The next in the series of poems based on now Episode 6 of Season 2 of the Twilight Zone for my eldest princess:

Eye of the Beholder
by Michael Romani

Suspended in a time and space of harshness
Miss Janet Tyler lives in a private world of darkness
A universe of bandages covering up her face
Patient 307 isn't just any woman in this twilight place
A pitiful, twisted lump of flesh pressed for normality
All must be equal in this statist bid for conformity

Others walk this world covered with the shadows
Always too afraid to look up for treasured rainbows
Where beauty is measure by its magical intensity
And the unfairness of this is borne with all immensity
She waits for a single chance to perhaps fit in
Judgmental people rule this world - now as then

Eleven times she has been wrapped up in unnecessary gauze 
Like the dark cave filled with wind and just because
All the comfort of a private cave in called hopelessness
Stumping the world brilliantly with its unknown brokenness
All of this stressed and redressed  to reach for normality
In all of the shocking sense caused by the pressured conformity

She cries out begging for the simple chance to belong
Falling under the spell of social tyranny's song
Crying out in whimpers that beg for a little empathy
As the doctor speaks of a ghetto for the ugly in his sympathy
Where others around are similarly gathered up and congregated
Locked away from, shunned as outcasts in a world morally sedated

A freakish ghetto of stolen life lived in placid segregation
Built to insulate a world too afraid of its own integration
The state calls out its policies as the epitome of rational
As the pug nosed and twisted leader mandates this as national
For the love of God, she wishes just to spell the flowers
Wishing her curse could be lifted perhaps this very hour

The doctor hopes against all hope for a single miracle
Against every known odd and the observed empirical
Too personally involved he starts to see her true self
Not just as a pitiful case of repulsion on a shelf
Beauty, you see he is certain, is not simply skin deep
But to be different is treason and this makes him weep

The Leader speaks to the nation of the need for unity
And how for the good of all, there must be conformity
The time has arrived to take the bandages off and away
As each present is mortified at the prospects of the day
A little light at a time arrives into a shades of gray
Brighter and brighter as the bandages all fall away

The last layer just above her face were about to fall
As the doctor gave his speech of odds flat against the wall
This is the one last chance for Miss Tyler to conform
But, alas, she is truly and beautifully not the norm
In a world of imposed ugliness, beauty is never allowed
It is cancerous to be cut out and so must be disemboweled 

Run, run down the hospital corridors, she tries to get away
But instead into the hands of the waiting ghetto she plays
Forced to be where there are more and plenty of her kind
Like some kind of fantastically wrong trick of her mind
The man sent to bring her in stops and has softly told her
That as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Softly not harshly, he repeats what he has quietly told her
To repeat and believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Two victims of a state imposed paradise walk out hand in hand
Awaiting the not too subtle dictates of society's stern command
It seems that wherever life is to be found and discerned
Acceptance of others is a thing that must yet be learned

(c) March 26, 2018  Michael Romani
All Rights Reserved