It shouldn’t matter whether
your mirror is cracked
or whole
or a pile of coins peering up at you
from some dank, municipal gutter.
The face looking back
isn’t yours.
You earn nothing.
Good or bad,
you deserve less.
The only meaning in your vibrant
but astoundingly brief life
other than the roses you never gave
the trains you never took
and the amber liquor you left
sitting on the counter
quarter-finished,
is the meaning you make for yourself.
The expressions of your waitress,
your pastor,
the doctor who will one day
pronounce you dead,
they are dust,
and you’d do well
to let them float right through
the bulbous lump atop your neck.
If having a god suits you,
don’t.
When prayer, the grand placebo,
seems to soothe you,
it doesn’t.
Whatever soul stirs
in the grey soup around your bones,
it isn’t meant for this place,
these sewer-pocked streets,
these placid suburban shacks,
the hum of your television
as it begs for your inaction.
You don’t belong here.
You never did.
You’ve always known as much.
But hell, you pretend just the same.
Don’t kid yourself.
The worth of your accomplishments,
the hill you slogged to climb
in your shiny new shoes,
in your robes
which made you look royal,
is to be the highest grain of rice
in a field soon to be harvested.
How does it feel
to be a crop?
It should be a wonder
to be so free.
To walk whichever street you want
humming a tune only you can hear
sowing the garden of your mind
with carrots, or pumpkins
or bales of black cigars
or with love
or hate
or with whatever idea, scrawled on a wad
of paper,
rolls up with the wind
and hits your heel.
Those problems you have,
the debts, the wheels falling off,
the heart raked over the coals
of your last great error,
the faults placed in yourself
or with anyone but,
those aren’t real.
You and your soul,
and your broken mirror,
you don’t belong here.
You never did.
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Read more J Edward Neill here.
Get more of his cranky, forlorn poetry here.
