Stone Soup

I’m flat,

drawn out,
stretched thin and empty.
Not by living but by love unanswered day by day.
As if sands of time,
those tiny falling grains,
tell me that mountains crumbled
and cliffs washed into the sea…
and if so mighty as these,
they laugh,
why not me?

I am tired now.
Tired as the day is long,
and into the night,
for sleep wearies me and dreams bring no relief.
They are like a thousand fractured shards and I cannot see your face
just helter skelter memories,
always out of place.

What is the weight 
I cannot breath,
I cannot bear,
I cannot leave?
Atlas himself bore only the world
but emptiness is much more terrible a weight
than such as made of stone.

Silence is deafening yet not the absence of sound
for still I breath in the deepening quiet of the night,
and I lay alone

And that is the absence of sound.

I am tired yet awake

and constant the ticking of the clock

Where is the “up” I do not feel?
The bracing winds are now just the doldrums haze.
As I wake from sleepless night to walk the measured pace of day
as I make my predestined rounds to appointed place.
And yet,
the new eludes and the different mocks me with the same.
Such tiny circuit in this expanse of world,
Tho’ the mill wheel turns and grinds exceeding fine
The lowly ass knows only the carrot and the stick.

Once,
I watched a man chip away at a stone and they called him an artist.
And watched yet another,
and they called him a convict.
And thought,
prisoners are we to our confessed professions,
so when questioned I pled the fifth…
Neither artist or artless I,
as daily I’m set to the grindstone.

I am an invisible man;
it being no remarkable achievement,
either by choice or exclusion,
to stand apart from the crowd.
Is this not the first step to becoming a prophet,
from the outside looking in,
to mark from a distance the routine and habits
of which you take no part?
But I take not the second step to hear the voice which says,
“Prophesy to the wind…”
for the wind blows whither it will,
and so,
unheard in passing is only felt.
But I do not feel now and so in dispassionate glance remark,
“Que sera, sera.”

And the insiders laugh just the same,
but at least they throw no stones.

Have you ever watched men who quarry the stone,
bore hole after hole to fracture the rock?
Near you I cannot help but feel pierced.
Yet you work at your own design which stands so foreign to mine.
And I’ve wondered why we seek to shape others to our taste
than to reshape our own ?
Yet I return day after day
just as you always seem to find me in familiar,
unremarkable,
though I’m pierced yet again.

Actions bespeak priorities and I am lost,
so how does one become found?
And is it found or finding,
or whatever the difference between the two.
How did I wander so far from my home?
I can’t remember.
Perhaps I left to find another.
Are not endings just beginnings and chaos imagination’s fertile field?
As with life,
with endings –
and endings never set in stone.

And in wandering,
what a strange word is league,
both a companionship and a distance.
Does it have to mean the one without the other?
For I have traveled far and know the dust of back country roads
yet have found none who speaks in answer to my soul.

But what is the deeper chance,
the more ennobling thought?
Hasn’t it always been to follow the lost cause?
In love or war,
where all is fair and odds ever seem so long;
when does one listen to, “Just stay down?”
Why do I stubbornly rise and doggedly soldier on?
I am beat beyond caring or knowing,
bloodied but unbowed,
so that even the gods must wonder at the measure of the healing.

So I’m glad I went not to war but fell in love alone,
though there’s no stone to mark the spot.

Some don’t know the meaning of never.

To some never means forever.

To me,
it’s the memory as a child in the country seeing blackbirds sitting on a wire
and a singular
caw.
As a distance I can’t recover,
a feeling that can’t be measured,
question and answer conveyed beyond understanding;
singular across the stubble of the corn harvested fields,
a lone yet familiar place.

Far I have wandered from never,
but never have I wandered so far,
for that grey gravel road has never left me
though I‘ve never found my way back home.

So do I seek she of remembrance ~

Or she who can lead to remembrances?

I’m tired and the wind shrills “you can never go home”
yet in the chill I cannot feel.
Oh, that Prometheus was unbound that I might rediscover fire,
for mine is banked
but some chains are set in adamant,
a stone found only within the heart.

Yet even stone can strike a spark…