Above and Below

Creative Forums Creative Writing
1

Above and Below

Wandering through the line of resistance,
He comes upon a glass of nerve,
And swallows whole its contents purely,
Running likewise to his contemporaries,
Asking, ‘Why aren’t you in charge if you’re so smart?’
and looking way beyond the hill in front of him,
But timely notions of bravado are not in his sphere of influence,
So he scurries backwards, seeking the shelter
of some banyan trees and wondering to God
Why he isn’t the bird that sits above him,
Coolly surveying the whole of its domain,
Must be nice to be such a bird, he muses,
But he is, alas, not such a bird,
And so he puts the empty glass down,
Listening to the sound of its empty impact,
and looking forward to the day when emptiness will be
celebrated more than the bravado that he cannot hope to muster,
‘At least I have the shade,’ he says to nobody in particular,
Secretly hoping the bird at least understands,
Probably it doesn’t.

2

i love how this reads like a fable or a myth of some sort. its funny though, that this style only emerges after the first 3-4 lines. The beginning of the work reads very differently.

3

Astute, Alexis.

The first 3-4 lines were kind of a stream of consciousness type thing, and then it suddenly started to go someplace and take some kind of form, so I just kind of went along with it. That’s how it wrote itself…I didn’t realize that’s how it would read.

Thanks so much for commenting.