Explore "Definitions" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ Music is a treacherous sound, / Seducing emotions and marking / Their breathless faces with death. / Art is an intrepid mountebank, / Enraging philosophies and creeds / By stepping into the black space beyond them. / Religions are blindly tortured eyes, / Paralyzing the speed of imagination / With static postures of hope. / History is an accidental madness, / Using nations and races / To simulate a cruel sanity. / (In the final dust / This trick will be discovered.) / Psychology is a rubber-stamp / Pressed upon a slippery, dodging ghost, / But thousands of centuries can remove / All marks of this indignity.
/ Men, each snuggling proudly / Into an inch of plausible falsehood, / Will hate the careless smile / That whitens these definitions. / The table has been broken by fists; / The fanatic has mangled his voice; / The scientist cautiously repairs the room / Beyond which he dares not peer. / Life, they will never cease to explain you.