I liked you better
Before I knew you
Were a pedophile,
A murderer,
A rapist,
A thief.
Homophobic,
Antisemitic,
Sexist,
A bigot.
Liked is really
The wrong word.
Tolerated?
Accepted?
Admired?
Loved?
Or was I just
Mistaking
Attention,
Attraction,
Intrigue,
Or lust?
We reveal ourselves slowly,
Cautiously, seductively,
A shadow dance in seven veils,
Each slips or stripped away
Until all that remains is
An unrepentant scar,
Malignant as cancer,
Ugly as truth.
I no longer want to
Hang out with you,
Get to know you,
See you naked.
I just want to cover my eyes,
Hide from my misjudgment,
My shame at not seeing
Beyond your mask.
And yet, sometimes
I still miss the person
I thought might linger
Behind that illusion.
© 2024 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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This one came out quickly as I was thinking about some of the people I’ve encountered in this life, usually during that middle-of-the-night review of where everything went wrong. The inciting incident was a casual acquaintance I’ve only interacted with at parties being arrested, which came as a complete shock to even people much more intimate in their orbits.
I’ve met and interacted with each one of the people described before I knew exactly who they were. Some might say I need to hang out with a better class of people. While it’s true that one was a construction worker and another a college dropout, others included an executive for a Fortune 500 company, a lab manager, a lawyer, an individual with an advanced degree.
We meet all manner of people by random chance or association and often have no real idea who they are until we take the opportunity to get to know them better. But then, of course, it’s too late. So, we are left feeling somehow responsible for not seeing what they’ve hidden, sometimes from casual view, often much deeper.
I’ve had it sitting, tinkering with it since early in the year. I wanted to post it before the election for obvious reasons, even though it is not about the election or the participants per se. But once you know the truth about someone, it’s what you do with it that matters. To choose to remain blind is sinful at best, and culpable at worst.
Picture Notes:
ReplyDeleteThis mask hangs on our wall. However, the light there is dark and one-sided and would have made a terrible picture. This image is a composite of images I took on our porch, with multiple cameras. My Pentax took a better pictures of the green background cloth. The Canon took a better picture of the mask, but I had to be careful of getting too many reflections on the mask’s glossy surface. I edited the mask image to remove the background, then placed that on top of the empty green background. Because it was a composite image, I had to add back shadows and a gradient on the background to make it look like the mask was sitting on the cloth.
Oh, how painfully loud this rings true in the past few years, but especially today.
ReplyDelete