Don't push so hard

the door is meant to be closed.
it's not what you think,
the center does not hold the answers,
only animals live there,
it's a puzzle
why we are trying to see
something as banal as a zoo.
the truth lies in the margins
because we have pushed it to the margins
with all our power
so that when death unmasks us,
she will have to do some digging around.

future pleasure, is that why
we toil so hard?
spoil my children with automatic ease,
it gives me so much pleasure, outside
is the world of pain, sooner or later
they seek to hurt us.
opening one letter by letter,
why is it so hard to love quietly...
it's my little dirty secret
i'm a whore of the establishment...
i do what they tell me to do...
i amuse
i concede,
i am soft, not disagreeable,
they don't see me as dangerous
and that's good.

i am so lonely, thinking
this is what the world is about.
how hard it must have been for others
before i came
how hard, how inexplicable
the dead terror of truth
as it reveals itself through history.
i want to care, then i wonder
if i have sexual cravings.

for so long i wished for some identity
to cover my cut-up face, only
to find that boredom and sadness
of those at the center
dictated that i be a clown, a failure,
a fool, or an angry man.
they are turned into stone,
medusa and time are wedded in revenge...

don't push so hard that door
our home is in heaven, not here,
here, the ultimate end is pleasure
propelled by a lust for power...
machines endlessly producing identities
manufacteured by the structure and alliances of politics and society,
don't push so hard that door unless the primitive comes out only to be soothed by drugs,
by temporary measures
by fits of unrestrained anger,
don't push so hard
unless you wish to be stripped naked and judged,
unless they ask you,
"Who are you to judge us?"
and you think
you might have been talking with God
but instead you were talking
to those who age without finding new life,
those who possess knowledge
but their body is decaying, unless
you really want to stick your head into the mouth
of reality,
unless
you want to die
for being the first to see
pornography and violence
at the center of society.