I’m always on the other side –
It's all receipts, playbills, envelopes
To my two-dimensional eyes –
What everybody seems to understand
Is incomprehensible to me:
How rivals are one’s only friends,
Where human kindness ends and deals begin.
They come with clippers at whatever I am every day
Wearing a smile, bearing no explanation,
As if someone else knows so well
How I should grow, or how I offend,
They don’t have to even tell me.
It is all, as I said, on the other side,
The why – other people’s unfathomable needs
And the inarticulate desires beneath them,
What always wins, for it represents the great
Insatiable, every person who shares the planet, Each one denied, needing to be satisfied,
The divine voice inside long since silenced
To a life of compromise and shame.
From my side, I have given each one of them,
Out of pity, my heart. I’ve made their beds,
Made their meals, told them tales to make them
Feel a little less lonely, but they seemed to prefer
To see it in terms of the way they prefer it;
They dropped nickels on the sheets,
Sent the meals back cold, said of my stories
I was a liar, not to be trusted, as if the heart
That made me do all those things for them
That made me do all those things for them
Was wrong, so that I will try even harder
Next time, in the name of love, one of the mysteries,
That won’t explain how one can only find oneself
After they’ve given all they are away,
Or why the value of things is in how they’re wasted,
Or how the cosmic dice that rolled these pairs
Relies on you to play them.
