for years upon years
the child within us
has transmogrified into one of our greatest fears
thus making the core of our happiness dangerously superfluous
somehow we've dismissed ourselves
the best in us, the most inventive
has been forgotten on the endless shelves
of our so called effective preventive incentives
where the wonder went
is the million dollar question
we rent and dent and in the end we're spent
but the truth we conveniently forget to mention
drowned in the relentless grocery lists and ostensibly helpful reminders
triple cream brie for dinner, your accountant's fourth anniversary
is that deep, deep, down in the faultfinders 
deep enough that ignoring it is their miserably assigned perjury
lives a spurned toddler
an ignored infant  
shunned for the dollar
mistreated for their pigment
drop kicked by the cosmos
marred, polluted, defaced by their quintessence
caterwauling rather than facing their sorrows
distressed, daunted, dismayed by the possibility of stumbling upon some resemblance
between their allegedly impervious character
and the thin-skinned child too soft for their reality
the versimilitude they are all too glad to register
the supposed fact that they are shielded from their actuality
is a flimsy justification
for their steel coating, their hypervigilant walls, their ubiquitous boxer's gloves
all expediting the brutal colonization
of the void left behind by old loves
and that's the way it is
and that's the way it stays
all because providence assigned them a quiz
they could not convincingly phrase.