WHERE IS MY SOUL, WHERE HAS IT GONE? (Originally published in Dream International Quarterly)

Where is my Soul, where has it gone?
Hyper-vigilance daily premeditating its vexatious slaughter of visceral acuity-
Psyche & Soma to soon no longer pulsate to the indefatigable rhythms of Unsubstantiated Fate.
Dreams haunt me with their cruel evasion during my somnolent stupor-
Where is my Soul, where has it gone?

Politics & practical persuasion probe & invade my Mind, abducting Essence-
for I am out-of-their-world, to be studied & examined endlessly as Insurance meets his quota,
the Mother Ship taking me on a round-trip to Mundanity-
of such banal profanity are such fruitless searches-
Where is my Soul, where has it gone?
Or, better still: What is my Soul, and where does it belong?

Internal conceptions collide catastrophically with external projections,
birthing a Big Bang of Perplexity and a black hole with infinite density-the lost light of Reason.
I open my mouth once more to emit the sound frequencies of this mortal human pining:
Where is my Soul, where has it gone?
yet instead what resonates is this: What is Reality?
And I come face to face with the insurmountable gravity of the matter of Metaphysics,
the low ground of common-sense splitting wide open-
I, now falling into a great chasm of rapturous agony, my Soul fleeing me, leaving me behind-
Cruel to be kind?
Now: Who am I?
For although I know by now where my Soul is and where it has gone-
and even what my Soul is and where it belongs, I still cannot help but think to myself
that I was perhaps better off, in question.