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Saturday 17 September 2011

MY DISABILITIES

I have eyes that glossed over
swept past or missed
eyes that don't read between the lines
a gaze that does not or will not capture wrong and wrong-doing the
perpetrator and the victim.
I have eyes that failed.
There are cries I did not or would not hear cries that are drowned in
preferred song or footnoted for convenience.
Failed ears have I.
I love perfumes
the scent of Araliya
Jasmine too,
but some,
less fashionable fragrances
pass me by
for I simply turn away,
for I have discerning nostrils.
And then I have a tongue
an appendage articulating partiality
an adjunct that I often hide
or make disappear in acquired delicacies; Yes, I am often inarticulate
and not for lack of vocabulary or word-play skill.
I have hands that will not be raised
to protest certain tyrannies,
knees that will not support certain stands.
You see I am crippled
by an incapacitation of choice.
And I even have a mind, let me add,
made of acquired dismemberment,
deliberately sorted out,
edited out and edited in
not so much for simpler distillation
as to hold the rose and throw the thorn.
But then, let me confess
in this weak moment,
that even now,
so strong, so able,
I cannot say for sure,
what I kept and what I threw,
if rose is thorn or thorn rose,
And that perhaps in the intricacies of choice I've proved feeble,
and in the end a lesser mortal.


Words are borrowed and reconfigured; they mean little if not shared. 
So do what you will with these lines.  And this includes comments. MS