stranger in a box
Take this person who you meet
List their attributes complete
Box them up all nice and neat
Then watch it fall apart.Begin to learn another side
A face that maybe they don’t hide
But one you’d miss had you not tried
And now you know for sure.You’ve figured out you’d been remiss
And rectified your view with this
And with that done, you can dismiss
But that’s still premature.Another facet is revealed
And once again the box unsealed
Perhaps the archetypes you wield
Don’t fit the real world.Nerd or beauty, jock or wuss
These are groups anonymous
Like packaging an octopus
The arms reach out the sides.Perhaps some day you’ll understand
Not abstract, in heart and hand
That these projections that we’ve planned
Are cast by greater shapes.For all I see is what you show
And if that surface does not grow
There’s facets I may never know
There’s nothing wrong with that.And I may only see one side
That does not mean no others hide
So I would say that I have tried
To let you be more than flat.After all, my box—a cube—
Cannot capture your tesseract.
Michael gave me this description before picking a title:
the massive cognitive dissonance going on in our minds, when after some talk people turn out to be completely different from how we perceived them before
Part of Poem-a-Day 2015. Title donated by Michael S.