Sometimes, Listening to the Cracks

Sometimes, listening to the cracks breaking 

free of the box they’d been consigned to keep, 

I recognize the complications of being 

tied to a flesh factory isn’t the end of being, 

that the decaying inertia of a mauve wall 

needn’t be the forever of a pastel existence forever. 

From atom to Adam to Abel, 

Eden is as much the end as the beginning, 

the launching pad to mysteries 

waiting to unspool, like minutes 

dripped from the great tree, the fruit 

of our own misunderstanding coming unhinged. 

Where my hands and feet might end, 

suns still burn, like gloves 

in anticipation of a long winter’s journey,  

unaware of any finite line being shaped 

to the contours of a heart. The division 

between yesterday and tomorrow,  

spark and conflagration, exists 

in the ether of either and, the simultaneity 

of everything and nothing conjoining. 

And in the stillness I turn back to sleep, 

contented, filled with reluctance of knowing

the cogs turn at a pace I can’t begin to keep 

time of. Like the rain 

rains until its rained, the thought of 

a universe is a thought beyond 

my comprehension for the moment. 

At dawn the creep of a sun will shine 

its light on my night’s muse, 

give pause to the dark brooding; 

and the cracks, temporarily silent, 

will have grown incrementally wider, 

turning at a pace I can’t keep pace of.  

Ken e Bujold

Reviews

[Fabian G. Franklin]

"There is a crack in everything God has made." Ralph Waldo Emerson " "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen

My cracks are mostly in my bones these days getting out of bed. I sound like a fresh box of Rice Krispies. This was great to read; the introspection of immortality so to speak. I enjoyed.