Naked Thoughts
Nakedly I go to bed
Every solitary night
To experience sensations
(Which my drowsing, dream-shot head
Films for me in imaged light),
Of that past day’s situations
And their vivid evocations.
Barely are my limbs composed
In the comfort of their rest
Unconfined by inhibitions,
Thoughts and concepts are exposed
Which my conscious mind suppressed
Lest their flagrant exhibitions
Should transgress taste’s prohibitions.
Stripped of those obfuscing veils
That concealed their privities
From perception’s observation,
They reveal their starker tales
To appreciative eyes,
For æsthetic contemplation
And acute evaluation.
Shorn of crude excrescences,
(Which disfigure beauty’s ch’i
By their ugly dispositions),
They display, for my senses –
In their artless artistry –
Their essential compositions
And implicit contradictions.
Secret truths and beauties cause
Inspirations to arise,
(Through sympathetic syntheses
Of imagination’s force
And cognition’s cultured eyes),
As freed cerebral faculties
Loose sensual capacities.
Boldly, baldly in the sight
Of my contemplating ens
Every exquisite perception –
And each defect which can blight
Honesty’s rare innocence –
Unadorned for my inspection
Naturally draws attention.
Raw experiences yield
Their materials as foods
For æsthetic transformations
Into concepts which can build,
Transcendentally, to moods
That, by their transfigurations
Can create such transmutations
As their consequential forms
Far surpass those mundane parts
That comprised their bare beginnings.
Now, shorn of strict social norms,
(Stripped of drossed, occlusive arts
Which disguise intended meanings),
They unveil truth’s underpinnings.
Unconstrained, I analyse –
Through subconscious processes
Of discreet discriminations –
Qualities my inward eyes
Intimate each possesses
In the way of its relations
To perpetual revelations.
When these actions are complete
And evaluations done
To my private satisfaction,
Then my weary mind, (replete
With the pleasures it has won
From such fruitful rarefaction),
Sleeps in peaceful stupefaction.
Nakedly I go to bed
Every solitary night,
(With my drowsing brain divested
Of censorious ‘blue lead’),
To review in sheer delight
Images surreally fed,
Like film-projections, through my head.
