Recycled Wisdom Lost
by Odin Roark

How common to recycle today
bottle,
cardboard,
can,
or bubble wrap.

How rare the regard for pleas from
mind,
heart,
memory,
wishing also to amend anew.

How satisfying,
To arouse the sleeping heart,
thrusting its comfort-beat
upon new rhythms made aware,
ensuing musical notes of clarity
not yet upon the staff of boundaries,
affording dissonance where only
harmony's familiarity once reigned.

To revisit memory
offering bygone experience,
wiser tools of perception,
scrambling dog-eared indexes
cross-referencing fact and fabrication,
allowing waste to fall free,
encouraging truth to persevere.

To sort through mind's many strategies,
discounting some,
discarding others,
dismantling exhausted cogs that
advance little the unknown begging at the door.

Such is…

To complete one's desire to remain conscious,
allowing distinction for that worth rebirthing
from chaff heretofore but a friction urging resolve.

How obvious to some:
the take-to-the-curb days of consciousness.

How misunderstood by others:
the smothering effect of effort
to treat excess destined as garbage.

How aware
those who
like the winged flights on high
weave today's nest
from yesterday's exhausted remnants,
knowing well the destiny of permanence
is but to replant where burnt forests once thrived.

And yet…

We often think recycling is confined to aluminum,
plastics, glass and other fabrications of man’s intellect,
but what of...