Paper dolls

Paper dolls                                                                                                        

Our lives are spent cutting out paper dolls –

the piecemeal extracted from the whole.

Our hearts set, gazes fixed

upon various relative, handsome,

scissored and brightly-colored figures

we prop up and manage;

with whom we play act for our own exculpation,

amusement and gratification

while discarding the ravaged sheets

from which they are cut, the origin     

and background, field and root,

never to humbly let things lie

unhanded and dormant in their contextual truth

but take up our scissors, our scissors,

again and again, to wreak havoc

upon this paper-thin, flimsy, fluttering world.

O child of God, how improbable and illusory

is the human predicament and personality.