He pondered the suffering in his life,
Imagined colored piano keys.
Did he become wound, or was he the knife
That cut off dry branches from old dead trees?

He could still hear words from an old school house
Where inside there were books and learning things;
He could picture his granny's old worn out blouse
While he dreamed of poets and queens and kings,

And the tree outside that suddenly grew
In a place where a child could be called witch.
Hearts never forget what they've been through,
He knew hands of poets can dig a ditch,

And that a lone missile gone astray
Can create a mad bad sad universe
With half of a self all shattered away
Where the monkey's paw is a gypsy curse.

Still, most tearful eyes will dry in the light,
Refusing to cruise through a crystal ball;
The muse of the hopeless calls at midnight
And beckons those standing who fear a fall.

He tripped in the weeds, he stumbled on brambles,
The path leading to refuge: a book store.
Distanced from shame and far off from shambles
Where whore is the virgin and virgin, whore.

Still journeying lost, the cost penitence,
Piano keys played in hands of the young,
Blasted by blood of all innocence,
Babes rotted on tops of a beetle's dung.

Then beetles changed from those just rolling dung
To scarabs when Osiris raised his head;
On the sarcophagus, the spring was sprung
In solitude, contemplation of dead.

That old crystal ball isn't clouded now,
Nightmares swirl and twirl and exit his head:
He knows the why, he recognizes how,
He will follow the path where he is led.

Movie stars, fancy cars, he cares not for,
Acknowledgement for skill worth his trouble,
If need be, Oriki, he will implore:
The poetry god has met his double.

From humble hunks of coal, diamonds come,
There is pulling and pressing down under.
No one can say where true talent comes from
But black gold rocks in hills under thunder.