-: A Pretty Boy Is Like a Malady

Do you trust this captain to get us where we belong?
I certainly don't

He contends that the storms have left forever.
I don't believe him.
I don't like that song he keeps singing. There are too many lyrics
getting in the way of the melody and his voice.

He keeps bragging about his intense honesty. I have never trusted honesty.
I would prefer to retreat behind this door of lies. There may not be honesty
within lies, but I've lived long enough to know that's where truth lies.

The whispers rising from that circle once would have frightened me.
I would have thought they were talking about me.
My elegant apathy has erased any remnant of paranoia.

Is there a greater entrance with a knock of greater providence?
What if I ignore the device and delicately tap just above.

The relevance of the date has been lost on me. My grasp of numbers has reached a point where I now see eight as a slithering vowel.

Even the fetishes that once frightened me now give me comfort.
They have been drained of all former sense of guilt.
Guilt itself has become a raisin of drained regret.
Pain that once was molten fluid is now soothing talcum.

Hair color protocol has not been abandoned so much as decoded.
Or is it a dyslexic confusion of eye and hair color or the eternal
search for the creature with blazing blonde eyes?

Many will make their comments about the futility and folly of that quest.
But is any quest worth its energy? Or is the reigning question for each quest :
How much luggage can we bring and will there be a steam iron in our room?

Folly no longer seems so frivolous. Old age seems so much friskier.
Even decay has lost its menace. It all comes down to neatly arranged spices and scent free soap.