All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; but the dose makes it clear that a thing is not a poison.

                    *

[Alle Dinge sind Gift, nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis bewirkt, daß ein Ding kein Gift ist.]
          —Paracelsus¹

How what nourishes
we let destroy us.
Have we been making
magic or are we
just torched sorcerers

making excuses?
Burnt out from abuse,
too confused to be
moved to do something
about our blown fuse?

Talk is useless, which
experience proves.
Movement through motions
to keep on going
with nothing to show

for it, how actions
intent on slowing
consequences, in
the end, lend no hand,
extend to a man

no courtesy, no
mercy, other than
permitting him some
variations on
the same theme he tends

always to believe
is his beginning
of which he has been
deprived, but by which
he is, instead, in

very truth, being
deceived each time he
tries to survive ends
he denies. What, then, are
we? No better or

different than an
example made when,
given over to
temptation, we tend
like men to ignore

every portent
and pretend hurt yearns
for controversy.
To be spoken, our
silence once broken

opens a door for
poison to let out
what needs to get in,
to sink deep beneath
beaten skin pain breathed.

__________
Notate Bene:
☞ The title is derived from a line in “Chapter XIX. Depression” of Charles Dickens’ novel, The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account): In Three Volumes: Vol. II, commonly known as David Copperfield, published at Leipzig by Bernhard Tauchnitz in 1850; page 352.
¹Paracelsus, “The Third Defense in Writing New Prescriptions [Die dritte Defension wegen des Schreibens der neuen Rezepte]”, in Seven Defenses [Sieben Defensiones] (Köln: Arnold Birckmann, 1564), as quoted by Frank Geerk in Paracelsus: Doctor of Our Time: The Life, Work and History of Theophrastus von Hohenheim [Paracelsus: Arzt unserer Zeit: Leben, Werk und Wirkungsgeschichte des Theophrastus von Hohenheim], published at Zürich by Benziger in 1992; page 169.