the ivory mask

We are both from broken-homes:
mine was built intentionally
from bits of things (defensively),
and yours took form organically
over years and years,
the way that nails grow, but
wildly and ghastly to entomb you.

What is
A Glass House
and
an Ivory Tower?

My Glass House is a greenhouse,
too, and
I can interact and see
beyond my windows,
willingly,
and creatures can look in on me.
So I made mine of glass for
its vulnerability;
because I am on a retreat
from the touch of society—
but, it’s a type of break.
I have not resigned.
I can break this house of mine.

Your Ivory Tower took
shape from inside
as a way to recoil completely
behind an unintentional
opaque design
to be your new exterior.
To this design
your ‘you’ is the inferior.

Subverted by white,
armored beauty,
hidden and stolen from
all that surrounds you:
Your new you
is a hologram slapped onto the face of
your self-grown Ivory shell.

Can a hologram touch things?
Do holograms breathe?
An Ivory that thick takes a whole lifetime
to grow…
It breeds and breeds and breeds and breeds.

And, yes, it makes you
somewhat mystical
to have the ability to manifest Ivory:
but it still entombs you/
still a tumor,
and now I know that you can’t see.

Your beautiful opaque is deceitfully fake
but there is no static cling
in our village,
because we’ve been earthing for 10,000 years
through a wire
in the wall
reaching out to the dirt:
it’s ionized in here
-just right.-

I thought I knew you through my window
but
now I know it was just a shadow
cast by a tower that obscures your intentions:
and your true intentions
hurt me.
Once I saw
a glimpse of the
Old you
Behind the mask and retreated,
hurriedly and safe
behind my Glass:
where I can both see,
and interact.

Thank God there’s no need,
then,
to go outside.
I cannot find the destination.
But I no longer breathe
the air you breathe:

Operation
Complete.
-clw
12-13-17

copyright: C. Ward 2017