Clay and Candlelight

 I walk the streets looking up at the tall buildings and down at men of earthenware souls. Men of clay morals and chipped characters, broken down statures lining the roads traveled by. A shirtless man drinks poisoned water from a decorative fountain spilling chemicals down his leathery shirtless skin. The rubber band in his beard quivers slightly at the notion that there is some foreign agent to the water that is not quite well. I move to speak truth to him but he pays me no mind and is on his way again.  I’ve staggered these same streets laughing at nothing as a madman not fully lost. Like a wolf left to the wild, perhaps wherever I am is where I am to be. No, I don’t believe that. Where I am is somewhere dangerous I suspect.  As I traverse the byways of clay men cracked and fired by the temperaments of expectation and stigmas I look at my own broken hands. The shards of myself calling out to me for adhesion.  I laugh like a man that lights a candle at noon day, and is scolded for the wasteful light. The sun may be bright enough, yes, but the matches were for warmth.  When I look at myself more over I see less Jesus and more Diogenes. I’ve shrank more from arguing ethics in the pattern of Cicero and have reduced to rolling barrels in the siege. The cynic is winning out. I have concerns for the growing deafness of my spirit. We cant laugh at ourselves as a people it seems.  I’ve misplaced my zealotry as of late. I do not war and crusade for God and cause as I did in my youth. I now stand in a room with God in a starring contest.  I’ve walked these streets looking for a holy man. I need a righteous man to keep me company as I seem to not be able to put myself in the roll. The righteous though, they’ll cause your flesh to remind you of what a sinner you are by the innate nature of reflection, but what's the alternative? Those who embrace the sins are fawning and falling over themselves to eat each other. A great loss of focus and acceptance, unified by the one over arching desire to consume.  I don’t consider myself a righteous man, but I can say for certain that I hate sin in its confusion and mastery. I laugh at the ugliness and the impropriety as a man that should by all means have a drinking problem. My contempt glows with a dim lights brightening cast, and my doubts hobble me. My God as I call Him, is good for however long He claims me.  He is good, should the day come when He doesn’t. I wade through doubts not of his truth, but my place within it as  I watch the devil dance in the shadows of flickering light. I am a man of an earthenware soul, chipped and marred in the sun.