Poetry | Resonant Reveries

Call It Soul

I am a composition of complexities

Self Portrait by the Author, during my sketching days, circa 2018

I watch my hand in the half-light —
a weathered map of old roads,
dusty towns, and forgotten rivers.
Scars like cryptic inscriptions,
creases where shadows settle.

It moves without asking,
writes its own story,
pulls the past from my pockets,
cups water, cups air, cups silence.

I am a collection of moving parts,
bone and sinew,
a murmuring machine,
thought leaping between circuits
like a bird too restless to land.

Somewhere in this tangle of wires,
something flickers —
a small and stubborn flame.
Not the hand, not the mind,
but the thing neither can touch.

Call it soul, call it ghost.
It waits in the dim,
watching the eye watching it.

Published in Rough Diamond Poetry’s, “Body: An Anthology of Poetry.”