The Soul's Cartographer (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

The soul's cartographer plots and enumerates and annotates
And learns his way across pages of drawings and graphs
Across dog days of waiting and guessing
Across a moonless night tarrying under a chestnut tree
Staring up at the heavens expecting what he oughtn’t to expect
It’ll be misery and self-loathing and dread if it comes
He’ll blame himself and resent others for not grasping
What he feels and struggles against unseen and unnoticed
When it’d be laudable and expedient to sit at a desk answering telephones
Writing letters and proposing schemes and deals
Churning contracts and percentages and profits
As business and business as the saving grace of the damned
And the demented by greed and speculation and envy
Business preached as virtue and duty and as the science of living
The damned know a thing or two about selling
What one hasn’t asked for or needs or is prepared to pay for
It’s souls and futures and ignominy the damned are after
It’s the profit in misery and loss and the death eternal they traffic in

2

There can’t be a reply if he’s talking to no one but himself
The charge against him is that he’s a knave waiting for nothing
The soul's cartographer plots coordinates and measures
Distances he isn’t likely ever to see and know
In the manner of a man knowing his way home
Familiar with the rooms of his home
And the years of his life and the longings of his heart
His maps are his testament and accusation
His maps are his prayers to an unseen god
The cartographer plots the coordinates across a starry heaven
In a long night that’ll pull in the dawn
Of another day and for other lives
There’ll be voices and unforetold futures
Futures ordained and manufactured and shaped
By the hand of an unseen and unknowable god
Insinuated and manifested in the cries of the gull wheeling overhead
Discernible in the moon renting the twilight in half


© J.Noya, 2006