Stuffed............Not Anymore..... Poem by RIC BASTASA

sometimes honesty strikes you
like a nail in your head, but
you never die, as usual, you bounce
back to life like a new born baby,
and when that nail hits you bad,
you doubt if what comes and hugs you
is love, and as you hug what love is,
you look at what is fronting you,
a front, behind all those surprises
and hullabaloos, and eureka,
another one rises from behind your head,
a medusa of some sort, biting you
with all its ten garter snakes, telling
you in all pain, this is not right,
and guilt springs from your hair,
like another set of snakes, not butterflies
or bees or blooming daisies,
but guilt, yes guilt and nothing but guilt,
but you are rational and learned and
well adjusted to who you are, and you dismiss
all these, keep back all those hairy snakes
hide them inside your skin and freeze them
inside your skull, and you respond to the hug,
with a tight hug, a french kiss with another
highly modified french kiss ofMedellin
an alien now to yourself, you even
forget your name, and you behave like
a stranger to this new place,
forgetting that you are married, and lived
in such a dignified echelon of society,
and you walk freely along its sidewalks
letting go, your history and records,
and swing your arms until they touch
the electric post with all the neon
lights glittering on those signboards
of the city that never sleeps, and you
are inside its bosom, happy and free,
and honest to such a humility.
i am human, and never for once competed
with all the saints and angels in those
embedded skies.