For Philip, Who Was Weird

If you're a human being walking the earth, you're weird, you're strange, you're psychologically challenged.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

In the end it's just your voice
your own weird bright lone song
blossoming from the beautiful dark
that lives in your head.
You hide in that dark
though your beating heart lies exposed;
you've pried yourself open for the world to see
but nobody sees.

I know the virtue in hiding.
Evening comes and I tread suburban streets
by my weird lone strange self
looking in lighted houses and wondering
how can ordinary people seem so magically out of reach
backlit in their perfect frames
sharing a meal, arguing, embracing
or simply sitting quietly
staring at something just out of my view?

Maybe in your own way you did the same
eavesdropped on ordinary human life
took it in then decided it wasn't for you
that your existence would not be framed
in a precise square of light that signified normal.
You lived outside that frame until you couldn't
write yourself into the story anymore
then left via the narrow path of a needle.
Strange, such a tiny place for a human being
to disappear into
that single point of reference in a sea of madness.

I know the virtue in coming undone.
The hectic symphony of rhetoric and prose
every role you play becomes a cage that won't open
until you've left a part of yourself in there
so many parts and pieces taken, chewed, spat out
and the chorus cries for more.
Sometimes the sanest thing to do is embrace insanity.

In the end I am compelled to say of you
that you were weird
and that is the bravest thing a person can be.
I am not there and no one is there to say these things
or try to change the hand you've dealt yourself;
it's just you coiling down to infinity
singing the song that only you know
your weird lone voice ragged and ecstatic
the voice of enlightenment or madness
which are one and the same, you see at last.



KB 7/8/2014