The Forest From the Trees

His skin is still tight from his youth. His teeth are still sharp and carry their edge, but his mind and his heart have seen the lengthy lives of a hundred men. Twisting and twirling and beating with tornadic velocity. His chest and his head hold tight, barely containing their contents, stubbornly refusing to breach.

He carries a razor-sharp axe by his side as he walks into the wooded canopy amidst the suffocating pines and lonesome oaks. The blade, acute and shiny, is his weapon for so many reasons. He files and tapers it down with infallible finesse on a wet stone. It glimmers and sparkles as the wandering sun catches it with each stride, reflecting light in the woods where no light has touched ground for ages. These vagrant rays from the sun find themselves lost as strangers in a place that was never designed to house them.

All his life he's heard that he and the men around him are the crown of God's creation, but he's not sold on that school of thought. Not yet. He hacks away for redemption. He chisels with accuracy as if to invite senseless inquiry into destruction and creation. One hand over the next, each splinter that falls to the ground reveals more insight on the exposed trunk...pulp unveiled and uncovered, blasting through the yearly rings, overly sensitive to being the new outer exterior of the tree. Shedding the trials and failures of life to allow new air to breathe at the soft center before it hardens from the harsh uncertainties of it's surroundings. He reduces everything in his sight to matchsticks...laid to waste, where it decomposes into the vacuum of time. Knowing he holds the power to destroy or preserve his environs, his choices are scattered and confused.

The tendency is to panic and overswing, but he's conditioned now and he is a master of precision. Surgical. He sees three moves ahead, before he makes even one.

He works hard to keep it together. His secret is a vice and his vice is a burden. It bears down heavy on his shoulders and he fights to keep it from sliding out of his guard. He is the custodian of an unwelcomed guest, and an agent of cognitive dissonance.

He uses his axe to keep the wolves at bay. But the wolves inside of him are seemingly more formidable. At times, he's given thought to turning the axe on himself, but he knows that this isn't the end that folklore and legend hold for him. He misses his innocence.

Quiet down now....hush, hush, my friend.