A Chiseling Life

                                                                            Poem# 1

Life is a block of wood; a carver models it into the best, but only at old age-when one becomes perfectly experienced. Every drill and grill is a tick of torment to life. It gashes to a perfectly imperfect time of life, and then we start over again in the next life.

A carver, lost in chiseling the wood,

models it into the finest.

He himself carefully carves into it.

As I look at him,

My own life rolls down:

the creaks of sculpting a block,

removing jarring angles,

 etch a torment.

Are those pains the impasse of life?

Life mills to live.

It’s a fume out of crumble and splinter-

every bit a loss and gain!

This act recurs,

and flusters like the hollow. resonant wood.

On thiscourse,

there is no sojourn from emotive and bodily fidgets.

Often, the disquiet chronic, writs large on the mark.

The happiness or silence-hung grim all around

were free of beginnings or ends.

They unfold in myriad ways.

One likes to live a life careless and free,

but the player lot is on the line.

Come to clutches with it, be a slave of it.

These forms befit a good mortal,

just as the crafter fits the pieces.

Yet this good human is qualified

only at old age- when he is unqualified-

and ends very near like a child,

the falls bodily asleep.

How many times do we hear creaks?

How many times do we crumble and splinter?

How many times are we milled,

only to hope?

How nany times are we never the finest?

As novice voyages embark anew

and we get down to chiseling all over again-

 to slice life in the life of a new beginning!