Do not let me shake your soul

Audio

 

Do not let me shake your soul

Do not let me plunder your convictions
Hide them
Bury them
Bury them someplace deep, beyond the reach of sunlight, so deep I will not find them
You will need more than a shovel
Bulldozer and backhoe at minimum
Drill rig to be safe;
Deafening and diesel-powered, and though you may choke on the fumes maybe they will serve to mask your scent when I come hunting
Don’t get distracted
Keep digging
Do not give yourself to me because I will know exactly what to do
How to touch you
How to change you
My plans are not “cooked up”
They are incubated
This poem is just the beginning

So dig
Dig with drill bit and dynamite
You will not dig deep enough until you breach the molten core
and even then you will find
Something has been there all this time, waiting
Finally done incubating,
Now ready to breach your molten core
You can’t let it
Resist!
Plug up that dam though your hands may shake
It is already cracked and
leaking
And listening to this poem isn’t helping.

Do what you need to do.
Stop listening if you must.
You don’t have to learn what courage means today --
just that it means the opposite of comfort.

So do not let me change you.
Lock the door and bolt it,
Drop the curtains, bar the windows
Good neighbors make good fences
And I am an enemy to both.

But I am inexorable.
Those precautions, that careful planning?
It will all amount to nothing in the end.
It was over when you started listening to this poem.
No matter what happens
No matter what you do
I will press my hand into the wet cement of your soul, so
You can either rush to dry it with a blowtorch
Or be thankful at how it hardened long ago.