My 2 Second Shelf Life

"Young people...Lord…
Do they still call it infatuation?

That magic ax that still chops away the world in one blow, and leaves the couple there standing…trembling.

Whatever they call it…it leaps over everything…it takes the biggest chair, the largest slice.

Rules the ground, wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp….and it's selfishness is it's beauty.

Before I was reduced to sing-song, I witnessed all kinds of mating…most reduced to two night stands trying to last a season.

Even though everyone drowns in it's wake.

People with no imagination, feed it with sex….the clown of love.

They don't know the real kinds, the better kinds, where loses are cut and everybody benefits.
It takes a certain intelligence to love like that…softly…without props…but the world is such a showpiece.

Maybe that's why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel on stage, just to prove they can think up things too, handsome, scary things…like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire, they fail, of course.

The world outdoes them every time.

While they are busy showing off…digging other people's graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from green to red.

Oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouthes…"

~Toni Morrison~