The Stranger Man 2

THE STRANGER MAN (2) They who posses tire out and loose more in keeping. As homeowner never have I felt at home But closer home as squatter and settler. The crop man crops his way through life, The dry cleaner cannot subdue the muck; The well heeled can’t afford inner balm with yen. I need no fortune or fame nor power For they like lime soot gathered in the wind And meshed with the clay of the flesh Makes the heart heavy and stick with the globe Cannot transcend the sphere’s limitations. I seek not a weighty but soothing heart, And forgo to hear the distant willow song And reminiscences of the howling pine. Once a man of good standing, well ‘heeled. Goods of sorts and plots like Sahara I got Heaps and bundles, piles upon mounds Of all necessities and apparatus, Strings and outlets of a bee hive The routes and channels of sub-Saharan trades Sprawled everywhere; I a trade mogul. I built myself an edifice like a pagoda Loomed from sky over sprawling trench huts Swarmed about as of winnowed chaff. I have carved a niche and engraved a name On rottenstone before the windward way. I knew all I own, but myself, I know not. Myself, shall I lost at one time And all my acquirements at another time, Whichsoever shall be the first to The both must cease and be gone to scheol! Alas I fear for my life and all I own; Intermittent angst about the world, life, Of growing old and what becomes of me! But why, even as through the years I struggled Earning “moolah” in order to live life, Now realize life has not the worth of diamond For even tramps and wastrels earn it abundantly. I esteem life so much as fishes their worms But more estimable for me to traverse through That it cloys me not, to traverse its travails. Even as worms serve the belly of the fish, Think not the fish it serves the belly of another? Enough of life had I, enough a wastrel Now shall wander by feet as by heart roam. The past is fraught with ignorance, yet now, I am saddled with pain and vexations and My expectations look to future of improbabilities. Of life I shall ease myself of her bond neither Let her cloy to me, but fly my affectations away. I shall burden no more the future; Why? It’s yet an abstraction. I contrive no agenda, Except now, I do and walk my work.