Or Is It Love? Poem by Howard Lieberman

Or Is It Love

that holds us, like pickles in the brine
turning sour against our will;
Or, like butterflies upon a board,
the knife-thrower’s-wife, waiting,
in the barker’s wake
for that moment of truth in which
one must inevitably be pinned?
O custom is the caterer: a hunger for acceptance,
rooms too cluttered, styles a menagerie of discardable furniture,
schedules kept as that routine we call necessity;
and those lame excuses we have made: age, children, propriety,
that job, without-which-not there is anxiety.
In the end, a tender touch, a look (that is not in askance):
a hope, perhaps, for an evening of passion,
is that which secures us.

Occasional slips of the tongue tell the tale
of an hypothetical prison, whose walls, as intangible as they are egregious,
are an appliance inserted unobtrusively into the hippocampus,
a kind of button
that makes sybaritic cyborgs of us all.