The Eternal Sorrow of the Fertile Mind

Oh! The eternal sorrow of the fertile mind:

A mind that thinks of everything feels nothing

But its own descent into melancholy, unsure even

When that descent began.

It began, as I recall, in a garden:

It was the garden of the muses with colossal trees

Springing up from the earth and a river, crystal

Swell, running through it.

That seed of a melancholy winter which planted

Itself from a great oak tree in that garden continues

To grow even today. Even as I write, its twisting branches,

Its leaves which turned copper crisp in Autumn but cycle

Back onto the tree in spring time, returning from the

Fertile earth to my melancholy, fertile mind bough

Lightly in the wind.

And I am happy in a reserved, sorrow-filled kind of way,

Let this tree grow forever, let it numb me from feeling and

Teach me how to think in a world where everything is nothing

And nothing is everything. Let it guide me back to that winter

Of ambition when I thought I could grow a fertile tree from a

Little seed I found on the ground of frozen garden of stillness and

Hope.