Sometimes it feels like someone is striking a gong
Over and over again.
Just when I think the sound has died away
When I can’t hear it anymore
When I think I’m free of it
The sound gest louder again as it’s struck with the felt covered mallet.
When it’s first struck, the gong is impossible to ignore and it reminds me
That the sound has never stopped
The call has only gotten weaker –
So weak one can forget about it for the moment
But still ringing
When it is struck anew.

Fate sits in a drawer in the closet.
It’s crowded in there. Fate is tangled up with an old phone chord,
7 dead batteries, a small flashlight, an assortment of keys that no one
knows the locks for. It shares space with a baseball card,
a smattering of paper clips and a doorknob.
Dust and lint jockey for room in there.
Fate is waiting. It’s listening. It knows it is not up to much
In this moment – but at just the right prompt, when the moment arrives
It will burst forth and take over.
Fate will seize its moment, surge ahead –
There will be no stopping it.

There’s something so much more precise about this command –
More precise than “get your hands off me” even, because
If you HOLD your hands off,
You will not quickly seize me again.
I picture Marcellus and Horatio
With hands held inches away from Hamlet, almost frozen there
As if time has stopped and they are compelled to remain there,
Waiting to grab him
But held with hands off.

He’s said he will follow it a few times.
Here, suddenly, he speaks to it
And with familiar speech, too.
Is he using the familiar “thee” because the ghost is his father or because he’s a ghost?
Horatio uses thou with the ghost as well.
Perhaps ghosts just automatically get the familiar speech
Despite their unfamiliarity.
Me, I feel like I might want to get more polite with a supernatural creature.
I might want to use some deference
Some formal speech
Elevate its status
Just to be safe.
Especially if that creature were a king –
Dead or not, he’s still wearing a crown,
Or at least metaphorically,
In this case the ghost would appear
To be wearing a helmet
One with a beaver
That he wears up, revealing his ghostly face.

That’s all there is to do sometimes.
Just
Go on
And on.
I’m chomping at the bit in my mouth
Longing to go in another direction.
Not that any of those paths
Are necessarily any better
But this one is leading me
It’s got me bridled and saddled
With a heavy cart at my back.
No matter how much I resist
I will still have to go on.
But I chew and chew on this bit
Waiting for the signal
That I can run free in a new direction.

It has broken my heart
Again and again,
Sometimes reccurringly in the same place
Rebreaking a broken line
Tearing open a recently stitched up wound
Cracking a newly healed bone –
But it has also found new places to break
Corners previously untouched can be shattered
Edges torn
And still there are bits of it unbroken.
Even so, even with my heart stitched together
With twine and briars
Stapled, like a paper crown,
Taped, duct taped and ace bandaged,
When it waves
When something moves me anew
When it calls out to me,
I cannot ignore it.

It may tempt me toward the flood –
I think it does, quite often.
It may bring me to edge of a cliff
It may break bones
It may cut me open
It may empty my purse
Rip it from my arm, slash it open,
Scatter its contents on the ground
Then take everything of value.
It may fray my hems
Split my seams
Tear holes in the fabric.
It may replace sweetness with bitterness
Enthusiam with gritted teeth
Hope with cynicism.
The dangers are many
The rewards unlikely.
It may wear out my shoes
As I trail along behind
But I have to –
I will.
I’ll follow it.

There are forms and ideas I think I have done with –
The art stuffed into a drawer, locked in the back of the closet, under a pile of clothes,
In a can in the garage, stuffed behind the bookshelf
And I’m there, too, hiding, or resting
Or simply trying to pretend I am small
And insignificant.
But Art finds its way out first and with its dusty arm, beckons for me to follow it.
Unfolding my legs
Shaking out my wings
Clearing the dust from my nostrils, I
Bow my head and drive forward.

There are a lot of things that can be done to a soul.
Just because it cannot die
Doesn’t make it invulnerable.
It can shrink
It can shrivel
It can ache.
My friend took a job on a cruise ship
Which pays him a living wage
With which he can support his son
But, he says, his soul dies a little every day.
If it were to die and die like that
In little bits, in pieces
It may be that it could all but disappear
Or go into hiding and a person could
Go to his grave
With the sense that he’s been abandoned by his immortal self,
That this death happened some time ago
While he was busy trying to survive.
I’d like to believe that the soul
Is like one of those little grow-in-water creatures.
It comes in a little capsule and expands
When you immerse it in water
But if you let it dry out, it shrinks again
Into a dull, brittle object, unidentifable in its shape
And one could think all has been lost
But if you put it in enough water, it will expand again.

Let’s see. I have this little bit of money;
I could buy a pin
Or I could buy Hamlet’s life.
The pin, I could use, you know, to hold things together –
Hamlet’s life, well,
He might as well keep it –
I have no use for it.
I’ve got my own stitched up life here,
Pieced together with thread and tape,
Tied up with string and the occassional pin.