Recycling Self (Redux)

We sort the easy things: aluminum ghosts, cardboard skins,

plastic bones bleached by convenience.

The bins know our habits better than our journals do.

But what of the mind’s clutter?

The heart’s expired prescriptions?

Memory’s cracked vinyl

spinning the same grief until the needle wears through?

Shouldn’t we want to compost our regrets,

shovel them into the loam of becoming,

watch them sprout as wildflowers no one planted?

And what about striping the gears of thought like rusted bike chains,

grease them with new questions,

ride them into the fog where certainty dissolves like sugar in rain?

Let’s rethread the pulse,

not with nostalgia’s silk but with wire pulled from old fences,

the kind that once kept wolves out but now keeps wonder in.

Let us remix the archives,

crossfade the lies with the truths,

scratch the surface until the vinyl sings something raw,

something unmarketable.

Remember…

There is no curb day for the soul.

No blue bin for the broken compass.

Only the slow sorting of what still sparks when struck against silence.

And if I am to nest again,

let it be with feathers plucked from yesterday’s fire,

woven with the ash of old names,

lined with the breath of things I almost forgot to feel.

Why…

Because permanence is not marble or monument,

it is the tree that grows from the charred rib of a forest that once believed in spring.