All These Things

"A pretty thing is at least pretty,
It is the worst crime to be ugly and useless"
Bartholomew Dutch's 'Fifth Ode'

To cut away a cancer is painful.
Better it would be that it had never grown.
This cancer would be too painful to cut away.

It would do more harm than good now,
To take a keen sharp, beautiful surgical scalpel,
And sever it neatly away from the healthy flesh.

The deluded flesh, it longs for the useless sore,
It longs for the pain of it to stay,
To have it leech ever longer and longer.

Why could it not have ever been grown?
Why could it have not just stayed a harmless bud,
Eaten by immune cells, and devoured by native protection?



We are each born for a purpose, it is our tragedy that we will never know it.