Professor Martel’s Startling Conclusion (5 of 10)

F I V E


After dinner every night
Professor Martel took a walk,

enjoying the walk
as a kind of externalization

of breath, that most repeated thing.
Walking, steps like breath repeat.

And repetition
in after dinner walking just destined

to walking, like breaths in breathing,
traverses perceptive time,

underscores time-sense,
a colorless dimensionality

also lacking scent, stomach, sound,
touch, taste and balance. But still

something, somehow, somewhere.
Time. A word. An expression. A thought.

*

Health clubs really pissed me off.
And joggers. And “power” walkers.

Expression without thought. Waste.
People fit. But for what? Living,

but for what? Thinking
of “accumulated expressiveness”

and thinking of time
turned my thoughts to the accumulated

expressions of everyone in the past
who thought and acted.

Every thought and action
that made my thoughts and actions more clear.

And I thought of every thought
in the past unexpressed, every

action unthought, undirected,
unsupported. Dull action.

Dull thought. Past and people faded.
Past and people just passing.

Dull people abandoning the thoughts
and actions of the past.

Dull people ignoring time
and the future. Repeated dull,

an accumulated thing, too,
accumulating dullness.

I got bitter thinking about
my own time-line. Days and nights

numbered and filled.
A low number compared to many. Lonely

compared to some.
A life – a repeated thing, too! – and a life

expressed within
the accumulated expressions of lives

repeated in the past.
A past blunted by fading dullness.

Blunted dull. Necessitating a shrug.
A painful shrugging.

Bitter thoughts. Bitter words.
Toward a watchful kind of repeating.

A repeating thing.
Young eyes opening with worldliness.

A shallow understanding
necessary, too. A young life

opening to pure living –
the ultimate repeating thing.