Monday, March 23, 2015

"Other" ------ poem by Nathaniel Hutner

Other
You will use my madness
To give me pain – you,
Who speak in the guise of truth
And wish me ill.
Have I not pain enough
For the ten of you, or twenty?
Can you really be invulnerable?
You have given the gift of my faults.
I have already lived with them,
They know me,
And I have made them my friends.
It is as if I lived with them
On a small island and we passed
Our time shifting places.

I am now all that I have been
And shall be,
History and potentiality.
My faults cannot destroy me.
Nor my madness.
Nor you.

Nathaniel C. Hutner


First published in Chrysanthemum, Spring/Summer 1992

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