It's Nothing New

It’s Nothing New

(“Know that the Lord is God—he made us; we belong to him. We are his people, the sheep of his own pasture.” Psalm 100:3)

And here I am, it’s nothing new, everything I’m writing to you.
I feel like a camel, not a sheep, hump ugly and dying to get out
of the heat.

I hear too much about kings and cravings
out here in the backlands. The coast use to be clear,
but now the continent hides the waves where my feet
cooled, where my soul grew like a hot air balloon.

I’m writing to you who
leave the 99 others as soon as the 1
has wandered like a feral cat. I am not feral;
in fact
I’m far too domesticated for my own good.

So bring me back to pastures, I only ask
you give me green and mud,
delicious skies and oceans,
elderly trees and apples barely hanging
like Christmas bulbs late January.

Here I am, it is still nothing new, everything I feel is due to
your absence, or a brain that cannot connect with the arms you offer.
Everything I feel is due to my absence, my soul in limbo,
my worship of pat answers dead on the floor,
my travel stymied by dust and pain;

Otherwise I would stand on the porch of my friend
and knock and enter before he invited me in. But old
friends
(who I still love as deep as adolescence)
are as far from me
as I am from them. This damned vast country

Will not give up its treasures I’ve scattered.

Here I am, still saying nothing that’s new, but you can read it to review
my complaint; and I’m sorry to complain. But I’m just another one of a
hundred
who needs the frolic of the flock, and for a line that stretches
before and during, after and soon, empty and captive, embraced and strewn
across the dimensions and lassoing the clouds.

Am I allowed this miserable silence, these noisy doubts,
and will you take my solitary tears before they run out?