THE SPELL - Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt Poems

 
 

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THE SPELL

The job in certain lives has been to find A
way to live with feeling -- for just to B
the selves they are requires them to C
things they were forbidden to. All the D
structive or delicious forces became inE
luctable vapors inside the inF
able masks of personal traits the weeG
boards of their parents created. But their nH
ures were disguised, not destroyed.

I
have the same job in my life, avoiding the J-
hook of Things Not To Say, not to know (not risK'
things, but life-threatening ones, with their deep wL
of being unloved and unforgiven). M
pathy was my way out. My mother wouldn't evN
feel anything; she actually unlearned how to (thO
feeling what everyone else felt was simply P
nal servitude).

Generations got this Q
from generations: Don't say what you feel, you R
not you. Generations of liars in a mS
one got the next one into became a T
leology of undoing. You are not U,
you must hide what you feel. Behind your V
nial mask you must hide, you as a W,
as spelling masks meaning, a kind of hX
on the alphabet, created to cover Y,
not to destroy it, but to make it haZ.