How easy it is to become wicked,
how accustomed we become to disguising it
behind circumstance and clumsy grins.
How we travel endlessly away
from understanding, but, like the sun,
it splits the horizon with its heat.
That every great mistake we cannot remedy
might wake the demon we keep
coiled in our bellies.
In small towns it winds its way into the whispering
mouths of women. In the city it seeps into the numbers,
the tricky mathematics of greed.
Somehow, beauty steals inwards,
its hands knead stony hearts,
makes a luxury of madness.
What is good in us often retreats
to the outermost edges of our lives
but we are porous, our fortresses cannot hold.
Most of us will do what matters:
Get up in the morning, adapt to narrow spaces,
empathise with monsters, hide our talents,
revel in the calamities of others.
Bridget Gage-Dixon grew up in Old Bridge, New Jersey in a large Irish Catholic family. Her love affair with language began at a very early age when she began to refashion the fairytales her mother read to her. She is still spinning circles with words today.