by LJ Frank

His heart queried whether he was but a pawn– for an idea, a belief, a conviction, an expectation, a passion, a judgment or an acceptance; finding himself alone on a battlefield plowed by his own blood-stained hands through the clay and loam soil for the players he didn’t actually know;

 Bewildered, he was transported to a seat amid a mesmerized, faceless audience and too distant from the stage to discern the elected and appointed human-like figures casting lots for their stately roles in a classically designed façade of comedy and drama, and then a staccato like cacophony echoed from a podium, embedded itself in the people with little notice, though the old man’s spirit whispered fondly to his brain, recalling the desire to stay in one place and not emerge from that womb of pleasure – perhaps, it was all a misconception at youth;

 As the day light dimmed, he confessed in a sacred intonation – this too shall pass, as he sought a path to nature’s revelation with his dog pulling on the leash, but is the truth too relative he asked, as he halted in mid-step to ponder, and he leaned over to drink from a fountain of cleansed urine in the troubled land, then breathed in search of a spring from the fresh recollection of an all but forgotten past, and pointedly noted the rewriting of the audience’s memory at the request of the players who stood behind the curtain;

 In the clarity of the evening there rose a wrestling in his mind – now older and wiser the old man reawakened to a vision, and asked himself what remnants do I possess to bargain with, except my smile, my ability to nurture and to love being the most uplifting of human traits, and as he sighed the sun in a metaphor of transition…began to vanish below the horizon.