The It Of Me
by Odin Roark

The boy inside me remembers.

The man outside me wonders why.

So long ago
hands cupped
such selfish made prisons.

Exhausted grasshoppers,
dimming fireflies,
rolled tight potato bugs,
and oh…the butterflies,
such timid love they gave.

So present now…

The boy once curious,
the man now cynical
the hands forever enclosing
ever changing prisons.

The raised fist of career’s price,
the prayerful fear resting beneath the chin,
the steeple pose of secret thought,
the twisting of fingers
intertwined in my narcissist tragedy.

Yet…

Simple genesis remains haunting.

Even as I peek inside my latticed fingers,
my eye seeing the cave of my echoes,
the fading light of the fly’s fire,
the grasshopper weakening,
the potato bug closed…for life.
the butterfly…

Ah, such patience,
this monarch of flight,
this testimony to strength,
this giving of beauty
knowing sacrifice always remains imminent.

Now…

Through the shallow opening of clutched hands,
I peer once more.

How telling the colorful wings,
still allowing me discovery,
even as I sit in this prison of piled rocks,
the wall of giant hands
cupping my existence,
sealing my fate in nature’s tectonic shift
San Andreas rising above me,
falling below me.

How revealing the eye of eternity,
staring through the one small opening,
the me of it,
the it of me,
the boy of man,
the man remembering boy,
forever becoming
the simple dust of us all.