It Matters

It matters much to me when
you say you're touched by
the words I write.
 
Yet deep down a voice admonishes
to be suspicious of such flattery,
which either is untrue or
else bad for me, especially that
part of me called ego.
 
That ego that becomes inflated,
proportionally to positive praise
and crumbles or rebels at
the merest criticism, constructive
or otherwise.
 
So either way is this
ego doomed to fall, left or
right, down into a bottomless pit,
never able to balance on the narrow
ledge along which it thinks it treads?
 
But what if the precipices are
simply left and right thought, but
thought in either case and therefore
in the past or future not the here
and now, which tells me it's all
quite different:
 
A wide wild-flower meadow
stretches out around me,
no path but only blades of
grass punctuated by a symphony
of dangling, proud, modest, small and
enticing possibilities, none of which
request a judgement, just a look or
gaze, a touch or brush, a noise or
rustle, sniff or smell telling me how
 
lucky I am to have the world and
you, all of you, in it and how
lucky the world to have me and
all of me, so together let's laugh
and cry and dance, sing and
skip through the meadow to the
mountains, where we'll work together
and share our innermost secrets
for all to see and be touched by,
as the greatest possible gift
held fast in my heart while my
 
ego isn't looking, briefly.