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The book The House of the World has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and is now available on Amazon.

Inside Out

I’m going to wear my clothes inside out.
Old cloth, stained and spotted,
suddenly respectable, turned around
unblemished.
Like skin never exposed,
clear as a child’s.
So it would be stories told,
from hidden plateaus of work and love.

The treasure of untold truth and
uninhibited passion.
We underestimate the virtue of honesty.
If life were lived exposed,
abscesses of deceit, theft and cruelty
could not fester.
Goodness would be found out,
for goodness is often unaware of itself,
and beauty seldom marred by conceit, is
often forced into itself by jealousy.

And so it would be
the way I write.
People would comment
on meeting me,
how polished I am inside.
How different from the idiosyncrasy
and imprecision of my prose.
And they would forget what harlequins know.
Laughing is weeping inside out.

Published inIndex of all Poems