Soul Over Lightning: Poems

I Slept in a Cave

5 | I Slept in a Cave I slept in a cave and did not know where I was, why it was important to see the light return to show me the exit. I slept in a cave and saw a fire in the heart, how it flickered away. I slept in a cave of dripping walls and listened to the water escape toward the entrance of my dream where the faces of animals covered the bleeding ground, men running away without taking what they had spilled before me, the herds of yesterday becoming the angry hordes of tomorrow. I slept in a cave and learned to trace its walls with a will that remained invisible, yet brought me closer to scraping my soul against the rocks to find I had always slept there. I tried to wake when I rolled closer to the paintings, saw things I can’t describe because my closed eyes had already seen what took place, how things were created underneath and not from above because many men slept up there, away from creation and what it sheltered inside the mountain. I slept in a cave and grew into | 6 an old man wise with eyesight and dumb with my hands, a blind man wanting to feel his way out of the dark tunnel that his mother opened when she screamed upon his birth. ...