The Weight of An Old Soul.

I was dead once. 

A thousand people came every day to my mausoleum.

In airy fabrics and sensible shoes, they perambulated over history,

ruminating over the symbols of my massacred mystery.  

Desperate to absorb culture from marble,

And pieces of Turkish turquoise embedded in construction centuries-old. 

By campfires, they alleged they understood my parable,

But the truth of immortality is unknown, an eternal heart is often cold. 

A thousand people came when I was dead. 

A thousand more than ever sat by my deathbed. 

I was a rock once. 

So massively unmistakable and distinct. 

Generations lived under my shadow and in my myth their flocks grew. 

To them I was forever, while their lives came, went and flew. 

They painted large symbols—red, yellow and green—to appease the gods they projected onto me, 

and in their worship of stone even as they murdered their brothers, they found some meaning. 

Yet meaning, like wealth, doesn't seem to last generations three, 

Might and splendor erode, and I was ground eventually to the bed of the river over which I once stood leaning. 

Sometimes a palm reaches into the depths of the water and pulls me out of the rubble. 

It tosses me aside with such ease, for I am now but an unidentifiable pebble. 

I was a vagabond once. 

I had a bed in every town, and a house in absolutely none. 

Strangers looked at me with disguised awe and unbridled pity, 

Maybe they wondered how long I would stay in their city. 

I walked past concrete towers within which priceless altars to bucolia adorned walls, 

and I offered my ramblings to tourists who went looking inside the hallowed halls of knowledge for purpose and god. 

In the streets I begged on the generosity of strangers for just enough to answer the calls, 

of a spirit that needed to wander in service of a much higher call of a restless lord. 

And then one day I realised all roads are identical and they all lead to Rome, 

And some of us misguided flaneurs, never find our way home. 

I was a whore once. 

Scores of warriors and poets came to usurp my beauty. 

I dealt in treasures that could be repeatedly sold, 

by my cavern heart to men young, weak and old. 

Inside my gilded cage of pleasures, I lived a life of endless desire, bereft of fear, 

Still, sometimes in their tales of valour and wonder, I let myself envision a future less heady, 

But my mother taught me better than that, she told me there are no rainbows across tomorrow nor true seers, 

It is better to drink today, love only in the moment, gorge on sweet figs and for death to always be ready. 

Hedonism is the path of those of us made of sin and poisonous wine. 

Pure pleasure is the only reward for a life lived on borrowed time. 

I was a sage once too, and many moons ago I was even a child, 

An empress, perhaps, a renegade scoundrel of the wild. 

Once I was alive, and even in death I lived, 

But now that I know everything there is to the world, 

the rotten fruits of a millennia of searching, unfold. 

Now that I have been beggar, thief and king, 

I see all the truth lies inside a vault of nothing. 

Now that I have embodied many a forgotten role, 

I know that the heft of emptiness is what weighs down the old soul.