I Mostly Left My Deeper Thoughts

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 that was 'deep', complex, or clever, and simply admired the scenery.