Dancers, Glancers, Lancers

There are dancers and there are glancers. That is, those who perceive your treasure and picture it in their hands, and are therefore willing to perform for you--to flay their personalities in any direction you choose to push, if the prize is enough--and those whose appraisal passes right through you, for you are no means to their end, and therefore you are nothing. Nothing but a waste of energy.

Ah yes, and there are the lancers as well: scar-sucklers looking for a nervous system to assault with verbal tackles and emotional rapes. Here there are artists, though: those subtle sadists who have condensed their vengeance into a seed of patience, manipulating the ascetic virtues of the distant days of spiritual striving to add a scent of style to their torture.

Is there any explanation for this state of affairs? Aye, and it reveals why there is no dance of light in the darkness, no poet's gaze praising every pore--for to do that, to give instead of gobbling up another's emotional resources, to gift grace to the inconsistencies, would require silence. Stillness. Thought.

And we all know that only weirdos and lunatics ask for that.