Easy To Be Cynical

Mama said it was too easy to be cynical.
I disagreed. It took a long and lonely
time of it to ravage childhood dreams.
I wasn’t born a pessimist – my views
indeed were Mama’s, pure and roseate.

So what obliterates your innocence? To be
assured enough to make the query shows
you’d know for sure – the rhetoric adjures
the weak and halt and maimed, so certain
it is framed to show my Mother right.

Which means I’m wrong? So is it far too
easy to be cynical – I think it takes a major
breach of faith to lose the way, a faith you
base on old belief. I’ll never join that fold
again – in truth it used and blinded me.

I learned to see without the symbols that
were handed out and bandied as the real
and tried and true. You call it education if
you have a mind, detached I played alone
because my sight was real, I wasn’t blind.

I learned an egocentric role; didn’t mimic
common thought or copy cat the milling
herd. In words I knew the stable truth
that fitted what I saw – and words alone
remain my friends, of that I am assured.
© 18 March 2008, I. D. Carswell