How the Thought They’ll Throw a Shadow Thrills!

Souls are so intent on manifesting into sensate form –

so determined to know what it feels like to be warm

and have a weight and to be seen corporeally

(how the thought they’ll throw a shadow thrills!) –

that in their reckoning, and beckoning to the remotest

possibility of incarnation, and from being famished

for the food of which they’re sure that senses –

smell and taste and touch – comprise immensities

for which as disincarnate spirits they’ve known only

as ungratifying theoretical abstract propensities,

they’ll often from impatience settle for the simulacra

of a mannequin, a Barbie doll, a Halloween mask,

or the product of the application of the careful task

of turning brush and pen’s attenuations in black ink

into an artist’s fine-line drawing – well, this last is where

another soul just found itself, moreover as a draft of what

the artist hopes will lead to something better, and which

therefore now resides in darkness on a “maybe later” shelf.

But even this is form: souls have dealt with less to find

inarguable evidence, outdistancing all doubt, they’ve felt –

down to their last sensate scintilla – what a physical

existence is about. On this basis, you might think to bring

a re-infused regard to all those shelved discarded faces

left in drawings you thought didn’t make the grade.

Are there souls there you’ve unwittingly mislaid?

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