Prisoner of Life

This one's taken from my cycle of poems called "October Meditations".


PRISONER OF LIFE
(Morning Meditation I)

The broken cobwebs in the staircase
I pass underneath each day
Float above me into empty months
Stretching into nothingness

Trying to shake echoes to life
Dry leaves blow from my avocado trees

My cut toenails
On the bathroom tiles
Lie like the cold shells
Of crickets from yesteryear

Like dead insects crushed
Between the pages
Of my notebooks, damned to become
Part of an unrequited museum of the future

Trying to shake echoes to life
All clocks have stopped

Fallen blossoms scatter in the backyard,
Crumbs lie beside my bed --
Lingering echoes
Of songs yet to be sung

The skylight in the stairwell
Cuts a slice of sky into the roof
I walk up the stairs and I walk down
I come and I go

But I come no nearer each day
To cutting some sky into my roof

In our lives, this patch of blue
We prisoners know
As sky, becomes the strongest pull
Of all our days

Days go by
In a blur --
Jungle rivers cutting their way
Toward their seas

2001 + 2003
© George H.E. Koehler 2009