We all love to keep hidden, secret things.
I don’t know why but I know that we must.
Maybe it’s a matter of truth or trust,
or a violent urge to make our dreams sing.
We peek beneath peat, wear curious masks,
read between lines, and bury notes in caskets.
We ask tragic questions. Did I mention
keeping secrets is a chosen profession?
But secrets all bear a revealing tell,
like a sonnet ended by its couplet
which conceals its own breast like a doublet
to cloak the sly spot where the heart does swell.
I do find myself best down a deep, dark well,
where I can hear my breath, and my being,
and hide myself from the prying sunlight.
Alone, to think, to dream of what’s right, and
open my eyes to what I’m not seeing.
It’s almost as if I am awake but dreaming.
Without this lone pillar of privacy,
I could not be me. I’d cease to exist
as a freethinker. I seek to enlist
you in my defense of strange secrecy
which, let’s be real here, is not a given.
So many people love lords and masters,
who want naught more than rank-and-file living,
and absolution from sinful pastors.
They suffer from missing peace in their heart
which means they fear what they cannot control,
like the great, mysterious works of art,
whose miracles I do hereby extol.
And I hope that you share in this delight,
for rotten swamps are brewing up monsters,
and we’ll need every voice in this next fight,
when we will confront the state-side mobsters
who know the secret to power is all
in the present control of the past;
when the story of our future does fall
into their hands, then the die has been cast.
When I spoke naught for the first, they came for me last.