qarrtsiluni

I like to believe things are what they are.
Tap on a melon, it tells you it’s a melon.
Ripeness resonates, you listen with both ears:
already you can hear it snap and fracture

into pieces that you’ll later contemplate, then eat.
The melon will be what it is, nothing more
and nothing less than what it is, and that means
ready to sacrifice itself for a job well done.

Not everything is melons. Not everything will
talk to you, divulging secrets of its seeds,
obliging you to look for fertile ground,
guaranteeing their progression from simple to complex.

No matter which fruit you choose to sample,
you’ll sense oblique connections between the simple
and the complex, the hidden kinship that they share.
You’ll want to find a melon and go home.

This is no easy task. The field you tend
is bounded on all sides by razor wire.
Your hands know this as a deep, hard fact,
and know that scars, like melons are what they are.

No, not everything is melons. Some fractures
that you’ll hear will be your bones. Snapping
and marking painful changes, changes
making you wish that life just went tap-tap.

by Richard Spuler

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