SOMETHING ABOUT SOULS [behind the scenes]

I was already working on a short prose poem when Daniel's #vss365 prompt dropped. At that point, the piece was all about a "brutalist jaw" and "silence jackhammering a void". The "soul" had not yet crept in there. But then, looking at the word, I realized that was actually what I was writing about: an absence of soul.

AN ABSENCE OF SOUL

Noir shades tilted on a crooked nose, gaze stretching beyond the pale dawn, over everything, into nowhere, and a smile withered beneath the lips, setting the brutalist jaw askew. Hands that feel nothing. Heart that never was. Silence jackhammering a void not even eternity will be able to redeem. An absence of soul. 

"A soul not quite of this time" appeared pretty much as a response to that earlier piece. It's a much more intimate reflection on this otherness that I suspect many of us writers feel. To observe, we must stand back from the center. It comes with a cost.

A SOUL NOT QUITE OF THIS TIME

Too soon. Too late. A soul not quite of this time. Perhaps not of any ages. Out of epoch. Mismatched and alien, an artifact buried in dust. Lost. Not broken. Not yet.

Several hours later, I was making some coffee (what a surprise, right?) and had to stop that to jot something down. I don't think we word-weavers have a choice: we'll just keep putting messages into bottles, hoping they find something beyond sharks.

GLASS FINGERS

A soul reaches out, pouring words into bottles, glass fingers set adrift on a sea of empty virtues. Silence is a hammerhead waiting in the shallows, wreck the only destination. Still, the soul reaches out.

Anyway, it's still raining, I'm still listening to Jazz, and I wrote three prose poems today. Not a bad Monday.