Eyes

Can you teach me to open my eyes?
In high school, someone affixed a horrific media image to their locker: a teenage girl's face with her eyes stitched shut with thick, barbed binds, and a tiny scalpel hovering on the right, ready to slice through the ties. The locker was near the front of the hall, so each passing into and out of the main hallway resulted in a brief glimpse of that image. I don't even remember the message, but on the scalpel were the words, "the truth". The truth about what? Smoking? Prostitution? Pornography? Abortion? Cultural propaganda?
Whatever the aim, the image has been seared into my memory, branded there so I mightn't forget.
Eyes are so vulnerable, so unprotected before this dangerous world. If I fall and bloody my knee, I'll be fine. If I scratch my eye...
And it's bad for me, worse. I can't stand watching people put contacts in, or using eye droplets, without my eyes watering in sympathetic misery. Eyes are magnificent and fragile things, and they make me nervous.
But I still want them open, even when the truth - the scalpel - terrifies me immensely.

Tell me how a fly sees, that I may understand - a blurry world of pieces, unfocused. And the bee, you ask? In ultraviolets transforming white clover into royalty. And what of the puppy, with her missing colors, or the hawk with sight piercing many miles. But I want to see inwardly, and the colors and motions of people as the live and love and breathe. I want to watch when your heart beats for what you believe and the turnings of your soul.
Can you help me to open my eyes?

Am I all cogs and wheels, gears and grinds?
This machine which every even unwinds, and winds
again through the night, is all of me, isn't it -
but I want to, long to believe in something beyond
grief and joy and disbelief, the mystery thereof
enticing me with nectar and honeyed wine
slipping into these toothed wheels -
sticky old clocks are a broken design -
so the bees buzz and pendulum keeps ticktock time
all cogs and wheels, when it's flowers I desired
it's only clocks I got,
and time is forever blind