Vulnerability

Sometimes it's easier to tarry on the fringe,
Not to probe, not to peel, not to find out things.
Sometimes the rose-colored glass shows best,
Filtering the unwashed, injurious rays,  
Surrendering the ornament only,
Peerless, painless. pleasing to the eye.
There was a time, once, when maintaining image
Stretched the credulity of youthful strut,
And signals, striated white and pink, peeped
Through by winks of unconscious toil.
But time tolls sometimes hard even for unmindful souls,
And muffle-mouth longing oft is revealed
In the sanguine circumference of pleading eyes.
Walls, eggshell and dissoluble, may no longer
Cloister sufferance whose thinly-filmed patina
Becomes ashened with advancing years.
The sun rises, then sets; we hang on.
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