Naked Truth (Prose) Poem by Linda Marie Van Tassell

Philosophy
boldly wears a frock
of woven logic
while
poetry
stands tall in a shroud
made from pure emotion.

The thinkers
stand
under cold stone arches,
toe-to-toe,
drawing lines in the dust,
daring each other
to cross.

Both tear squares of their cloaks
which fray at the edge
from the rip
of unknown ideas
and elusive truths.

They continue,
righteously,
throwing the squares
to hungry believers
busily stitching
the thinkers' scraps
in a green-golden field of early spring.

Neither
logical philosophy
nor
emotive poetry
notice
as their cloaks
shorten
and shorten
to
nothing.

A lonely
frigid
draft
makes each thinker
look up,
still toe-to-toe,
at their combined
nakedness.

Frightened, they
stare out to the crowded field
where believers
have fashioned a great guilt -
a complex patchwork
of logic white
and emotion red,
large enough to cover all.

Philosophy
and
poetry,
shivering
alone
in the frost of their determined
purity,
walk forward
hand-in-hand
to sit
beneath the warmth of the guilt
in the great lily-flowered field.