Only We Poem by Patti Masterman

Only we poets are brave enough
To appear utterly bare before one another,
Wearing just our prejudices, our obsessions
The vanishing epiphanies of the hour; trials of the day
Disheveled, reeling drunk on what we're trying to say:
Our own individual truth wrung out of the day's dollar, or the day's scarcity.
Tongue-tied in our despair to say it perfectly
Hedging all on the compassionate intuition of our peers-
Other authors, who are much the same deep down,
Feeling things together, as if poised inside one being;
One omnipotent beating heart, vibrating the worlds fragile equanimity.
Maybe I might have passed through life never suspecting this
But I know there is a potential power
Which lives inside words, because things have changed for me
In subtle ways I could not have foreseen:
I was finally able to admit those parts of me
Which I considered unfit for human consumption
Or else too abstract to put down on paper-
To dredge, lever them upwards;
The good, the bad, the heretical, the complacent;
All the unbridled creatures I had set a lock upon, and tried to forget
And instead of being frightened away, you came closer
To see what lay behind, what was opening up inside-
Even if you should have been running any other direction instead-
Now that is a true friend, as true as you may ever find,
Anywhere you ever go.