8/29/03
I've found a way to cry
While I look like I've been laughing,
Brandishing my best defenses:
They are the stiff smiles
Which, shattered, still hold
Their delicate formation against gravity;
They are the caustic tears, wrath acidified
To comic grief, fools' sobs,
Spilling down the ravines of a painted face
From burning eyes, disguised as a clown's.
Even grief is bathing lies.
You might remember when we were children:
Then we recognized the human fascination
With the exaggeration we take for truth.
It is easier to laugh hard than laugh easily,
Easier to tantrum than to weep.
As we grow, so do our powers of manipulation,
But even the emotions of a wise clown's concoction
Are overdone like children's wrath,
Baked twice, so that if they are burnt,
They are humorously burnt.
It is a way to hide the dangerous truth
Of small and naked pain.
Emotions, both motive and product,
Are broken by the ruptured causality
In the mockery cowards will show.
There is a reason that kids are afraid of a clown:
They recognize the horror
Of honesty grown hideous.
Still, we have unwisely outgrown this fear,
And I wail and laugh each daily circus.
So somehow in this spotlight lying,
I feel a twisted sense of truth
As I am trying on this stage
To make a laugh of my own crying.