Faces in the Book

Faces in the Book

Stereotypes are great for truncating thought patterns

Assumptions of the visual collective noun principles

Of time management devices to preclude the necessity

Of actually getting personal

Of getting to know a man in the logistics of his own fashion statements

Of musical genres measured out in the hieroglyphics of the library list of his iPod

Of his street address and wall frames in parlor tricks of where he has been

Can not make amends for the bureaucratic side steps of snap judgment

We all just want to hear ourselves talk

Show how much we know about the lights going down in Chelsea

The girth of Paris, the salt of San Francisco, the sewer-sweet of New Orleans

The micks, the frogs, the fags, the creole souls in body bags

I am a mister too, a mrs. that misses the you

Walking there visually impaired for auditory short cuts to slice through the ruts

Of actually getting to know anyone in this smart phone life

Are we closer now or further down, that we don’t have to see the face?

Of the man we are speaking to, we can just put up “likes” in facebook balloons

Define ourselves in electronic portals and leap visual preconception holding cells

Paint the portrait of the earth in a motive of derivative computations

To understand the change in a global direction

To see sixteen year old counterparts on six continents spelling the same plot

Out in seventy different languages parading, comingling the estrangement

Like a belated engagement for a conversation worth having

I can not see you, but you can paint me in the margins of this argument

Complete the equation and is this now a paid debt

For the wars of grandfathers assuming Islam and Christianity are two boats moving

In opposite directions across the oceans of this world, embolden a child, enliven a dream

That the stereotypes ring true and false across the gleam

Of seeing beyond the lines of your own street

Lunatics and geniuses converse in mobs of sanity and religion, we are living

Less cold in this metallic poly-plastic mold, I give to you myself to reach

Across the world this shelf of me so plain to see my tapestry beyond this color by number lines

See me outside your window pane, the communities that gave you and I these names

Maybe in these cells we find our humanity, faith in the viral movement clarity