There are no words for the songs plucked out on the heartstrings
of the melancholy man with deeply sad eyes,
but he sings those songs to the stormy skies
through the tears rolling down his craggy cheeks into the world's oceans,
and those same tears slipping off of the barely beating wings of the tired wrens.
He thinks himself a strange man,
with not a single instrument to his name,
yet known as a musician,
and he breaths out in cold clouds his sorrow,
but the sparrows,
those little birds, let his breaths of freezing billow
roll off of them as easily as the starlight that the sad man can't see.
What a man, so heavyhearted,
who does not know how to play his own heartstrings like a harp,
how to play his heart like a drum,
how to play his brittle ribs like piano keys,
so heavyhearted that he cannot bear to give anything else the weight to exist,
so heavyhearted that the rest of him blows away and he is but a heart,
old and cheerless, without its own reason to exist.
0258 December 29th, 2018.
Along the way in writing this, I thought of Picasso's The Old Guitarist.
