Be Alert Among Words
Be alert among words, they’re shifty illusions
like 2-d boxes of joined walls on a flat page,
straight-forward and innocent as tots but,
they can turn inside-out in a blink,
spontaneously, now, as you listen.
Though once closed cells with steel wills
they may transform in instants, shape-shift,
morph like a high-speed chrysalis,
while you, gaslit, feel insane.
(Be careful among words warned
Lao Tzu)
or have you been, not in,
but out-of-sane all along,
distant from sanity, disconnected,
as removed from the Big Bang
as the Milky Way,
as far from sane as
out can be from in, but
now, by fate’s twist,
after a long life, despite
digging your heels in,
now, by fate’s mercy, you are
not out-of sane at all, but
finally, in —yes, into sane —all in,
Into sanity without the lonesome lunacy of
otherness that you once knew as
Me.
Jim Culleny
4/3/19
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