A Curious Capability

On a deserted island

all I need

would be one book

Shipbuilding For Dummies

But why leave my own island at all

isn’t that the dream?

To hit the lottery

or toil and gather enough 

for a permanent tropical retreat?

Why surrender my privacy

to travel the open sea

And expose my Self

When I can appease my fragile psyche…that nagging need, that voracious beast...

with palliative echoes from those who agree

No, simple luxury will not do

It only serves to confuse

the priority of what seems ordinary

What we need

is so simple

children are even capable

To ask a question

is not to admit a deficiency

but to reveal humility

and to know

that it is better to be sure

and declare

NO

I do not know the answer

To some lofty inquiry

than to feign familiarity

by gesture or breadth

and later confess

to a predictable mess

What can redeem

the sludge of prideful arrogance’s pomposity?

Curiosity

That sneaky suspicion

Of a blind spot’s imposition,

 that enhanced focus,

 that sensation

that shatters the jerking knee of judgement

and grants us free agency

to figure out the cause of failure and to improve,

rather than to settle and sulk,

when it’s more comfortable to blame the rest of the world

and become perpetually aggrieved

To be human

Is to fight daily battles

skirmishes of modernity

and the greatest warrior,

the one who acts,

does not encase himself

in the thickest of armor

But is bare

Bearing only an invitation

to be struck, welcoming the upheaval

of novelty and discovery

a coup of that gnawing psyche

Curiosity, a cure all catalyst

unwinding and flooding us

with the ability 

To love and be lovable

To understand and be understood

To be wise and to accept wisdom

To be brave and to embrace failures inevitability

To backhand brutish boredom

And delight in defanging danger

To reject banality and mundanity

And quit indulging impulsive gratuity

To fight futile, forced words, falling flat, limping from our lips

To quench our quivering souls

To take it easy, but to take it!

These lines, so easy to say

and surely dismissed as cliché

Are all the same, true

And blur the boundary between me and you

When we embrace our nature and know

that our minds

those moist machines

are not built to find truth

but to keep our vital signs

vigorous with ruthless efficiency

we can finally have faith

in curiosity

Relieve of duty

the watchmen at the gates

of that skull sized kingdom

and one can finally trust

that it’s not that one moment can make or break you

But that making it or breaking

is not all there is

That every moment

Can be as brilliant

As the flames that lit the stars

If we choose curiosity

You are what you are curious about

Or else

You only wait

for death