Someone is coming to take off my bandages now,
Snipping and peeling,
Slowly revealing
Things underneath that I’ve never seen fit to allow
Any to scrutinise, even suspect,
Probing the cause of my lifetime’s effect.
When they’ve examined me, what will the doctors conclude?
Selfishness, vanity?
Simple insanity?
All that I’ve hidden so long unremittingly viewed,
Weighed in the balance of credit and debt,
Worth whittled down to the ultimate net.
Oh, how I swathed myself snug as a fist in a glove,
Daily and nightly,
Loosely then tightly,
Covering my hope and my fear and my hate and my love,
All but the blandest externals suppressed,
What I was made of unknown and unguessed.
And now that my last mortal coil has been carefully unwound,
Laying me bare,
Nothing is there,
Only the wrappings by which a potential was bound,
Only the rind of a soul long displaced
Labelled “Dispose of as clinical waste.”
