Sharpened Soul [poem]
Last night, in my delirium (avec un peu de fièvre),
delicious though it weaved my swollen words,
I dreamed and saw with calm uncustomary clarity
(according to the winsome voice I swoonly heard)
why I had come to sojourn in this cloistered world
a tiny while (my weeping heart not merely style).
I swear I heard I fell to earth to find adventure here
among the crazy circus tumbleweed, to breathe the air,
to touch some skin, to stroke the sky (and learn to fly),
to kiss the grass, to taste my tears [and taste yours too],
while knowing all of what we dream would never last.
For coming here’s the only way to have this 3-D fun,
where bosons can shake hands with gluons in the sun
and laugh at those who think they’ve seen the light
but, frightened of the night, they only will embrace
the day [whereby uncomfortable truths are put away].
I dreamed I chose my parents (bless their golden socks)
so I would have to learn to swim without a float or ring
(my only saving grace from drown was my ability to sing),
to lose my way deliberately so it would then be found
(but not before I, on a myriad rocks, have run aground.
Then I [this is an I you have not met] perceived a choice
to jump into the fleshly pool of wholesome solid-state,
or else that “I” would have to wait in Turtle Station
for another later train before receiving (yet again)
a further chance to earth the soul in skin-clothed role.
The dichotomy of now is this: Those things I dreamed
(which are not merely dreams but cobweb facts spun
wide across the blackened hole of photon-scented time)
no longer fit my birthday suit — the clash of chords
denotes a cosmologically amphisbaenic case of rhyme.
In this way or in that, the wily serpent’s double-headed
grasping groping in the darkly mudded breaking waters
birth-canal of falltoearthness writes a further chapter
on akashic record’s vast etheric scroll:— Here comes
another starchild neonate to clothe its sharpened soul.
© Alan Morrison, 2016
The Naked Troubadour 