A Painful Lack of Complexity

I wish,
sometimes,
that I was more complex,
a character from fiction,
or a spy,

someone who carried deep plots
in his head,
with twists and turns,
vendettas and affairs,
and not

the person I am, who
the deeper I dig into my soul,
the simpler I become,
not the complex hero of my own novel,

but a child,
loving purely, and
afraid of the dark.

About this poem

As I was going through some of my pictures today, I found this one, a picture of a label I shot in an antique store. And that got me thinking about how I used to think I was more complex than I am. Don’t ask how I make these jumps – I just do.

That’s one of the things a few years of counseling robbed me of – the illusion that I am complex. For someone who loves Dickens, Tolstoy and spy novels, I want to be complex. But alas, I’m not very. At first that bothered me, but as I have had years for it to settle in, I have grown comfortable with the idea. And embraced what I am.

But I still love spy novels.

Tom