A prisoner to words
they cage me in
confine my thoughts
they dictate who I am
and what I can do.
What is it that they want?
Why am I enslaved to them?
They are my master
and yet I cannot find them
they do not comfort me.
A thousand bear no weight
and yet they are so heavy some of them.
I cannot pass time without them
and when I cannot find the ones I need
I must sift through them
as if they are tens of thousands
of pails of sand.
When I seek solace or peace
and try to put them away
they barrage me like hailstones.

Waters Arrested

Behind a pane of glass on the cluttered bookshelf sits an old black and white photo yellowed with age of a river lined with trees clothed in all their summer foliage, her waters arrested, the forest still and silent. The waters have long since flowed away, the leaves of the trees fallen long ago, now dirt. The summer breezes gone utterly away. The river still flows, the winds still blow, the trees yet grow. The fading image on yellowing paper will one day be no more, it is dead and decomposing, but the waters will flow forever, birdsong borne on the wind fills the forest perennially and long after I myself am gone, others will come to photograph the river's waters.