Threshhold Life

Do not call me a dead man;
Say, rather, unborn.
Call me not an evil man;
Say only, “Unformed.”
Unformed, embryonic, a teeming mass
Of cells, undifferentiated,
Potential unmapped
Unabated because untapped.
No not evil.
I have committed no crimes.
I am not a devil.
But I am a product of my times.
I have spent my score of years and seven
Waffling about between heaven
And the space inside a zero.
I have built a fortress out of sheer possibility
And I guard its ramparts like the true hero
Of false humility;
Firmly entrenched in the zero space
The liminal space
The nowhere space
Between a thousand “Yeses.”
Not lost;
I know precisely where I stand
Trammeled about by guesses
More educated than most.
 
An acorn is free to roll,
But not free to grow.
No.
For that there is a toll,
And the toll is rootedness
Fixedness
Differentiation in anticipation.
And before that there must be a split
A tearing
A rupture of the skin as from within
Tender green and white things like earthy wings
Must thrust through the crust into the dust
And dirt, in search of fertile ground. It hurts.
And before even that there must be the time
Of lying
And crying,
And dying silently on the forest floor
Half buried under dead leaves.
Pelted by rain and hearing
The snortings of pigs and scurryings of squirrels and fearing
And feeling lost and cold, as the frost takes hold.
All too often only thus is softened
An acorn’s shell.
And it cannot tell
That only thus is it free
To be
Rooted.