Embrace the Thorns! [poem]
Never mind the thorns or prickles!
To hell with every spine or thistle!
Screw the bristles, points or prongs,
needles, barbs and aculeus, spicules!
Nothing never ever comes for free
and least of all in matters which,
collectively, are known as “love”
to people such as you and me.
For even though a rosebush
sports some pointy parts (alert!)
I still will plunge my naked hand
into its heart and not care less
if I am hurt. (I hope and pray
that I would do that anyway!).
Far better it would be to have a
rosebud AND a bloody arm than
empty hands and ersatz calm.
Preferring to remain unscathed
and free from bloody stains when
searching for a rose brings only
isolation, edge of desperation,
ruthless calculation, chronic pain of
other kinds which endless grows
instead of ruddy rosy overflows.
It seems today that games have
fetched too many hearts away.
(I write this rhyme to advertise
I will not play, no matter what the
rules, for by all games I’m bored).
You wave your sword my way
and sow triumphantly your discord
of protectionism (state of schism)
thinking (or imagining) you then
can be absolved of all potential hurt
of love and thus will persevere.
How far from truth this is one day
will be revealed; for hearts which
take no risks will soon congeal and
fossilise and atrophy and ossify
and lose the will to question why
they’ve turned into a husk or shell
which populates a lonesome cell of
loveless empty anaesthetic dread.
Indulging in defensiveness will
merely signify to all that raw
spontaneous adventure’s thrill
is missing from your skillset
while you sit upon your frightened
throne and thus become another
scareful drone who’s turned the
switch of life to “off” and died
(I speak in metaphors as here
to you in code I liltingly confide).
The sad & foolish choices of the past
are no excuse to dam your blood
or stem the flood of ardour in your
thirsty soul. For what you ignorantly
did last year or in some past decade
is done and gone — a mere example
of pathology, of what will happen
when we let psychology rule over us
instead of being guided by our heart.
Self-protection is the biggest scourge
of every passion-prism’s sighly surge —
a plague of locusts feeding on the
fruitful fecund open field of love.
It’s narcissism’s darksome underbelly —
ego’s cumbersome refusal to remove
the self-created body-glove which
numbs all touch, to throw away the
useless prop of all imaginary crutches,
of all your grasping clutches at the
subtle worthless straws of safetynets.
So when you’ve been disrobed of all
that armoured but redundant junk,
and every vestige of it has been sunk
into oblivion, you’ll then enact what
every lover secretly desires to do:
to wholly slowly roly-poly quickly nowly
longly drawn-out hugely holy infinitely
merge with one another’s ever-yearning
everythingsome love-discerning bodysoul.
© Alan Morrison, 2019
The Naked Troubadour 