He butts in
Making his presence known
Where it is not clear he has
Any clear title to be here
Intruding in my business
And insisting to be heard
With his voicings of moods
Sometimes rapturous but
So often quite severe and sullen
And lonely and dark
And sometimes fully understood
And sometimes not
Yet often so strongly put
As to seem they simply
Must
Have a say in what I do next
Even when one cannot fathom
Their relevance to the real world.
And I puzzle at how
One could get so far out of order as he does
And yet feel so utterly entitled
To be heard on most every matter
As if he could not possibly
Be wrong about anything
And deserves to sit
At the head of the table.
And I can say that I have certainly
Given him the benefit of the doubt
More times than I can count
Having sat still to feel his moods—
And I should mention that he
Does quite like to sit—
And I have sat him
Doing nothing else even when
Else really needed doing.
And I have so rarely seemed
The better for it
As to wonder why I should not
Run him off for good
The bastard.
Yet he is me too
My sorry self
Yet a child it seems
After all these years
And as much in need of being heard
As of being put in time out
Or even spanked now and then
By the better me that tries
To do the thinking and planning
Around here.
We are the odd couple
And I have of late decided
Not to keep him entirely shut in
But to let the neighbors see
And to talk freely to them of our struggles
And most of them don’t seem
To know what to make of him either
And they mostly stay quiet
Though there is
From time to time
A trace of a kind smile
As if of some understanding.
And I suppose that
I may not ever fully understand
Just who he is
Until I am done here
And he and I stand Elsewhere
Before the One who made us
And the full story of us is read aloud
And the patterns emerge
And the fog of confusion melts away
In that noonday Sun.
And we shall see then how often
I have done right by him
And he by me.
