In The Company of Strangers

The touch that aroused curiosity

The look that cut through the identities of life

Rising from the ashes of ignorance

Venturing, with a lisp, into the embrace of a disarming disrobing

Purloined from the bashful secrets and cajoled by an emergent strange face with muttered whisperings

Strolled, stomped, energized, silenced

In my ensuing stupor, all futures aghast. The shame. The haze. The ecstasy.

My confusions too and the speculation of all that is left mute and moot.

The shifting whispering silences that attend me. The woes of the peers and the traditions of home

The culture of solitude and the yardstick of convention

Converging to assault my senses and dumb my hastening pace

With strides in full gait and the redemption of time

Encircled within the arms of tolerance and halting embrace

Intoning the virtues of my learning

I skip and jump and somersault even as I pirouette

Converge. Conform. Blend in. Fall into line

Unspoken words from the distant catcalls. Bludgeoning Catapults

Shrouded in the embers of traditional affectations. Stifled. Sealed, without an aperture, the suffocations of birth

The filters.  Life and the dances of shame. My being, my vision and the solitude sublime

Who would venture to such lengths obscure? To encounter the shifting parapets beyond the pale?

Who would engage in such a dance on cobblestones when the floors, extant, embrace the weight?

He hesitates. He hesitates. He almost grows on stilts. Gingerly, raises his hands askance to the torso

Touching the very tips of a protruding low hanging fruit. Piercing the veil of the warm forbidden track

Exploding with the urgency of a coiled spring

Drenching, in its gentleness, both thoughts and, mind

Why! I wonder, must it be so?

The moments of darkness and the embrace of the twilights

Fermenting in the loneliness of singularity

And discovering the duality of emotions suppressed. Moments, stolen in the silhouette of noise

Who can see it and who can feel it?

They demand conformity to the essence of our definition

Yet, Sempre Libera, a sustained refrain

From cradle to grave and all in between

They become strangers that will have you conform.