Our Thoughts Collide

P(pre).S.  I don't know if this can truly be called poetry, but I think it addresses the issue we have all been talking about here (although perhaps in a less straightforward way).  If you like it, then I'd like to acknowledge a few of the awesome SPI folk (Vanessa, Andrew, EJ, and Joseph) with whom I had a very thought provoking discussion yesterday afternoon.  If you don't like it, I apologize for my poor writing, but I'm still very thankful for my conversation yesterday.

We will shatter the subconscious
Stratification of our lives into
These layers of superficial
Images that we cultivate so carefully

Shallow projections of ourselves
Which end up running so deep
That we often have our own minds’ fooled 
Into believing this idea of who we are
That is so fragile we do not know how
To let our thoughts fly free 
Because to be challenged?
To be questioned?
The thought itself is unthinkable 

Lest a collision of ideas 
Shatter the portraits
Of ourselves that we hang
On display for the world
Presenting our lives 
Like cadavers
Encased in the wood and glass
Of our perfect picture frames

We will not be afraid to drop
The masks we wear and search out these 
Questions that threaten our suppositions 
About ourselves and our world
Because it is in this interrogation 
That we can begin to truly know
Who we are
And who we can aspire to be

It is in letting our masks fall
Our masks of perfection (or brokenness)
Of race, or nationality, or religion
Of scientist, or writer, or mathematician
That we can actually see our own face
In the mirror 

So we will not be afraid to let our thoughts 
Go speeding off through the accelerator of 
Open discourse
(instead of the closed-off race tracks of our minds)
To let our ideas smash
And sometimes burn
But always to let them be freely
Divulged and
Discussed and
Dissected and
Defended and
Perhaps even discarded

We will not be afraid 
To cross the boundaries
That we have created within ourselves
The unconscious shackles of superficiality
That we pretend allow us to connect with others
And they do
As we all sit chained together in the prison
Of our own perspectives 
As though uniting in this self-oppression is freedom
Although we all know that this common ground 
We so carefully cultivate is too thin
To bear the weight of ideas 
That change the world 

But we will change the world 

As we turn our disparities into tools
Of inquisition and 
Allow our own identities to be refined 
Under the pressure of new perspectives
So that we can search again and again [research]
For the hard earned gems
That can only be created
Together.