DO NOT CALL IT LIFE

DO NOT CALL IT LIFE

Spend your precious time on the run
From the sound of your inner voices.
Stay trapped in the box, you know the one,
Where you've locked away your choices.

Dance in your sad, sinister, self-defeating ruts.
Do not stop to be yourself, to be yourself takes guts.
Do not stop to think you might be lying through your teeth,
As you chomp at the bit of unbridled strife.
Hang on your door a green and crimson wreath.
Dance, but do not call it life.

The whirlwind will catch you someday,
Pathetic little liar,
Careful lest your pants catch fire.
The whirlwind will come and catch you off guard,
The hiding and deception are hard.
You join the ranks of other lost souls,
Who have prayed for redemption but been swallowed whole,
By the weight of their guilt and their basic desires,
That flame and die on the funeral pyres.

Run from yourself in your desperate shoes
When you can't let the real truth come shining through.
Like some pusher armed with mind numbing pills,
That are good to cure a myriad of ills.
To titillate the bloodstream, to dull those fleshly dreams.
If all else fails you can go in hock,
Try your hand at electric shock.
There's no way you can go too far,
To avoid being the man you are.

Spend your precious time on the run,
Find an unsuspecting woman to marry,
You are running out of time to tarry.
Then close your eyes and fantasize,
When it's time to consummate the marriage,
Of the tall dark men with the stars in their eyes.
And not the vows and the baby carriage.

You can lie to me and lie to your friends,
You can lie to your wife and try to make amends.
But you can never lie to yourself, though your future's a blur.
Such a shame the word gay was always bandied about as a slur,
Such a shame you learned to despise the thing you were.
Such a shame you heard their words and took them so to heart.
Those words they killed your spirit, right from the very start.
The gilded closet its promises dangles,
But soon like an albatross it cripples and strangles.

Such a shame your parents would hurl you from their home,
If they found it was another guy on the other end of the phone.
Such a shame they hate you for spilling precious seed,
That on your fondest hopes and dreams they only piss and feed.
Such a shame it has to be, but someday soon you know it's true,
There comes a day of reckoning when you're going to have to live for you.

Spend your precious time on the run,
Like a race horse startled by the fire of a gun.
You can still dance if you want to, in self-defeating circles,
All across this damn twinkling city.
But do not ask for pity, and do not call it life.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2013
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

A poem originally simply called "Life" that I wrote in my college days as sort of an open letter to myself. I knew I was gay in my heart but had come out to no one at that point and had already unwittingly misled two women. This poem was sort of a cautionary letter I wrote to myself. I came out as a gay man shortly afterwards. I did a rewrite for 2013. The line about parents hurling you from their home does NOT apply to my very loving parents, but it does, sadly, apply to many gay men and women, even in this "enlightened" age.