I Like this Song

I Like this Song

(“Ask, and you will receive. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you.” Matthew 7:7)

I can’t find the help I need, no one answers my call,
I’m stuck and I’m leaving, I’m famished and I’m grieving
over the cold feet that could be warmed
if you just asked one friend unalarmed, to find
the source you lost when someone Grasping for Life
held the door open so the winter cold would enter
and you would leave for the last time after time.

Your words are a string of letters flowing from immediate fingers,
not the dipstick pens of unresolved stories. Let the flurry
wipe your vision clear, the frigid blister steel your resolve
and look further forward this time than ever before.

I entered your story around chapter 16. I heard you recite
vignettes from six and seven. You quoted dialogues of two characters,
both with the same name, though their sentences were
of nearly equal length while you filled in the silences.
I knew you were future.
I hoped you were not fastened with invisible fishing line
to stories that would become ancient by the time your
narrative is ended.

The indelible ink has dried, the silent pillows cried
along with your unrelenting fears that played like
silent movies upon your sleeping cranium. But, with
chapters and dialogue still to be written,
seek the Muse whose style can match your
past unbidden

With a future unhidden, when
day becomes brighter from sunrise over the mountain pass
to noonday’s reflection upon the stillest river flow.

I’m out of predictions, used my last half a century ago,
but the story will be written, the lines like poets write
with jazz in the background and a favorite friend who,
each time the band begins, says again,
“I like this song.”