Where is the lightning bolt within your tender scent?
Where is the cause and where is the effect?
Now at your feet I crawl, the whole hundred percent
Of pride and self-regard were left defects.

Don't you believe you lose when you evade
What could be yours, in one instant of chance?
How can't you see beyond thy armored plate?
Is it the risk you can't afford at the first glance?

You think compassion is too big a word.
You think you ought to handle it alone.
Then wallow in self-pity.  It's absurd.
Through armored plates this choice of yours has shone.

Is it a matter of such infamous glory
That you would not reveal to your own safe?
I doubt that letting out your latent story
Turns wrong off right and right upon itself.

Perhaps it is a silent whisper in the thunder,
But I would hear, a fox' ears would wield.
Perhaps it is a light sparkling asunder,
But I won't be beguiled, I wouldn't yield.

Feelings, not less, you have come to forfend -
One has the false intent, the other cheats.
But I must stand for them, I must defend -
Protecting senses, while my reason weeps.

The third was too audacious, he was swept.
The fourth asked for too much, you gave him none.
If nothing it's the nobleness preserved,
For less you do, more stagnant you become.

A million examples would not change,
Or lead me to where one exception drives.
Go on and seek them, broadening your range -
But that single exception always thrives.

You've known and seen so much that, rest assured,
Your knowledge by no one could be inured.

You should look closer rather than go far,
You should use what you've got, not what you wish.
Should not lock up your passions behind bars,
Should not forever keep them on a leash.

How trivial a message I have chained
Within the proper lines of decent rhyme.
Perhaps it's nothing that from this you've gained.
One's love for you is ancient art for swine.

I have rejected all the offerings unfurled
Within the space and time of our cruel world.
But when confronting thou, there is no voice.
Just lines of rhyme without any choice.