The Aspiring Bard

My image The embers break Like porcelain And shatter in a Flickering of sparks. I bank the logs, Reflective of Those careless firebrands That further blacked The charred remains Of self, And check to see That all the sparks Are dead, the dampers right, Forgiveness lit and living In my soul.

Source My signage, all the shapely Winter trees  That point me further out With every breeze, To purple heights of boundless Mystery; These mountains make A vagabond of me.

My image I mostly left my deeper thoughts Digressing in the rear, Contented now with smaller things, I build a fire here. I do not search for metaphor Or hidden simile In eager flame or drifting smoke Or ashes in my tea. I simply sit and feed the flame, Take tea and ash together, And notice how the leaden smoke Changes with the weather. I think this piece actually started last Sunday, when I was burning trash and drinking lukewarm coffee, laced with cardboard ash. At that time, I tried to write a poem that presented fire, simplicity and ashy beverages in the light of some cleverly-worded analogy, but that didn't work out very well. At all. Yesterday, sitting by the little fire I'd built in the woods, sipping some mildly over-steeped chai (caffeine and fire seems be a bit of a habit), I scribbled down the first, very rough draft of the poem you've just read. I put pretension aside. I stopped trying to write anything ...