to be
not ourselves, when the truth is

that all we want is to be
is exactly as warty and prejudiced
and venal, etc., as we are now,
that all we want

is an easier way
to be those things.  We’re happy enough
to know what we want because we have it already,
just not enough of it,
not all the time,
et cetera.