Soul Searching

Originally posted by EvilToasterElf
When a drunk turns his key
and the engine doesn’t turn over,
I wonder if souls traveling back,
always land in a body. Or are they
simply pulled like asteroids to the earth?

Are they round? Would they skip
across the ponds to the old willow,
that drinks a fat baron’s share of
the water, and litters its fair share
in return?

Would they compress flat onto the
arteries of highways, varicose
across Nevada deserts, sticking
like road kill to the tires of passing
trucks? Again doomed to the
same endless circles.

Maybe it doesn’t matter what happens
to them. The result’s always the same,
we stare at the night sky, it provokes
thoughts of the infinite and our feet
stray from the path.

If so why bother coming back at all?
Unless getting lost was the more sane
of the two options. The ultimate answers
could by nothing but unsatisfying. So do
they still land

in the vast fields of tobacco, or hops,
or marijuana perhaps? Do we take them in,
writing off those imaginative leaps to the buzz?
Are those drunken revelries simply that,
or have we ingested the wrong turns and
failures of meteoric souls?

Who light the fires of lust under our bellies
or the sense of injustice from a life
tragically snuffed, a rock that flares,
hurls itself toward the blue waters
and breaks against the atmosphere.
Like the electric sweat of the sparkplug,
as a drunk drifts harmlessly into sleep.