DEFINITIONS
Music is a treacherous sound,
Seducing emotions and marking
Their breathless faces with death.
Art is an intrepid mountebank,
Enraging philosophies and creeds
By stepping into the black space beyond them.
Religions are blindly tortured eyes,
Paralyzing the speed of imagination
With static postures of hope.
History is an accidental madness,
Using nations and races
To simulate a cruel sanity.
(In the final dust
This trick will be discovered.)
Psychology is a rubber-stamp
Pressed upon a slippery, dodging ghost,
But thousands of centuries can remove
All marks of this indignity.
Men, each snuggling proudly
Into an inch of plausible falsehood,
Will hate the careless smile
That whitens these definitions.
The table has been broken by fists;
The fanatic has mangled his voice;
The scientist cautiously repairs the room
Beyond which he dares not peer.
Life, they will never cease to explain you.