How Much is that Soul in the Window?

I don’t have a soul anymore.
Not sure where it has flown.
I didn’t know it was there before
But now I’m sure it’s gone.

Maybe I dropped it in the parking lot
Or it hid between the pages of a book.
Maybe it slipped through a rip
In the purplish thin spot.

Hopefully it has gone to a good home.

I don’t have a personality anymore.
That slinked away,
Closing the back door softly on its way out.

Creativity?
Gone.
Goals?
What are those?

I concede,
I’m defeated
And there’s no repletion
From a handful of ragweed.

Maybe it has all rolled into a cabbage field.
Bundled inside one purple head of cabbage amongst all the green.
Let’s hope so; then I’d be able to spot it easily.
Or what if it’s just a snail on one of the cabbage leaves?
I imagine a heavy-booted farmer stomped it flat and clean.

Maybe all of what makes me me was murdered
And now my body, splayed,
Abandoned,
Is in the muted sunken place,
Stuck under the surface of things,
Gasping under plastic.

Or in a vice,
One that amplifies gravity.
There’s wet rot in the air that I have to work
To force inside my lungs
And oh, how it stings.

All the iron and salt sent down to Earth
Is in my pores
And behind my eyes.

There are soul-murderers everywhere, you know.

Is this what it feels like to be murdered
By those hands?
Those hands.
Those far-reaching, lying hands.
They do it to all of us every time.
The hands of man,
The ones that say they hold Truth in them,
The ones that killed innocence.

There’s no glue at the center of things anymore.
Paper, paper everywhere and not a drop of glue.

Hello?
I’d like to report a fire,
A genocide
Of my love of words and language,
Of the arts, and nature, and God.
Now they all
Burn.
Send water.
Wash the burn away.

I can’t even seek out the sky
Or stand in the sun
Without egging on the agony
That drips from an egg of shards
That was cracked on my head and
Scrapes all the way down.

I drive in one large circle
After leaving work
So I can scream to God in my car
About how much I hurt.

I spend an hour getting rugburns
On my forehead
Every night
‘Neath my east-facing window.
And there I’ve watered
Every soil-sewn seed that yearns in thirst.

I am just an ass in a chair
Or on the edge of my bed,
A head on a pillow,
A heap on the floor.

I am nobody.
I am pain.
And everything is
Death
And Winter.