Middle Ground

Only you and I do not smile –Ted Hughes

I'm not sure if you’ll ever make it to sixty,
reckless girl with a fear of death
like cannonades, museum still.

You are cutting free of the black
telephone, pressing down hard
the doorway to your writing chamber.

This is a secret attempt to achieve
the highs and lows in life. This is a secret
attempt to achieve transcending happiness
like deliberate living in Thoreau's woods.

That’s not you. You are living
deliberately through drama, attempting
to psychotically conjure new highs
from new lows.

Don’t tell them you’re achieving it.
Don’t tell them your lows are well-bottom
deep with a sense of purification.
Don’t tell them that highs in life
never outweigh the lows or vice versa.

Tell them there is a balance, that you
are playing the role of the balance beam
pretender. Your façade is not your mind,
your thoughts, your decisions.

Your façade, I tell you, is life itself.
And they are all just living test tubes,
a part of one of your many experiments.