Golem

Silhouettes, into ghostly chasms peer, seeking absolution. It is from the shadow, which they are fraught, that they hide. Their souls they would condemn for the slightest sunburn. Chasing light, with eyes upturned and legs leaping, the smoky shades multiply and dissolve like fractals.

From a wooden chair, writing, words cast out like stones skipping from a shore. The water, undulating, rippling as the pebbles slide across it, seems a mirror whose surface cannot shatter or scratch. The waters of our youth, receptive to the rocks, slosh and splash with great gulps, creating a cacophony of concentric circles that trace the patterns of our forming minds.

By the time two and one half decades have elapsed, the waters have birthed channels and canals, varied and irregular in their depth. Stones thrown in some places steadily sink - swallowed and drowned - while others, more buoyant, drift with ease across the surface. Time, ignominious and anxious, twitching like a second-hand on a watch, turns our waters to ice. Intolerable is the iceberg that old age has wrought.

No longer are you the water into which a rock was cast; you are the stone.