Love’s Reasoning
by Odin Roark

We
the imaginative
often ask
“What is insanity?”

“That which is not sane,”
they say.

And who might the "theys" be,
these judges who make up freedom’s creed?

Might they be but ghostly brown-robed sanctimony,
or modern iterations in crimson,
mind-sets who once slept on hay
and who today speak
from gilded chambers?

Sanity suggests collective solipsism-imbued pulpit bearers,
whose contempt is only made darker
by their refusal to coalesce with consciousness
willing to touch fear as but viscous mutations
pursuing life's "what ifs.”

Such is accumulating stench of ignorance masquerading as humility,
gripping arrogance as fear's ready defense against curiosity,
tasting the victory of considering obstinacy as eloquence.

Such is the price to pay
by those who acquiesce,
retreating beneath the velvety bedrock of captivity,
while others drink of self-direction
beyond the hallowed shadows of seductive hypocrisy.

Some
must travel
where all is nothing,
and nothing is all,
where passion to think for oneself remains stalwart,
a state of mind,
where discovering the unfathomable nature of love
need not be supernatural, but learned reasoning.

And all with the honesty of disrobed nakedness.