Meat or Man

I.

When I stare past your naked eyes

within your naked bod'

a raw question rises:

"am I meat or am I Man"?

I scour your naked body

avoiding your naked eyes

answering:

"You are meat and I am man."

But I am pulled into your heartache

where your question's filled with terror

and I know that I'm a lecher

and know that you're the Man.

II.

Looking through the eyes

of the flesh upon which we gaze

with ears open to heart

questions rise to sight.

The face makes known the message

the silence wants to share

and a human projects before us

to challenge who is Man.

III.

With what eye will we see?

With what ear will we hear?

Is the other our reflection

the mirror of our fear

the fear of being meat

of Man to be cast aside?

IV.

Cannibals slay to take in souls

Christians presume to instill life.

No Man is meat for eyes to eat

each is Other for feeding Life.

*Thoughts of Theodore L. Prescott:

   -There are twelve-step programs, self-help books, talk shows, counselors, evangelists, psychics, and therapists, all glad to help you rearrange the furniture within your soul.  Walker Percy has marvelously  parodied this in Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.  The desire for transformation is hardly bad, but the accumulated effects of all the techniques and programs for crossing into a better you, with subsequent glowing testimonials of new life, have created the cultural equivalent of attention deficit disorder.  America's public discourse is full of nervous introspective twitches, spasms, ticks and jeers, shudders, mutterings, and finally incessant rocking as we search for the next "best thing" for our lives.

   -What strikes me about our cultures's preoccupation with weight growth and transformation is it seems born of a desire for control.

   -I am certain that the result of the personal growth industry is a collective inability to discern what constitutes significant change.

   -Whatever the reasons, we Americans have problems distinguishing major achievements from interesting diversions.

   -...achievements are relative to the person making them...