It’s past time
for the fade
to begin:
watch us
pretending the lines are stark
and obvious still, that answers
and decisions are clear
and unambiguous. We can’t
live as we have, we can’t even be
as simple as we’d like to claim:
black, white, left, right,
right, wrong…simple boxes
that won’t hold our outcroppings
and amorphous truths.
Truth is they never did well
by us, forced us to compress
and cut and try to stuff ourselves
into plain cubes,
but we did what we could
and denied our ornery natures
so we could fit;
now that the boxes themselves
are shown to be fragile and breakable
we’re at a loss to explain
ourselves.
If there are no
boxes that fit us, how will we
get along in such a demanding world?
The answer is that we will fade,
let our deceitful edges
disappear into the general,
let ourselves get lost in the Big
and accept that unique
and easily definable shape is a myth
made for containment.
But we’re not ready
just yet, and we’ll remain solid
and square looking for our square holes
while everything around us gets rounder
and larger and nothing stays in one place
for long.
We long for days
that never existed
except by agreement,
and now that the agreement’s broken,
we have to learn to fade,
become obvious ghosts
who will not refuse
to acknowledge the freedom
of the death of category,
even as we deny
the new joy available to us:
the tingle of pleasure
as we pass
through all those walls…
Dark Matter 