The disguise
Inside the house,
Outside the house
I adopt the disguise of an ugly toad.
I pull on the coarseness,
Adopt the crudity,
Swallow the poison,
Smoke the dynamite,
Fuck, curse, fart and belch
Scratch my fat belly,
And act the part,
While inside, hidden,
From myself,
The lost kid is bullied
Forever,
And I pour it all into
Poetry and prose
Like it’s real
And it’s real.
The worse I behave,
The more graphic the account,
The more revealing,
The more extreme –
The more honesty and ugliness,
The greater the adoration.
I am my disguise,
It suits me.
I’m at home in the skin
Of a realist
With no limits
To what I might do,
Or its consequences.
It’s primal.
It’s pornographic.
It’s the vomit of reality.
When you pare it down,
The essence
Reveals the core
That is usually
Disguised.
Opher – 27.12.2019
I was influenced by a poem of Bukowski’s that I read a while ago in which he talked about how he kept his true self hidden and had developed this persona of hard living.
It affected me.