Sonnet, interrupted

I know myself. I’d rather understand
The experience that we call “ecstasy”
Than know it for myself, and have first-hand
The (frightening) flesh-and-blood reality.
This seems to me peculiar, so I ask,
“Why should I fear what most is real?”
I undertake an intellectual task
Eschewing what I tangibly can feel.

Let me be clear, with nothing left to chance:
Our lives could overflow, joy heaped on joy
I know that Mary Oliver is right
Our birthright is to live and love and dance

Unconstrained by form and convention, escaping the depression that is a necessary condition for tolerating life in our civilized world, the only life that, from birth, is offered to us, for which we take on the burden that we know we must in order just to bond with our poor mothers, who consented to the same sacrifice when they were small, and so forth going back to that time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary, the fiction that Thomas Hobbes articulated and that men of privilege ever since have found so convenient to invoke, that we must choose between shackled conformity and a war of all-against-all. Damn him! Damn social convention! Damn, God damn, every constraint and rule and limitation that I’ve willingly accepted. Damn the discomfort and the embarrassment. From this time forward, I’m reaching for delirious rapture, going for it with all my soul, letting go, ravishing life in all its glory

…After all, even today there are indigenous people who can dance without self-consciousness…..

_____________________________ …but I know I won’t, I’m too uptight