I am not fragile
But I am vulnerable
Loving makes me so.

Fear is a foe
That only those who truly love
Will ever really know.

How can I search for Truth in a world that's built on lies?
A lid resting heavily over a once glistening eye:
Shielding, masking, concealing
What last droplets of wonderment are trickling and asking to pierce the concrete ceiling...
...Instead I cynically note its off and aging colour...
"Yellow: Choice Number 4!"
Relays my proud voice, with a more
Assertive tone; I, the host...
Discussing aesthetics to collectively pathetically awe-struck guests, over specially served toast...
"Yes, I'm an impulse shopper, so it seems"...
...(Well, according to the ******...something article I read in my monthly subscribed to magazine)...
Happily consumed by consumerism...
But still unable to consummate
Anything really, Truly sacred...
...Unless I'm exactly half naked...
(That includes wearing Calvin Klein SoCKs)
And crucially still sporting my brand-named top,
Designed for tight fit to cull any ounce of shoddiness,
Whilst giving the impression of an existing healthy body, no less,
And then, due to superficial attraction,
An end will occur, hopefully, of distraction,
From the absence of my once healthy mind...
...but that never happens...
So then, how can I search for Truth when the bricks of my own guise
Only resonate deceit, sealed to create a facade of falseness?
Sure, I can articulate,
Wielding words like swords,
Pure, planned alliteration...
Baffling the bemused by barraging both beautiful and brutally belligerent brilliance...
But...
Showmanship is the tool of the restlessly minded,
Those who search the hardest for the key to authenticity but yet cannot find it,
And then paint their walls with vibrancy set out
By observing the mass hysteria of the layman,
Because nobody wants, Truly, to be classed as grey...
Do they?
Or it may
Be that that is exactly what we're all tactfully missing:
The fact that appearance, in some sense,
Is reliant on one sense,
And thus, in defiance of what we're meant
To wholeheartedly believe,
It is, in its very nature, subjective.
We were not designed
With a panel of judges judgmentally judging what pair of shoes should be selected,
Our mind's
Blueprint was principally a highly charged and thirstily receptive
Open book, with no printed prose,
No preordained guide to "Truth",
Merely a transient vessel:
A glowing red beacon of vulnerability in glorious, continuous distress,
Uncompromisingly afraid of its own ignorance, which, through an act of defense,
Strives to follow other's paths,
In arbitrary hopefulness that someone knows the meaning of it,
The answer to it,
The code that locks it,
The spark that drives it,
So in our fearful and ever conscious lives it,
Makes us want to hide behind this
Fantasy of an apex being,
Where our car seats vibrate and our carpet is soothing,
So that we seem to have a clue of what we're doing,
And instead of resting our ego-bulging heads and choosing to accept,
That we're just not quite, you know, as adept
As we might have thought, we choose to reject and neglect
Our opportunities
In communicative
And interactive discoveries of the beauty
That goes beyond and lies behind that neatly fashioned fringe,
Within.
Love is humble as we are stupid:
We'll see that one wise man has cottoned on, and knows
That even though
He hates that smell that his wife
Adores, he incessantly sprays it lovingly from a canister for the rest of his life.
But he'll never say a word,
Because, from what he's heard,
Truth no longer exists:
In fact, as soon as the larynx allowed the habit of opinions to persist,
It became a frozen entity,
A vague depiction of pure, untampered quality...

“Cold,”  you said with heated words
Masked by tenderness and longing -
Just as though ice pierced your heart
And stayed there, lost and wandering.
“Not distant, though, just looks like snow,”
Genuine or insincere?
I suppose it doesn’t matter
Though the latter’s all I fear.

I just couldn’t help but wonder
What my eyes strike you as now -
Are they still as frozen or as guarded
With pain you won’t allow?
Does the memory stick - that awful lick
Of fire in my throat?
Now you have watched them melting
And have let them die unstoked.

My mind is full of tirades
A tempest fills my brain
I've lost a part of myself in love before
How gullible I've been.
Would you rather I pour my heart out?
Spill my passion let me bleed?
I apologise. **** myself in front of your eyes.
Take off my mask so you can see where my vulnerability lies.

It's funny how
we, as people,
wear our faces like masks,
and then act surprised
when we don't find someone
who loves us for what is beneath.

I often feel naked
like a sword without a sheathe.
I walk around with my heart
drumming in my temples.
Always being aware of exactly
where my hands are at any given place
at any given time.

There is about as much strength in me
as there is citrus in lime stone.
It's all an illusion.
Because somewhere along the path,
I convinced myself that the strong
don't suffer the same as the weak.
The next thing I learned in life
is that suffering is a language
that we all speak.

So I wore my face like a mask,
brows carved downward into an expression
of barely concealed anger.
I tied my courage into a knot each day
like a kamikaze pilot's headband,
and somehow, in my own clueless way,
acted surprised when nobody bothered to
peel back my mask
and see the scared child within.