Patience is the unimpeachable
chivalry of a straight line; poems
are just blood and bones, one
unreasonably mad with the other;
pride is the boisterous sadness
of a defaced old coin; youth
is a dead man's treasure, wistfully
squandered when he was young;
love is a bloodless papercut,
sudden, invisible and stinging; anger is
a stirring serenade to the old neighbour's
dead cat; maturity is the unflinching art
of pretending to be somebody else;
defiance is a rock in the window
on the seventy ninth floor; idealism is a
polka-dotted napkin one moment and
a burning tongue the next; happiness
is the curious devotion of a
ticking clock in a deserted house; childhood is
a blue swallowtail, delicate cheekbones
stretched taut into an endless smile; simplicity is
a rainbow captured in monochrome.
