Narcissism as a Point of View

Far to the south where water runs
Funnel-like
Down the drain counter-clockwise
The think that things are upside down
And backwards.
Across the Atlantic,
In the land of a recent
Royal Wedding,
Where cars are driven
On the left side of the road,
They believe that we drive
Wrongly
Or, if given the benefit
Of intellectual doubt,
Dyslexically.

Those people who hold their fork
In their left hand while eating
See our convention of moving it,
Once loaded with food,
Into the other hand for insertion
As nothing short of uneccessary
If not simply bizarre.
There seems no accounting for taste,
Preferences, habits or conventions
When they are different from our own.

What we do and how we do it
May not be perfectly correct,
But it is what and how we do it.
Anyone who does differently is,
At best,
Misguided, misinformed or unintelligent.
At worse,
They do things the way they do
To deliberately annoy us.
There is nothing terribly surprising,
Mysterious or new
About a devoutly narcissistic point of view.

If it is like me, it is right
And if not, I can be left
Behind in the pile of
Unneeded discards
The loss of which will not
Leave me
Depleted, impoverished or bereft.

The socially
And academically valued talk is often
About change
While,
When real life circumstances erupt,
Many Homo Sapiens
Find anything or anyone
Markedly different
Unacceptably strange.

Some '˜isms' are worth having
And cultivating
While others are problematic
And worthy only
Of incinerating
Or boxing up to the basement
Or attic.
Narcissism is one
That tends to hold
Our ideas and behaviors
Indelibly and unsympathetically
Static.