Despair

Cover the left side of your face, and see it:
an unwilled bitterness in flesh and feature.
Call it an active lack of expectation—
it replaces fear as your ruling passion,
will be lived with equal single-mindedness:
the killing logic that's your version of piety.
There's defencelessness in it, too —
as of an unquilled porcupine huddling
in your lap: a once bristly reality
become this shapeless, alive, no-being,
utterly at odds with its future.
What to do? Rearrange that face for a start.
Easy: the body is only time-lapse plasticine,
isn't it? Remove all sign of what blocks out
the sorrows of friends, meets the new
with boredom, is in a continental drift
away from wherever now is.
And there's no short-circuiting despair
with cheer or compromise; it will not be
got to the bottom of, or written out in poems.
This has been sent to you, has arisen from
what you are: a ticking bomb to be defused,
a Trojan horse to outwit. Walk round it slowly.
Deal with it or be diminished, become a self
shivering in your own helpless hands
that can make no offering, will damage all gifts.