gravity's need

[jsol]

the frigid air turns his skin
red like the fire it craves.

shoes broken along the highway, agony
eats his steps, laces his tired smiles.

the line of faces pass over him, straining for anywhere else to look,
suddenly radios needs attention, gloveboxes need rearranging.

he watches the darting eyes,
the worn practicality, like a rug

walked over for years, used up
through to the exposed floorboards

showing like his skeleton, walking into unknowns.
his life has followed the trajectory of a rock smashing

the surface of a lake, a spreading interruption
his circles bellowing out into journeys

paths that lead back to the same places
to the cold, the eyes, the sky, headlights

passing in the night, uncaring,
thrown like the brightness of futures

now passed, gone, gone
before anything human has time to exist

time to talk, tell it's name to the listening world.
he laughs at the years, the pity of heavy hearts

at the smallness of everyone, he laughs.
his feet are cold, painful, he walks, sits, lives,

pitiful against the stubborn beliefs
in the darting eyes, the radio dials,

yet almost weightless, nearly free from gravity
he will fly soon, he is worth fortunes.

[dwells]

A real puzzler jsol and my one and only wild guess would be a roadkill requiem for the homeless; both the turkey buzzard and the wandering derelict. Nature's scavengers performing a necessary service on our highways and byways; nothing goes to waste and asking little in return. It would be a graveyard and eyesore without them. Sorry for the ramble - cheers! - Dan

[jsol]

good day sir dwells! how pleased i am to hear from such a gracious and benevolent fellow! i do hope this gentle rotation of our wondrous planet finds you safe, happy and healthy. now, in all honesty, though i would not hesitate to pin a ribbon on your lapel for reading this piece and attempting an explanation as to why all these words are ordered as such, i respect you enough to deliver the sad news: fortune's smile passed you by and your interpretive arrow missed its intended mark. a rarity for you indeed. but, plainly you are a gentleman of the highest caliber and as such are deserving of some consolation. so, to match worth with value and even the distribution and degree of form and function, i will attempt to grant you fair counsel on this matter at hand. i must warn you though, that this is an informal chat between friends and so i will forgo any guidelines, plans or rules and allow the path to be that which my feet so choose. hopefully, when some end is reached, there will have formed a shared understanding between us. i cannot guarantee this, though, so please feel free to ask of me any questions you may have so that our conversation can rest, free of any lingering qualm or doubt. so.. gravity.. the principle force of attachment between enormities of mass, capable of the greatest feats and yet the weakest of all known natural forces when measured acutely. pick any time, pick any place, pick any force, pick any object and the assertion of gravity can be thwarted with ease as long as whichever force you picked shows up with tools sufficient enough to produce enough of that force to act in relation to whichever object you picked (don't bring a shovel if you need to move a cement truck etc), but then what? gravity rules simply by the magnitude of its persistence. however massive the force acting against it may be, once that force has acted, gravity remains to take control of the situation. yeah, ok. cool. so, in these collected words, there's a man. he is cold and he is injured. he is insufficiently dressed. life has left him with almost no possessions, no money, no home. he is almost not there, standing, walking back and forth along a highway intersection. he sees people zoom past him in cars, he watches as they look away from him, he understands they are uncomfortable simply because he is there, for in him their entire purpose is negated. they amass comfort whereas he amasses agony. they own valuable things, and he owns nothing of value. he knows that perhaps someone will hand him a dollar or two and he can eat. so he walks and he sits and he looks. night falls and the faces become headlights. he watches these beacons of impersonal machinery ignore him and he suddenly starts to laugh. as his presence in the world begins to fade a clarity fills him with peace and certainty and he is calm and he laughs the laugh of a fluid soul. he sees the hardened hearts of the people unable to care for his pain, the pain of the world. they can barely care for their own pain. he discovers that he is the one who is free. he is held by nothing, tethered to nothing yet he cares for everything. and he laughs. he laughs because no longer is he in pain. he laughs because everything is perfect and can never be otherwise and he knows this and joyously he laughs. he laughs at the small, hardened hearts, as his once was, because they will have to suffer to grow soft. he laughs because he knows he is free. he has finished his lesson and can feel himself growing lighter, can feel even gravity finally letting him go. he lived hard and found truth and in truth became free and in freedom he is ready to let go. to fly. there is nothing in the cold, hard, trash-strewn asphalt sprawl of life anywhere near as valuable as this.

[JASON]

Wonderfully descriptive and observant Judson.
A character study deserving a place in any literary compilation...
The rug imagery is particularly powerful and agony eating his steps,
I found exceptional.
Well done!!

[dwells]

Thanks for the rundown Jsol, and I can see the inspiration and motivation now that birthed his epiphany. I frequently take things too literally and risk another clumsy comment, but not always.
Gravity indeed does hold sway over all, by a matter of degrees and mass, and is inversely proportional to the square of the distance as I recall.
Now I'm off to the factory to insist that my robots forego weekends off, until they develop that anti-grav drive we've been working on. Cheers my friend! - Dan

[SirFleshwound]

Wow, your explanation is as beautiful as the piece itself. I love the sense of letting go, releasing the weight of the world from your soul which, of course, is the true gravity we are bound by.

[Forestdawn]

Wow!

An Incredible piece. As I read it, I began to see a homeless man, watching people passing by him. Maybe someone might hand him some hope.
This society is filled with busy rushing people, who live in their own little bubbles, and tend to look, and turn away, from the unfortunates. They don't realize the karma they're raking up on themselves.
It's not that they HAVE to give something to the unfortunates. They just need to smile, or wave at them once in a while. Those simple gestures can be all they need.

The explanation you posted, Extraordinaire! I loved them both.

Splendid write!

Blessings

[Josie]

My feet started to feel the pain of traveling down the road. The human desire to rest reminded me of the Donner party story when an old man could no longer keep walking behind a wagon and was left behind. How different that was for the grandmother who was carried in her daughter's family wagon on a feather bed. She died along the way, but how different her departure was from the old man who was abandoned. I am glad your homeless man had the vision to be able to smile in the fourth line of your poem,even though it was 'laced' and 'tired'. He recognized that many folk who appear to have so much, may have next to nothing. There was joy in this rather dismal setting for him to recognize freedom. Congratulations on the TPS Spotlight.

[inflames]

This is quite lovely. I enjoyed this a lot - a lot of weight to these lines. Congrats on the spotlight!

[rupertpupkin]

Superbly written piece full of wondrous lines. Loved it.well done on the spotlight. Most deserving.

[Kornelia]

Hi Jsol,

This work is a bit lke a riddle of reflection. It flies beween dark and light. Is at times a canvas of impressions.
Somehow a fragment of "the last supper" came to mind as it seemed also sort of a confssion.Great work.

Kornelia